Today technology is making it easier for users to populate, update, and maintain databases, and infrastructures are needed to support such user roles. Pros, Cons, and Experience with Standards Standards can define functions, processes, or services. Standards can extend to a variety of procedural or administrative functions, including the management of rights and permissions associated with intellectual property protection and more generally the use of content and services for which there are restrictions, fees, or other conditions. Standards are a necessary evil or a mixed blessing, depending on one's particular perspective. Humanists, like other users of information technology, asked for standards in the hope of lessening the distractions of figuring out how to work with the technology.
Standards have the obvious appeal of facilitating the sharing of information.
They also minimize the learning burden. At the same time, standards pose the risk of confining users to an obsolete technology or a lowest common denominator because of the difficulties and delays associated with setting standards. Waves of innovation and ensuing system obsolescence in consumer and professional electronics make clear the challenge of preserving access to humanities material over time. Part of the problem relates to the changing base of support for digital formats. Michael Lesk, for example, reported that only half of the ten word-processing programs advertised in Byte magazine in 1985 remained on the market in 1995.