fwd: Electronics vs Paper

[Curtis Clark]

At 08:43 PM 9/18/97 -0300, Doug Yanega wrote:
>(1) if all of the institutions who took on the responsibility for archives
>ALSO made a commitment to upgrade, there is no reason data can not be
>passed from one medium to another as improvements are made.
[...]
>Units of data transferrable
>per unit of effort is increasing quite a bit, and if improvements continue,
>we might have a situation where an entire university library's worth of
>data can be upgraded in a matter of minutes, and the problem might vanish
>that way, too.

There was a time when monks and scholars recopied hand-written manuscripts.
What we know of people like Aristotle comes not from any original
publications, but from copies, often many copy-generations old. This is an
important part of bibliography. Problems with obsolete data formats in the
past were the result of data being curated by computer specialists, not
librarians. I agree with Doug, that the problem exists only if we allow it
to exist.


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Curtis Clark                 http://www.intranet.csupomona.edu/~jcclark/
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