The lifespans of irreplaceable words

Reading Nicholson Baker's Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper for my other MLIS class this semester has been interesting and somewhat heartbreaking; Baker vividly conveys the irreversible loss of historical newspapers and periodicals and the unreliability of microfilm as a backup storage medium. His descriptions of microfilm as an oversold "solution" that risks illegibility, shrinkage, buckling, bubbling, and sticking -- as well as his accurate portrayal of the dizzying text-glide that reading microfilm entails -- make it especially tragic that so many original materials have been destroyed after microfilming. Yet our textbook for this course, Discovering Computers 2009, described microfilm as "inexpensive and [having] the longest life of any storage media," with a "potential life expectancy" of 500 years. (p. 379) How could anyone know that, when the technology hasn't been around nearly that long?

Of course, if you look at the asterisk in the book's Media Life Expectancies table, you see the qualifier "*according to manufacturers of the media". Of course they would make inflated assertions, but Baker's findings prove otherwise. I'm all in support of high-quality digitization of information, but not at the expense of original copies! Have librarians been sold a bill of goods? It seems there should always be space enough somewhere to store original copies, even if not always on handily accessible library shelves. I'm now wondering what other technologies highlighted in our computer textbook could be seducing archivists away from sounder storage methods, or otherwise affecting the longevity or quality of stored information.

Think like a machine

I finally succeeded in importing my reference links from Connotea, Zotero, and Del.icio.us into RefWorks, thanks to some helpful tips from classmates and blind exploration. Each of the programs was easy enough to use on its own, but synthesizing different programs created all sorts of little challenges. And I'm still baffled over why the programmers couldn't make certain tasks a bit easier: just for example, why doesn't Del.icio.us allow me to create folders? Isn't that a pretty basic element of data organization? (Or did I fail to find the way to do so?)

I've been reminded today of a mantra that my tech-savvy husband has oft repeated when working with computers: "Think like a machine." For instance, when for some odd mechanical reason my Del.icio.us RSS feed would only import my 30 most recent items, I found that the best course of action was to find a way to group the remaining items in a separate locale and do a new RSS feed, accommodating its inexplicable quirk. Since, as I pointed out above, Del.icio.us didn't let me organize references into folders, I had to find a way to group the remaining items: I tagged each remaining item with a single word ("text"), then bundled every reference with the "text" tag into a new bundle called "Text," and did an RSS feed for the Text bundle. Naturally, if I were working with a human being, a few friendly words could have clarified my intentions in far less time than the bundle project, but I admit that I actually enjoy solving machine-puzzles in creative ways like that. What a feeling of accomplishment to have found a path through the cryptic channels of techno-obscurity!