Juan Garces wrote:
> While I do find some arguments persuasive and others not so, it truly
> begs the question: are CD-ROMs (and, I suppose, the same goes for
> DVD-ROMs) still a desirable medium for ditigal publication?
One of the main reason for libraries and archives not preferring
CD-ROM publication is that they are not an acceptable preservation
media. They are guaranteed to degrade and become unreadable. Whereas
the same files copied to a hierarchical file server / incremental tape
backup can be kept in multiple copies etc. Part of the related
problem to this is the licensing. Many of the licenses with CD-ROM
publication do not wish you to make archival copies. (Whether they
are legally able to prevent you is a different issue.) So libraries
that buy a CD-ROM, for some bizarre reason, tend to keep only that
copy of the CD-ROM. Rather than keeping a master copy (say as an
iso disk image) from which they can keep generating CD-ROMs when they
wear out.
I feel that someone applying for funding (for example) to create a
digital resource who said that their only form of backup was CD-ROM,
should be warned in the strongest language that this is a bad idea.
-James Cummings
--
James Cummings, James dot Cummings at oucs dot ox dot ac dot uk
Oxford Text Archive / Arts and Humanities Data Service.
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