Useful life of CDROM

[Frederick W. Schueler]

Murray Fletcher wrote:
>
> still have to solve the problem of permanency of record with website
> URLs changing. A downloaded printout of the
> website deposited in appropriate public libraries perhaps
> [bows head and waits
> for expected rain of verbal blows; update: 17 July 1999]

* As Joseph Grinnell taught us, we ought to be taking our field notes on
paper, and with ink, that will last for a millennium. That's the kind of
standard we should aspirte to in all kinds of publications as well. The
only practical medium we know of with this kind of permanence is a
well-bound book on nonacid paper, and the only way I can see of
'publishing' names electronically is to have a network of libraries
formally committed to automatically printing, binding, and archiving all
electronic descriptions. This might be a justification for a kind of
registration of names: for a name to be published on the www the URL must
be communicated to this archiving network so the hard copies can be
preserved, and the date of publication becomes the date when the URL is
sent to the network.

There may be an analogy here with botanical descriptions in Latin, and a
problem with this scheme is that the hard copies are not very useful
(unless some cunning scheme of classification were to make them so) until
the URL disappears, and the description is unavailable electronically.

fred.
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