eJournal storage (Dan Lester) Marcia Tuttle 16 Jul 1996 13:20 UTC
---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Mon, 15 Jul 1996 16:25:40 -0600 From: Dan Lester <DLESTER@BSU.IDBSU.EDU> Subject: eJournal storage (Albert Henderson) -Reply Date: Fri, 5 Jul 1996 17:19:10 EDT From: Albert Henderson <70244.1532@COMPUSERVE.COM> In 1992, Association of Research Libraries published projections indicating that if the present decline in acquisitions continued their members would purchase no more books and journals by the year 2017. Today these libraries are a major source for interlibrary loans and document delivery. What will they be in 20 years? ---------------------------- Oh, Albert, Albert, Albert....this is purest rhetoric and nonsense and you know it. I'm sure one as knowledgable and experienced as you is all too well aware of such fallacies. This is just like the projections that "show that by the year [insert favorite year from 1998 to 2003] every person on earth will have an Internet email address". Sure, if you take some rate of growth and keep projecting it at the same rate from some date you'll get that result. But, does it make any sense? Of course it doesn't. Will it happen in the next 25 years, if ever? Of course not. This is the kind of crap spouted in Sunday Supplement articles or in badly researched articles in the news magazines (a certain one that was suckered a year or so ago regarding net.porn comes to mind). ======================= Just look at the [implicit] attitude of universities toward their collections of books and journals. The formerly "free" library has been called a "bottomless pit" by at least one provost who demanded that librarians justify their existence. --------------------- So? That was about thirty years ago, if memory serves, and both that library and its crew of librarians continue on, though the Provost is undoubtedly retired or dead. Is the library there doing as well as in the past? I remember the library, but don't know the answer. ================== Digital storage will certainly suffer the same fate. And don't forget the short life of magnetic media and software. If you think you have preservation problems now, start checking the oldest floppy disks and tapes you have been storing. What's on those 1976 Honeywell tapes and Hollerith cards you have been hanging on to? They're only 20 years old.... ------------------------- I'll hope and trust that any of the stuff in those old formats has since been copied to more contemporary media. If not, sure, it is a problem. But, if it was worth keeping, it should have been done. Will some people mess up and fail to do this? Sure. But others will weed the wrong books and journals, too. I've always been told that Alfred North Whitehead said "You could take half the books in the British Museum and burn them now and no one would know the difference from now until the end of time." Of course the problem is which half. (and if anyone can give me a proper cite for that quote, or even contradict it, I'd love to have the proper information regarding a truism I learned in library school over thirty years ago) cyclops Dan Lester, Network Information Coordinator Boise State University Library, Boise, Idaho, 83725 USA voice: 208-385-1235 fax: 208-385-1394 dlester@bsu.idbsu.edu OR alileste@idbsu.idbsu.edu Cyclops' Internet Toolbox: http://cyclops.idbsu.edu "How can one fool make another wise?" Kansas, 1979.