A cautionary tale (electronic publishing)

[Julian Humphries]

> Date:          Fri, 15 Mar 1996 17:31:22 -0500
> Subject:       Re: A cautionary tale (electronic publishing)

"This is a cautionary tale; I think that electronic publishing is
coming sooner or later. But, we have to look ahead and plan carefully.
...... Apparently Gunn
never got the message because he used the system so little. A valuable
dataset has vanished into cyberspace."

I'm sorry, but what does this have to do with electronic pubishing?
I've lost datasets, lots of people have.  The US Mail loses
journals, movers drop stuff off the back of trucks, water rains down
from the ceiling and journals and notebooks are ruined.  Shit
happens.  Are we really to believe the chance of loss would have
been a lot different if he had simply recorded this stuff in a lab
notebook?

There is nothing magic or even very different about assuring
permanent, accessible copies of electronic data/publications/whatever
(well maybe there is something different, I can move and copy huge
datasets to lots of different computers and media in a matter of
seconds, something I could never do with a paper copy).  You make
copies, archive them in secure places and assure a lot of people
have copies -- all just like we do with books or journals or paper
notebooks.







Julian Humphries
Ecology and Systematics, The MUSE Project
Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, 14853
Phone: 607-257-8143    Fax: 607-257-8109