Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!uunet!bionet!NSF.GOV!rrobbins
From: rrobbins@NSF.GOV ("Robert J. Robbins")
Newsgroups: bionet.molbio.bio-matrix
Subject: electronic publishing
Message-ID: <9008081629.aa15124@Note.NSF.GOV>
Date: 8 Aug 90 20:29:53 GMT
Sender: daemon@genbank.BIO.NET
Lines: 15



With regard to archiving, James G. Smith asks: 

> What's the half life of information on CD-ROM, or WORM drives?

A more relevant question is, "What's the half life of a particular 
format for a CD-ROM?"  At the moment, the answer seems to lie 
somewhere between months and years, and certainly does not exceed 
a decade.  The problem with archiving is twofold: (1) storing 
the information on a medium with a long shelf life, and (2) storing 
the information on a medium, in a format that will be readable 
by current hardware n years in the future.  To compete with the 
archiving capabilities of print, the value of n must reach into 
the centuries.