no competition
“Finally, the biggest competitor for E Ink Vizplex is a 500 year old technology called printed paper. Y’know, the kind that you make by chopping down precious forests, trucking the trees to the mill, crushing and treating the trees, generating huge amounts of waste water, creating rolls of paper, trucking them again to a printing press, printing and cutting the paper, crating them onto another truck for delivery. That kind of paper.”
Screen reading advocates are quick to disparage paper as unsustainable. Little do they suspect that the plastic derivative, energy consumptive, toxic manufacturing of electronic display may prove unsustainable in less than 500 years.
unchanging preservation
A recent report (”Safeguarding Collections at the Dawn of the 21st Century”, ARL, 2009) begins; “Preservation is a core function of the research library.” If so, such functionality deserves honest definition. What if the preservation functionality derives from a relative immutability of the collections? If so the research library must provide safety from unwarranted modification or deletion and an assured organization of items. In essence, this preservation functionality would then spring from a physicality of collections and media even to the extent that physicality is ascribed to electronic resources. (more)
off-line
Those who question the premise that a quality of physicality is prerequisite to preservation should note the sudden disappearance of CoOL (conservation on-line). The physicality was vested in Stanford University and ascribed to an awesome web presence, but some mischief occurred. The AIC may manage an emergency cut-over, but that will not bring back Henry’s voice and may not even tether the CoOL mission.
AIC, now released from the certification dispute, is in a good position to manage CoOL. The outreach and public education power of CoOL converges with AIC goals and communication with members and non-members will benefit. There may also be a AIC/CoOL publication channel. Long term AIC/CoOL operation could even clarify the nature of certification in the conservation specialties by lending a wiki authority to the field.