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From: "J.Sigbrandt" <j.sigbrandt@elec.gla.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: Publishing Scholarly Work on the Web -- opinions?
Organization: http://www.mech.gla.ac.uk/Control
Date: Wed, 09 Oct 1996 12:53:01 +0100
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Message-ID: <325B921D.F93@elec.gla.ac.uk>

David Ecale wrote:
> 
> Let's not count out
> the fact that the Word Processor used is also gone & I would have to use
> cryptoanalysis to decipher the word processor codes if I didn't have a
> plain-text version. 
...
> Anyway, I digress.  Optical diska may last for an extremely long time &
> on-line maint. of data may work out well.  The problem is that the media
> becomes obsolete at a ferocious rate.  The data formats become obsolete at
> an even more ferocious rate!  The cost to keep up is enormous.

Has anybody ever heard of project Gutenberg ??
ftp://uiarchive.cso.uiuc.edu/pub/etext/gutenberg/pg_home.html
It is an internet-wide project 
to publish as much of the literature in our international heritage as possible.
The work must obviously be out of copyright.  Their noble motivation is to make 
this literature available to as many people as possible.

The only electronic format that is useful since it is the least likely to
become obsolete is plain ascii.

After reading their web page, I have started the job of converting all of
my work, projects and data to the ascii format.  It only then became clear
how difficult this is:

	- no longer have access to the originating software packages,
	- storage media has changed
	- operating system/platform has changed
	- when the software is available, sometimes there is no option to 
	convert the data to ascii format !!

I think everyone using computers should be aware of these issues.  I for one
now insist that the programs I use store my work in the human readable ascii 
format.  It would be difficult to convince me to use a program with a 
proprietary electronic data format.

Regards,
jay

ps: did I mention project gutenberg ;)

