[Web4lib] Next new thing?

[Mark Bardsley]

Karen,

First: Thanks for LOCKSS!

I agree that lots of copies makes things confusing for librarians and
information professionals. And in fact, in normal practice it is a bad idea.
I use that example to backup my claim that it is a bit alarmist to say that
in the future all or most of the information from our era will disappear.

- Mark 


On 7/17/05 8:53 AM, "Karen Coyle" <kcoyle at kcoyle.net> wrote:

> Mark Bardsley wrote:
> 
>> 3) There is an acronym but I can't remember it (then what is it good for?)
>> that implies that many copies keep things safe. The digital age is allowing
>> us to keep many copies of things. These copies are going to move from
>> storage media to storage media. In other words, things that are now on hard
>> drives, DVDs, etc, will move to holographic or DNA based systems (or
>> nanotech) -for example.
>>  
>> 
> Yes, and the big question is: how will we know which of them are
> equivalent copies of something else? In other words, if you're looking
> for the PDF in a particular place and don't find it, but you find a
> "similar" PDF elsewhere (or an XML version), what's to tell you that you
> have the same thing? In an overall cultural sense, the "lots of copies"
> is a great idea. But if you wish to do what libraries do, which is to
> identify and inventory the cultural artifact, LOCKSS is a nightmare. The
> obvious solution is "work identifier" but as we've seen, that's easier
> said than done.
> 
> kc