template
“To me, the most interesting factor is the way instant communications lead to unconscious conformity. Youíd think that with thousands of ideas flowing at light speed around the world, youíd get a diversity of viewpoints and expectations that would balance one another out. Instead, global communications seem to have led people in the financial subculture to adopt homogenous viewpoints. They made the same one-way bets at the same time. Banks got too big to manage. Instruments got too complex to understand. Too many people were good at math but ignorant of history.” David Brooks
It is always exciting to experience how little awareness the IT sector has of print collection usefulness. They are focused on the current transaction and on-line traffic. There is no regard for sustainable, long term access. The current financial collapse may be a template for other system wide reverses in governance, sciences, social cooperation or libraries.
duh
“Dag Spicer, curator of the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley, says: ìData rot refers mainly to problems with the medium on which information is stored. Over time, things like temperature, humidity, exposure to light, or being stored in not-very-good locations like moldy basements, make this information very difficult to read. The problem, strangely enough, is not so bad on the older stuff, but quite bad on the more recent stuff. So we can read tapes here at the museum that are 50 years old. With a CD or a DVD, if thereís an error, often itís nonrecoverable, and youíve just lost all your information.î “
“It was, I think, a titanium disk about the size of a long-playing record, and it was supposed to last 10,000 years. But then they realized that there were some assumptions that weren’t right, and that it would not last 1,000 years, it might only last 20. Otherwise, as far as I know, no one is working on this problem.”
covers with no books
As research libraries project management of print collections there is some hurry to disregard their role in screen delivery from print sources. These print collections continue to serve as back-up, master and authentication source (each distinctive functions) for their screen simulations yet there is an inclination to regard their role as over. (Virtual libraries will easily provide sustainability and the overhead of print collection storage must certainly be more than digital preservation!!)
In a recent post
Lorcan Dempsey mentions a facsimile publication of Raymond Chandler novels that could not locate the original cover art. This is a small instance of the continuing role of print to enable subsequent recapture from a print master. This example of books without covers is strangely related to covers without books. These are the color cover thumbnails used to retail black and white Kindle titles. It appears that the package is even more useful when the product is an electronic transmission.