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Date: Tue, 16 Apr 96 11:00:12 bst
From: Fytton Rowland <[log in to unmask]>
Please would you consider this for lis-elib (I am not permitted to mail to
it directly).
Thanks,
Fytton Rowland.
>Steve Hitchcock wrote:
>
>"....the dynamics of online information through the Web will be quite
>different......we intend to make periodic updates and we didn't want
>to propagate obsolete versions."
>
>Thomas Krichel wrote:
>
>"I think we will have to get accustomed to the fact that things on
>the internet are only available as long as the holder of write access
>to the disk will allow."
>
>Giles Martin wrote:
>
>"Winston Smith's job was to revise history. If in this electronic
>world, there is only one copy of historical source documents, still
>under the control of the creators, then as political fashions change,
>they can be revised -- just as the Chinese Government has edited
>historical pictures, to remove Lin Biao from the side of Mao Zedong."
Quite apart from the very valid political point made by Giles Martin,
isn't there a central issue here about what different types of information
are for? The Internet has totally transformed academics' *informal*
communication behaviour and is an unalloyed blessing for this purpose. But
we also need solid, established, dependable knowledge, so that as research
progresses it can be based on solid rock, not shifting sands. In informal
communication, nobody minds if I say one thing today and change my mind and
say something different tomorrow. I don't see, however, how anyone can
plan and execute a programme of research in any scholarly field if there is
no accessible record of tried and tested knowledge on which to base it.
Thus, if electronic networks are to be used as successfully for the
transmission of formal knowledge as they already are for informal
communication, we need first of all to maintain the distinction between the
two, and then to address positively the archiving need being discussed in
this thread.
Traditionally publishers have not been responsible for this archiving --
libraries have. There is a good case for archiving electronic journals
after the event in CD-ROM form -- the plan adopted by Journal of Molecular
Modelling, the first pure electronic (or at least "electronic first")
journal in chemistry. Admittedly this does not preserve the WWW hypertext
links, but it does preserve the *new* knowledge content of the journal in
its full multimedia form (which print cannot). This issue is well discussed
by James et al of the CLIC project in: David James et al., The Case for
Content Integrity in Electronic Chemistry Journals: The CLIC Project,
New Review of Information Networking, December 1995. This article is also
available on-line as http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/clic/video.html I don't think
it's just chance that chemistry has addressed this topic more seriously than
some other subjects -- chemists are very conscious of the importance of a
reliable archive of knowledge going back not just years, but centuries.
Fytton Rowland
Fytton Rowland, Lecturer, Phone +44 (0)1509 223039
Department of Information and Library Studies, Fax +44 (0)1509 223053
Loughborough University, Internet:
Loughborough, Leicestershire LE11 3TU, UK [log in to unmask]
WWW: http://info.lboro.ac.uk/departments/dils/staff/frowland.html
"There isn't a train I wouldn't catch, no matter where its going."
(Edna St Vincent Millay)
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