Dear Diary...
Today I attended a Law Library Faculty Meeting concerning "Collection Development for electronic resources." The main issues debated involved the necessity of both print and electronic versions of the same journals, taking into consideration usage metrics and cost differentials.
There was discussion of the ever present problem of preservation. I asked if the literature has indicated that libraries have been affected at any time by the "pervasive fear" that "IF" we subscibe to an electronic ONLY resource and 2 years down the line a patron needs an article from the previous year's archives but the company has gone belly up and no one has that vital article...all is lost!
I was informed that this phenomena is much too current to have suffered from such events, but with the palpable fear surrounding it, I guess I can't help but feel it is a tad bit overly dramatic.
I did learn that there is a real concern about the "shelf life" as it were of changing electronic formats, such as DVDs and CD-Roms. Some assume 100 years, max. I located the following excerpt that I found interesting:
"The Digital Problem; the Digital Challenge
Since the mid-1990s, we’ve known that digital preservation is a technical, legal, and organizational problem. Storage media degrade; signals decay; and the configuration of hardware and software required to render and display stored data become obsolete. Try running Microsoft Word 2.0 -- or any pre-1990 software -- on your Windows XP system and let me know how it goes. "
http://www.prelec.stonybrook.edu/lectures/marcumlecture.htm
There was also discussion of archiving websites, I had heard of one previously called the "Way Back Machine"
available at http://www.archive.org/
