Assuming this was a reply to my comment that it is a waste of effort to claim digital serials, the article is pretty much irrelevant. I'm not opposed to several someones, in several places, keeping paper copies. As has been pointed out, JSTOR is working on that very project. That probably means, however, that many of "the rest of us" don't need to keep paper for the things that we've licensed from JSTOR.

Not surprisingly, considering the popular source that published the article, it didn't contain much, if anything, that we didn't already know. Governments and libraries and companies have been losing records since the first clay tablets fell off of a shelf or the Library at Alexandria burned. Thus it will always be, whether due to natural disaster, war, or other "Acts of God or Man". I believe that the Library of Congress has hundreds of thousands of items that are deteriorating faster than they can be preserved, doesn't it?

The emphasis in the article on the digital age issues ignores not only the fact that loss of information has been with us for millennia, but that for the last 150 years we've been losing non-print non-digital data as well. Just think of old photographs, wax cylinders, wire recordings, eight track tapes, Betamax videos, Ultrafiche, and so forth.

This problem isn't going to go away, no matter what media we use to store information, as there are no indestructible media. Maybe that is really a good thing. Some 44 years ago in "Principles of Book Selection" (long before we heard of "collection development"), the professor said that Alfred North Whitehead once said:

They could burn half the books in the British Museum and no one would ever now the difference from now until the end of time. The problem is which half.

I've never been able to track that down, and could well be apocryphal, but if anyone has a citation, let me know.

Meanwhile, we should make our best efforts to preserve information as is appropriate, but should also face the fact that our efforts will always be far from perfect.

dan

----- Original Message -----
From: Shaare Zedek Medical Library ben-el@SZMC.ORG.IL
To: SERIALST@LIST.UVM.EDU
Sent: 2/27/07 9:10 AM
Subject: Re: [SERIALST] Claiming online issues

> Try entering into Google "digital ice age", read the article from
> Popular Mechanics and a few comments on it (I only found one anti) and
> see how you all feel then.
>
> Yours,
>
> Pamela Ben-Eliezer
> Shaare Zedek Medical Library
> Jerusalem, Israel
> ben-el@szmc.org.il
>