Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ncrlnk!ncr-sd!hp-sdd!hplabs!hpda!hpcupt1!vitale
From: vitale@hpcupt1.HP.COM (Phil Vitale)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: Re: Hundreds of books on an optical disk (Medium!)
Message-ID: <-290109999@hpcupt1.HP.COM>
Date: 10 Nov 88 22:00:17 GMT
References: <968@accelerator>
Organization: Hewlett Packard, Cupertino
Lines: 59

> > One of my primary tools is a 14th Ed., 1929 Encyclopaedia Britannica.
> > If it is true that the life of a CD-ROM is less than 50 years, I would
> > now be seeing data loss.  This is unacceptable.

> ... Do we imagine that in fifty years we will
> be unable to create arbitrarily many backups of important information?

If there is ultimately no hardcopy -- relying on arbitrary numbers
of backups gets scary.

"Who" decides what books are *important* enough to backup?  The number of
works will not decrease, making the backup process an ever growing problem.

In addition, CD-ROM is probably the first major print distribution medium
where the act of copying and the act of modifying are of equal ease.

"Who" will insure that the copy of the book in front of you is really a
copy of the original, or one that was modified along the way by a "concerned"
individual/party/government when it was "backed-up."  (Orwell and 1984.)

(Not that these concerns are new to CD-ROMs, just that the potential
for abuse seems greater.)

> Unfortunately, many recent books were not printed on acid-free paper.
> And few books are of sufficient quality to stand up to serious use.
> Many libraries' collections are crumbling away. We must archive this
> knowledge to electronic form soon or lose it forever.

Electronic form is not the only way to preserve knowledge.  Books have
been remarkably successful at preserving information across the ages.
(Are we really going to have a CD-ROM reader capable of reading the
disks we make today say 300 years from now?)

There are serious efforts underway to come up with methods to de-acidify
large (room-sized) numbers of books at a time.  Also from what I gather,
there are no longer major price or technology obstacles in producing
acid or non-acid paper.  Rather it is an issue of investments in existing
processing equipment.  (Can someone with closer experience to the industry
comment?)

> Nobody is trying to do away with books altogether (yet).

I would hope not ever, not completely.  The methods used for long-term
preservation and rapid information access need not preclude each other.

I really enjoyed pouring over some of the original papers of da Vinci,
Darwin, and Bach.  (Handling drafts, pencil-written by Tolkein, was quite
a thrill for a young undergrad.)

Somehow the same information loses its impact
when it is displayed on a
CRT screen.

Then again, it would have been nice to have some backup disks of the
library at Alexandria before the fire ...

> Dan Mocsny

Phil Vitale