Anecdote of unusable decade-old proprietary technology
In a column called Dead Media Everywhere, writer John C. Dvorak highlights a problem we at FGI have written about before - proprietary digital formats that quickly become unusable. In this case, the propritery technologies are late 1990s digital cameras and their associated proprietary file formats:
So I'm digging around the archives (aka closet) and I find two old digital cameras that cost $500 to $1,000 when new and now cannot even be used unless I can find the old software and cables. This is a new form of dead media: old digital cameras. I was actually hoping to take some pictures with these "antiques" to post on my blog. No dice. The first camera is the fascinating Agfa 1680. It still works, but so far I have been unable to find any way to read its SmartMedia cards, since the camera uses a strange file format. And I have long since lost the cables that would let me transfer the photos directly from the camera. The other classic I unearthed was an old Olympus D300-L. This 1996 camera has no removable media. I was never a fan of this, but was always assured that it wasn't important. Yes, it's not important if you can ever find the extremely weird cable that hooked to the camera to transfer pictures (slowly). See the images here: http://www.dvorak.org/blog/?p=3409. Continue reading
GPOExpress
GPO has announced a new service. The announcement says, GPOExpress is "a nationwide convenience printing contract that allows Government personnel to walk into a printing company, day or night, at any of the thousands of locations throughout the United States and Canada -- to take care of small printing needs." Sherburne quotes Bruce James as saying, "This is GPO's next step in streamlining small printing procurements while increasing flexibility for our customers."
- Coming Soon... The GPOExpress Program Government Printing Office, November 22, 2005.
- GPO Awards Contract to Kinko's: Launches GPOExpress with FedEx Kinko's November 29, 2005 -- (WhatTheyThink.com Exclusive, By Cary Sherburne, Senior Editor)
Maybe it’s trains, trucks and planes
In his recent Depository Library Council Plenary Address, Public Printer Bruce James compared the curent changes in the documents world (paper to digital) to the Government Printing Office's switch from steam power to electric power in the early 1900s, and to the abandonment of horse drawn wagons in favor of gas powered delivery trucks. I've been thinking about that a lot, knowing that outside the government documents world, digital takes its place alongside print but hasn't come close to replacing it. Even today, e-books are an insignificant fraction of the $28 billion spent on books in 2004. Maybe we need a new metaphor in thinking about the distribution of government information. Instead of buggies vs. cars, let's think of trains, trucks and planes. As most of us know, the Pony Express was replaced by mail trains in the 19th Century. Horses simply couldn't compete in terms of speed. But when the Post Office aquired trucks in the early 20th Century (or therebouts), they didn't stop using trains. Trains still had a purpose in the postal distribution system. Later in the 20th Century, airplanes became available but that didn't put the trucks or trains (or boats, in Alaska) out of business. Each mode of delivery survived not because of misplaced nostalgia, but because each mode had at least one application not well served by the others. Could that not be a parallel for print and digital? Tell us what you think! Continue reading
Analysis of Google Print/Library/Book Search
A Risky Gamble With Google, By Siva Vaidhyanathan, Chronicle of Higher Education, 12/2/2005, Section: The Chronicle Review, Volume 52, Issue 15, Page B7. [subscription required]. Also available without subscription here.
Siva clearly identifies the problems of relying on Google as a replacement for libraries: it "offers us at least three reasons to worry: privacy, privatization, and property."
This particular project, I fear, opens up more problems than it solves. It will certainly fail to live up to its utopian promise. And it dangerously elevates Google's role and responsibility as the steward — with no accountability — of our information ecosystem. That's why I, an avowed open-source, open-access advocate, have serious reservations about it.... We need services like that provided by Google Library. But they should be "Library Library" projects. Libraries should not be relinquishing their core duties to private corporations for the sake of expediency.
Siva is assistant professor of culture and communication at New York University and author of Copyrights and Copywrongs and The Anarchist in the Library.
Continue readingThe PDF format
While Adobe publishes the specification for PDF (portable document format) documents, allowing others to write software that creates and reads PDF documents, there is concern that the specification in not truly open. The first two links below give information about the PDF/A long-term preservation format. The third item is a short note about why the published Adobe standard is not truly open.
- PDF/Archive Committee Scope: Responsible for specifying PDF tags for the archival storage of electronic documents.
- PDF/A, PDF for Long-term Preservation (NDIIPP)
- Adobe omissions in the PDF specification