The Dead Media Notebook (40 page)

Source: Mark Vail, Vintage Synthesizers, Miller Freeman, Inc (pp. 78-79)

From Albin Wagner

“WASHINGTON, A library card catalog from Union Theological Seminary in Richmond is poised to become history at the Smithsonian.

“It’s a commonplace item you probably never thought about, an increasingly outmoded relic like the manual typewriter.

“And it’s quietly slipping into another era, replaced by computerized catalogs.

“A rescue effort mounted on the Internet, however, will guarantee that the card catalog doesn’t fade without a fanfare.
“The National Museum of American History is the proud new owner of the handsome oak cabinet, bought by the seminary in the 1920s.
“’I think there already are some youngsters who have not seen a card catalog,’ remarked Alva T. Stone, head cataloger at the Florida State University law library in Tallahassee.

“She said the widespread use of card catalogs ‘was undoubtedly a significant factor in the evolution of American libraries from 19
^th
century repositories staffed by curators to the democratic, accessible, and user- responsive institutions’ of today.

“By e-mail, Stone contacted a Smithsonian official in March about the idea of preserving ‘a representative card catalog as an artifact of what we call ‘modern’ civilization.’” “When a positive reply and specifications came from the American history museum, Stone used an Internet library network to find a prime candidate in Richmond.

“Peggy Kidwell, a specialist at the American history museum, said she was interested in an oak unit that had 60 drawers and book cards, that was near Washington and could easily be moved there, and that was made by the Library Bureau.

“That company was one of a group that banded together to form Remington Rand, one of the first manufacturers of computers, Kidwell explained.

“Enter the UTS library. It had an oak, Library Bureau card catalog containing cards that spanned decades, ranging from hand-written to manually typewritten.

“’It is so representative. And it is unusual that it’s in such spectacularly good condition,’ Kidwell said.

“The seminary was about to move to a new library and wasn’t taking its card catalog, according to head cataloger Thomason. UTS uses a computerized catalog in its $11.8 million, nearly 300,000-volume William Smith Morton Library.
“In December, the American Library Association published an article by Alva Stone of Florida State, in which she wondered: ‘Will all of the card catalogs disappear from the face of the earth?’ “Not yet, said the Smithsonian’s Kidwell.

“Card catalogs still are used in many places, she said, and she recently heard from a company that makes a limited number of them.
Albin Wagner, CA, CRM Chief, Bureau of Records Management New Jersey Division of Archives and Records

Source: Richmond Times-Dispatch Monday, February 17, 1997, by Peter Hardin,

From Bruce Sterling

“Today is the last day that libraries can place orders for catalogue cards with the Library of Congress, which is halting production of the cards. Libraries wishing to maintain card catalogues will have to turn to commercial suppliers. The Library of Congress has since 1902 sold duplicates of its three-by-five-inch cards to libraries around the world.

“However, card sales have declined since 1968, when cataloguing information became available in an automated format; they fell to 579,879 last year, from a peak of 78 million in 1968.

“Critics of automated systems point out that errors in coversion have led to books’ being lost and have limited cross-referencing options, and that the cards themselves, many of which are being discarded, have inherent historical value.”

Source: The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 279 Number 2 February 1997 ISSN 0276-9077

From Patrick I. LaFollette

[The following essay was part of a lengthy net discussion about the archival security of stored digital information. It first appeared in the “Mollusca” Internet mailing list. It was brought to my attention by Steve Jackson and is quoted by permission of Pat LaFollette]

There are three separate issues involved in the archiving of digital documents. The first is captured in this quote from Steve Long: “About 2 years ago I threw away over 100 eight inch floppy disks because could no longer find machines to read them. Fortunately I was able to convert most of the important data to 5.25 inch floppy disks. Now, my computer has 5.25 and 3.5 inch disks but most users are replacing the 5.25 inch with CD-ROM drives and don’t have the space in their PC to include all three. In another couple of years, I will have to convert to 3.5 inch or CD- ROM for my information. After that, who knows, but you can almost guarantee that the storage medium will change again.”

The physical media changes as storage technology advances. The marketplace requires that there be one or two “universal” formats at any particular time so that electronic products can be distributed. At present these are the 3.5 inch floppy disk and CD-ROM. The new DVD format is physically the same shape as CD-ROM and DVD readers will be “backwards compatible,”, able to read CD-ROMs, at least for a while. But after DVD has reached its planned maximum capacity of about 15Gb, who can guess what will come next?

The second issue is made clear by William Schleihauf.

“The various media being talked about, tape in particular, has a lifespan of only a few years (and that’s not counting the operators playing frisbee with the tapes on the night shift!). Companies now are discovering that some tapes created only a few years ago are coming up with i/o errors, and thus the data is lost. The newer cassettes are better, but again, the half-life is measured in years, not decades. CDROM, guess what, maybe a century, on average, or so the forecasting is.”

The currently available digital media are not of “archival” quality, unlike (acid free) paper. Perhaps it’s just as well that the physical format of the media keeps changing. It forces people to copy their data to new disks every now and then, while the old ones are still readable! I’ve read lengthy discussions of the archival properties of CD-ROM disks.

Estimates for some CDR (CD- Recordable) media exceed 200 years, twice as long as commercially pressed CDs. But the glass masters from which commercial CDs are pressed might last millennia. On the other hand, how long are CD readers likely to be around? The first generation of DVD readers will be backwards compatible, but I doubt CD technology in its present form will last as long as the phonograph. (My LPs, and even some 45s and 78s, are still in playable shape, but my turntable died years ago).

But all that kind of misses the point. One of the tasks performed by traditional librarians and archivists is to protect paper from the ravages of time, the elements, insects, fungus, fire, flood, and undergraduates. Paper can last for hundreds of years, but only if it is taken care of. Paper can also turn to dust in days or weeks. The analogous task for electronic librarians will be to protect their bits, independent of storage method or medium, by periodically transferring them all to whatever appears to be the most secure and accessible storage technology of the time, and by distributing copies of them to as many other widely dispersed locations as possible. But there does not yet seem to be an established tradition of digital librarianship to shoulder this responsibility and pass it on from one generation to the next. It’s very difficult to establish traditions and a commitment to the long term when the technology is in such a state of flux.

A major advantage of the digital medium is that so long as the physical media is readable, copies made from it will be identical. There is no degradation from generation to generation as there is with analog reproduction processes such as microfilm and photocopying. Nothing is fugitive. And unlike books, which are produced in finite (often rather small) numbers that decrease over time, there never need be such thing as a “rare” digital document, so long as it is periodically copied and made available.

Digital media may not hold up as well as paper to adversity and neglect, but its content can be much more widely distributed. Local disasters (wars, fires, floods, hackers, budget cuts) would have a much less lasting impact on a properly managed digital archive than on a conventional library. As soon as the event is past and the equipment is replaced, identical copies of the data can be restored from other unaffected archives.

The third and most intractable issue affecting computer documents is, as William Schleihauf pointed out, the coding scheme in which the data are recorded.

“Everything stored in a computer is stored with a specific coding scheme. You need to have the “magic decoder ring” to get it all back. If you create a file/document with Word Perfect v.6 today, there’s no guarantee that you’ll be able to read it 10 years from now.”

The real problem here is the use of non-standard “proprietary” document and database formats by DBMS, word processors, page layout programs, and typesetting systems. They tend (often deliberately) to be mutually incompatible as well as changing over time.

A solution to this problem was agreed upon eleven years ago by the international standards organization, but is only gradually gaining wide acceptance, primarily in the publishing industry, government, large corporations, and the European Common Market. The solution is SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language), ISO 8879 (1986) which defines a single international standard for coding documents that is hardware, operating system, and software independent.

Electronic documents in SGML format avoid the problems of proprietary formats and obsolescence, but can be converted to a proprietary format if this is necessary to perform a particular task. Most commercial typesetting and CD-ROM display software now accept SGML documents directly, without conversion. Actually, WWW browsers are quasi-SGML viewers in that HTML (HyperText Markup Language) files are SGML documents. The new buzz word in publishing circles is “repurposing” documents. That is, taking a computer file (the manuscript for a reference book, for example) and using it to produce a CD-ROM or online database.

If the text is in SGML format, it can be used for all three purposes without modification. What allows this to be done is that in SGML, it is the content, rather than the appearance, that is marked. In any other text markup systems, one would say [start italic] Astraea undosa [end italic] to put the name in italic. In SGML you would say [start genus] Astraea [end genus] [start species] undosa [end species]. The rule “print genus in italic” (or red or 14pt gothic) is defined separately from the document, and can be changed without changing the document itself.

There are a variety of SGML editors that allow documents to be created and maintained directly. Unfortunately, it’s still pretty much a “big boy” technology, the software expensive and clunky, and the conversion of existing electronic documents labor intensive. But this situation should improve in time, as more companies enter the arena. The bottom line to all this is that digital documents are, and will continue to become an ever more useful supplement to the published literature, and an inexpensive method of distributing large volumes of data, but are not likely to take the place of paper any time soon.

Given that digital storage methods will continue to evolve for the foreseeable future, I would want to witness digital librarians staying ahead of the technological wave, maintaining the security and utility of their holdings, for a generation or three before I will have as much confidence in them and their holdings as I do in paper, conventional libraries, and old fashioned librarians.

From Bruce Sterling

[A group of historians and librarians has filed suit against Mr John Carlin, the official Archivist of the United States. Their complaint is that historically valuable email and other governmental electronic documents are being wantonly destroyed despite their manifest historical value. The following is a much-edited communication on this topic from Page Putnam Miller, Director of the National Coordinating Committee for the Promotion of History, and an activist in this lawsuit against the US National Archives and Records Administration ]

“Public Citizen, Historians, and Librarians File Suit Against The Archives Challenging Policies that Allow Destruction of Electronic Records “On December 23 Public Citizen, joined by the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, and the American Library Association, filed a complaint against the National Archives in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia.

“The suit challenges the Archivist’s promulgation of a ‘General Records Schedule’ authorizing all federal agencies, at their discretion, to destroy the only electronic version of Federal agency records stored on agency electronic mail and word processing systems, provided the agency has printed a hard copy of the electronic record on paper or microform.

“The complaint states that the Archivist has ‘improperly ignored the unique value of electronic records’ and ‘has abdicated his statutory responsibility to appraise the historical value of such electronic records.’ The complaint asks the court to declare the General Records Schedule 20 null and void, and to prevent agencies from destroying electronic records created, received or stored on electronic mail or word processing systems.

“This new lawsuit builds on the Armstrong v. Executive Office of the President (Civil Action No. 89- 0142). The inadequacy of National Archives’ guidance to agencies on the preservation of e-mail was at the heart of that case, frequently called the PROFS case. [The PROFS computer email of Lt. Col. Oliver North and others, which they had assumed to be deleted, eventually became central evidence in the Iran-Contra scandal in the United States, bruces] “In 1989 the National Security Council, as well as other agencies, routinely destroyed e-mail, which according to the National Archives did not meet the standard of a ‘record”Ķ