there is no problem.
Future generations will only archive e-documents.
Analog books in their scanned in form.
Archived will be e-documents which are worthwhile by their content.
These are worthwhile to transfer to archive into archivable formats.
These are known (SGML and their derivates address this task) or currently
finalized (MathMl, CML, .. as derivatives of SGML).
Only these are able to conserve the full context (in contrast to pdf, ps
,..)
Programmes to excerpt browsable images from archivable formats will be
always provided by the respective generations.
Money as said has always had the key role, especially in science.
But the other way round as assumed in the earlier discussion:
Whenever science found something worthwhile, society has put in the money.
And archiving anything worth it of e-docs is a small amount compared to
moon-landings, elementary-particles-accelerators, supercomputers for
quantum field theory calculations for questions like 'is the coupling
constant in QCD 250 MEV or different' and the like.
So one should not start with costs but with the content necessities.
All active scientists in the meeting 'Long Term Archiving of Documents
in Physics' (
http://www.iupap.org) did emphasize that e.g. not all
prime scientific papers are worthwile to be archived on the long run,
(many of them 'marginal content') but content extractions (by the authors
or experts) written with the aim at being concise, full content,
understandable on the long run. [Example: noone reads the original papers
of Einstein, but all of us use the equation, shure enough not in the form,
Einstein wrote them, but with the present mathematical tools and
knowledge].
Comments to me for summarizing or directly for the list.
Eberhard R. Hilf 4.1.2002
.................................................
Eberhard R. Hilf, Dr. Prof.i.R.;
CEO Institute for Science Networking
an der Carl von Ossietzky Universitaet Oldenburg
Ammerlaender Heerstr.121; D-26129 Oldenburg
ISN:
http://www.isn-oldenburg.de/
my homepage:
http://physnet.uni-oldenburg.de/~hilf
hilf_at_physnet.uni-oldenburg.de tel/Fax: 0049-441-798-2884/5851
PhysNet for the EPS:
http://physnet.uni-oldenburg.de/PhysNet
Received on Sat Jan 05 2002 - 22:36:09 GMT