North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

["Richard J. Ossolinski" <osso@acadia.net>]

Kudos, Tom!
Richard

Tom Volkening wrote:
> 
> As a librarian I have been dealing with the print vs. online question for a
> number of years.  As you can tell from the comments generated by this
> question there is no consensus about which is best or if we need both.  Some
> folks want print and others prefer online.  I would argue for keeping both
> for the time being.  I think print is still the most reliable long term
> medium for storing information.  As a number of people have pointed out the
> old issues of Pomona contain useful information you may not be able to find
> any place else.  You are dependent on hardware and software that can become
> obsolete.  Here in the library we have old cdroms that can't be read, 5 1/4
> floppies that can't be read by any of our current machines, backup tape that
> can't be read.  It would be nice to think that someone will migrate the
> information from one generation of equipment to the next but that may not
> always happen.  If the information is stored on just one machine and
> something happens to it the information could disappear for good.  Relying
> on a company like eGroups is not a great long term solution either.  The
> company could go broke, be sold to another company with a different business
> strategy or decide that it no longer wants to host groups like ours.
> Archiving is a major worry for libraries and any other groups like NAFEX who
> have valuable information they want to keep available over the long term.
> 
> Tom Volkening
> Engineering Library
> 1515 Engineering Building
> Michigan State University
> East Lansing, MI 48824-1226
> Phone:  517-432-1498
> Fax:      517-353-9041
> Email:    volkenin@mail.lib.msu.edu
>               volkenin@egr.msu.edu

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