Re: OED, CD-ROMS, Hard drives, etc.

[Harmon Seaver hseaver@xxxxxxxx]

>The most serious criticism of buying anything on a CD-ROM is that,
>in all likelihood, in 10 years or so CD-ROM readers will be antiques.
>The hard disk offers a longer life expectancy, IMO.

  This has been the primary arguement in the library world against
digitalization vs. microfilm for archival purposes. It ignores the fact
that once a text is digitized (CD-ROM, hardrive, whatever) it can simply
be copied again and again to whatever medium one choses, with error
correction software insuring absolute reliability, by the press of a
button -- even back to the original paper copy, on archival quality
paper.
  Libraries copy many cdroms to hardrives, most can be made to work
that way -- although I think that there is a worry factor here, in that
disk drives very often get corrupted, while cd's, other than serious
physical damage, don't. I'd think that long before CD-ROMS themselves
become out of fashion, the next better technology will appear, and your
investment can be transferred. OTOH, won't the OED itself need updating
by that time? It does evolve, eh?


--
Harmon Seaver hseaver@xxxxxxxx hseaver@xxxxxxxx
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The fundamental delusion of humanity is that I am in here -- and you
are out there.
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Copyright, Harmon F. Seaver, 1997. License to distribute this post is
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