From: emv@msen.com (Edward Vielmetti)
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.vpiej-l
Subject: Re: Distribution of Electronic Journals
Date: 15 Sep 1992 11:18:59 -0400
Organization: Msen, Inc. -- Ann Arbor, Michigan
NNTP-Posting-Host: nigel.msen.com
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MEDS002@UABDPO.BITNET ("A.J. Wright") writes:
: Will this happen with all of the e-info we're creating now?
: And fifty years or more in the future people will discover these files as
: they clean out virtual basements, closets, attics, etc?

There have been several attempts to keep a complete record of some
electronic traffic.  All of usenet news was put onto tape for a while, and
then as traffic grew the archiving got more selective.  (This is in
conjunction with individual efforts to archive individual groups.)

Right now you can call +1 800 643 NEWS or +1 402 291 2108 or write to
cdnews@sterling.com and subscribe to "NetNews/CD", a subscription service
that puts usenet news on cd rom (about one disk every two weeks).  They've
been publishing since the beginning of the year, and I'm hoping they'll
get the funding somehow to put other back files on cd-rom.

News on cd-rom does *not* address the question of access.  It's quite
clunky, relative to ftp'ing or rooting through my mailbox, to go in and
retrieve a particular article from a particular cd-rom.  However, it does
make a sizable improvement over mag tape, and since the individual disks
can be spun up and read directly as file systems the browsing isn't as bad
as it might be.  (They ship news readers that know how to read articles from
the spool in a sensible way).

My final class I needed to graduate from the U of Michigan was a writing
requirements class - kind of ironic that I failed similar courses a couple
of times, given how much I was typing in e-mail and conferences at the
time! - which was taught at the Bentley historical library.  The goal of
the course was to teach research on original historical materials, and for
my project I was assigned about 6 boxes of stuff from Henry Carter Adams,
a turn of the century railroad economist.  By stuff I mean *stuff* -
copies of letters that he sent, some small amount of published materials,
and largely what wasn't too much different from what you'd get if you
cleaned out his desk every so often and dumped it into a box.  Tracing
through this collection in search of what was really going on in railroad
safety gave a very different picture than any of the second- or third-hand
published accounts could give.

What could you do if you had all of the public discussion on the net -
with moderated, refereed, edited publications at the "top", moving down to
well behaved newsgroups and mail lists and finally descending into the
chaos of the "alt" net - all available on line for looking at?  Any of the
existing systems we have now for retrieval and browsing work really poorly
on collections measured in the tens of gigabytes of text.  If I want to
ask a research question like "trace the history of the ARL's thinking on
access and archives for electronic journals" so that I can explain to
CICnet how the project is or is not moving forward, that's going to be
hard to accomplish.  Probably means (if you were to do it right) spending
a few weeks searching LISTSERV and WAIS servers, asking for access to
archives (which may be long gone) of private mail lists, etc.  Not too
much different from rooting around in boxes of ephemera...

  Edward Vielmetti, vice president for research, Msen Inc. emv@Msen.com
        Msen Inc., 628 Brooks, Ann Arbor MI  48103 +1 313 998 4562


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