durable paper?

From
Date
Henry Gee's statement:
>2) Web publication may be fine for molecular and cell biology which
>re-invents itself every year or so, but palaeontology papers are meant to
>have a long shelf life. We still refer to stuff from the 17th century. Can
>we guarantee that web-published palaeo will be as durable, given that one
>needs a computer to translate unreadable (i.e. magnetically encoded)
>material that you'd otherwise read with your unaided eyes?

The ongoing decay of publications printed on acidic paper puts a question
mark on long-term storage of information that depend on preservation of a
physical medium (e.g. paper). Given, the old publications would have been
published on CD-ROMs 200 years ago, it would be easy to transfer the
information to modern CD-ROMs and this could be even done by a robot and it
would be cheap. The conservation of the old publications on paper is
extremely more demanding. The ETH library is heavily involved in this
conservation work. They tell us, however, it will be only possible to save
a small fraction of the books. It is foreseeable when the majority of the
old publications will have decayed to dust, despite a big effort and lots
and lots of invested money (I recall something like an entire annual ETH
budget to be invested in book conservation in Switzerland). I love the
classic paleo-publications and you are right to think in centuries when it
comes to publications. I wish, however, the grand old mothers and fathers
would have published on CD-ROMs.

Heinz Hilbrecht




Address:

Heinz Hilbrecht
Geological Institute
ETH Zentrum
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