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contentd - your point about digital media is very valid and the thought of having to copy to new media every 10 years or so is not encouraging. To my mind the old microfiche or positive film is nearly as future proof as paperwork. All you need is a light source and a magnifyer!
Duplicated hard disks are the best best for large digital archives as it is a relatively easy task to copy from old server to new server every 10 years or so. This of course assume that file types and operating systems are compatible. I would always keep paper originals in any event but as you say these need enviromental stability.
There is no simple answer to future proofing but anything done now is better than the skip!

Peter

Dave and PNK, great posts as this has always been a problem for me. I have a vast collection of negs and have over the last few weeks been digitising Lee on Solent, Bicester, Upper Heyford and Pucklechurch (about a 900 neg images). It is amazingly time consuming as it is not just a question of scanning, the negs are not in good nick, they have faded somewhat (edges mostly) (even the UH photos of 1996!) which surprised me, so there is a certain amount of tweeking to do to each one. I can only get through 100 or so per day so you can see at this rate I will be here scanning till I am pushing up daiseys! I like your idea of uploading them, but I would also want them on DVD, external hard drive and solid state (as soon as the price comes down). We need to talk more on this.

Absolutely this is a must Dave and thank you for suggesting / organising etc. What do we do?

We have indeed, but it would also be a good idea to examine the technology to have an internet based photographic archive in addition to having a central archive of digital images. This is just an experiment with the idea. The reason being, that DVDs, CDs and hard drives only have a life span of five or so years. We ultimately want a future proof archive and one way of doing this is two store it in cyber space. For example, I have my negative collection, digital images stored on two external hard drives as well as two independent sets of DVDs, there is no harm in storing the images in cyber space too as well as the duplicate collection which you will have. That way, if my house is destroyed in a fire and I end up as toast, then you will have another set as well as control over over the cyber space collection.