Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (4570 mails)

[Kai Ponte <kai@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tuesday 22 November 2005 11:20 am, Carlos E. R. wrote:
> The Tuesday 2005-11-22 at 07:12 -0800, Randall R Schulz wrote:
> > As I said, I love books, too, but Nicholson Baker is so agog over his
> > beloved newspapers that he sees them as treasures to be preserved, not
> > records of their times to be made accessible to the public. His is an
> > antiquarian agenda, not a public information agenda. I'm not
> > necessarily saying fiche or film is (or was) the right solution to the
> > challenge of archival storage for newspapers, but neither do I believe
> > that paper is the apex of information recording and distribution media.
>
> Neither do I.
>
> But saving our precious data (knowledge, history, whatever) _only_ in
> somekind of electronic media could be dangerous in the very-long-term.
> Perhaps there is need to safekeep in paper or something as durable, and
> use in crystalmemorycube or whatever.
>
> That's an ongoing debate in big libraries, I understand, as Fergus hinted.

Having a long history with document imaging and storage systems, I ended up 
one time in a discussion about five years ago with one of the guys who was 
maintaining the records for the U-2 project, which at the time was still 
ongoing. He had a great point - all their information is kept in microfilm. 
If they had tried to use some electronic means in the '50s, '60's, '70's or 
even '80s, it would have quickly been obsolete and extremely expensive to 
maintain. Microfilm on the other hand is cheap and longer lasting.
-- 
kai 
www.perfectreign.com

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