short story
“This situation is much worse than then mediocre color permanence of color materials back in the 1960s and 1970s. Back then, you had warning signs that the pictures in your photo album were slowly fading. In many cases you could do something about them such as getting them reprinted or copied.
With CDs, all is fine one day, but the next day you may get a “this disc is unreadable” message. Millions of photographs and documents will be lost forever.
Ironically, hard copies, whether text or photographs, might be our best assurance that our history will be preserved. The 5.25 inch floppies on which I stored my first book, History and Practice of Carbon Processes (1982) were unreadable by the time I was ready to
convert the files to a new computer format a few years later. Today, although this would be a lot of trouble, I could OCR (Optical Character Reader) the original text and convert it back to ascii files.”
Luis Nadeau
book shape of things to come
In his
LRTS article ìReflectionsÖî, 48/3, July 2004, Ross Atkinson muses as to who the person was who wrote his 1992 LRTS article on the role of the acquisitions librarian in the digital revolution. While the digital revolution in scholarship was early recognized by Ross, it has been late in arriving as regards supplanting print readership or print acquisitions.
Ross admits that he would have been surprised in 1992 to learn that the Cornell acquisitions remain 80% print today. And, to make an Akinson-like observation, that decline indicates an increase. While reference tools have migrated to on-line sources, the remaining concentration of monographs continues to grow. Book publishing in the United States now races along at 4000 titles per day.
Still lacking is an evaluation of the synergy between the print and on-line reading modes; the synergy that is fueling the future of the print book. But, then, that perspective is provided here at FotB.