Google Apps is the implementation of Google applications like Gmail and Docs except customized for a particular domain. It’s pretty cool that they offer all of these features tightly integrated together to pretty much anyone with a domain name who wants them.

The BBC and The Chronicle of Higher Education report that many universities around the world are taking Google up on the offer and implementing Google Apps at their schools.

In Dublin, the news service says, “the addresses and domain name still remain the same — but underneath the bonnet, it’s a service provided by Google.” Trinity College officials say they made the decision to outsource because it let them maintain a robust e-mail system at no additional cost; Google does all the work. 

Arizona State University made the same decision late last year to switch to Gmail, which also comes with a calendar and instant messaging, two items that are very attractive to students. 

My school, the University of California, Berkeley, is not one of these universities. I feel like this is really unfortunate and that the world’s most prominent public university is missing out big time.

The standard UC Berkeley email service, CalMail, offers students, faculty, and staff 250 MB of email storage (the quota until about a month ago was an even more paltry 100 MB). Email through Google Apps would offer more than 2GB of free space for every account. The spam filtering on CalMail similarly only just recently improved from “horrible” to “marginal.” Of course, Gmail’s spam filtering is legendary and very good.

The Google Apps service is completely free as well, including the storage costs, support costs, etc. I wonder how much money that would save a school like UC Berkeley.

Apart from those very tangible benefits, it seems like there would be huge potential for student and faculty collaboration and communication through Google Apps. The Apps include Google’s talk application, meaning that all email addresses would also have the instant message capability. Same thing goes for the Google document relation applications, notebooks, etc.

Obviously I could see a university have strong misgivings about turning over so much of its infrastructure to Google - basically the concern would be “selling out” to a corporation that would data mine users, pitch them ads and do all sorts of “evil” things. The thing is that many individuals already make that choice by signing up for Gmail or another free web-based email service. Obviously there is a huge difference between one person making a choice like that and an institution imposing such a decision on everyone. I wonder, however, what a company like Google, self-desirous of not doing “evil,” would be willing to promise a university in order to gain its adoption of Google Apps. I suspect they might be willing to make a pretty favorable deal.

What Google Apps for education seems to have the potential for solving is the problem of universities with underfunded IT departments and infrastructure. 100 MB of email storage, even the current 250 MB, is ridiculously low. (memo to the university - that unworkably low quota might be a reason why so many students and faculty have their own Gmail accounts already). 100 MB is 50 2 MB PDFs or images, 250 MB is 125 of the same. I know many faculty members and students who send and receive this amount or more of documents in the span of a week or less.

Providing university-wide document sharing, collaboration, chat, etc. capabilities is something not even on the horizon in the current IT planning. The only thing that we have similar is bSpace, Berkeley’s implementation of Sakai, which is great, but is designed for class and project collaboration. A Google Apps implementation would complement that, by proving more advanced collaborative features for students in day to day life (in and outside of the classroom) as well as better supporting ad hoc groupings and sharing.

Something else that Google Apps provides that there is only a half-baked campus equivalent of current is calendar service. Right now, faculty and staff have access to CalAgenda which is an implementation of the Oracle collaboration suite calendar. It works, but it costs the campus (which of course passes on to individual departments) a variety of fees. And it is limited to those signed up. By contrast the Google Apps calendar is tied to an individual’s account, meaning every student, faculty, staff, affiliate, etc. would have a calendar. It seems like in addition to saving money, this sort of universal implementation would cut through quite a few scheduling Gordion knots.

Google and Google Apps have limitations and are certainly not perfect, but I wonder the sort of system they could become for my university if they were implemented here. It seems like Berkeley’s expertise and funds could be used to customize and tailor the Google Apps system to the campus’ needs, while still saving so much money.

I’m also really curious what the response percentage would be if students, faculty and staff were polled on the issue. I suspect that a significant number would support an alternative to the current IT services.

The complete article from The Chronicle of Higher Education: “Wired Campus Blog: Google Mail Takes Over Campuses Worldwide”

The complete article from BBC News: “Google’s Email for Universities”

Steve Jobs’ keynote at WWDC today, widely regarded by Apple-fanatic critics and bloggers as lackluster, was not exactly disappointing to me because I saw it as more of a “maintenance-release” keynote than anything else.

June’s big Apple news, of course, is the iPhone and, since it’s already been publicized that the launch date is June 29th, all that was needed today was for Jobs to fill in the gaps. He told us it would be available at 6pm, and he sketched out Apple’s model for supporting third-party “apps.” Necessary information, but nothing earth-shattering.

Similarly the Safari 3.0 beta availability for Windows as well as MacOS seems to fall squarely on the side of “good” but not “great” news. Apple seems to be doing a lot with Safari as a browser, app, and platform (?), making it central to the iPhone, establishing its connection to Dashboard in Leopard with the web-clip, make-your-own-widget capability, and having it do a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff in the new version of Mail and other apps.

The Windows XP and Vista release of Safari is something which was staring the tech community in the face, but no one I read prior to the keynote predicted it. Safari’s always straddled the fence between open source and proprietary, so it doesn’t seem like it would have taken a significant amount of effort to build a version of it that would run under Windows. (Absolutely not meant to trivialize any Apple programmers’ work, just a comment on the organizational resources and cost to port this app.) Right now it seems a little odd that Apple would enter the “browser wars” (v. 2.0), especially since Firefox will most likely be the victim if Safari on Windows gains any traction.

Is there a master plan behind Safari on Windows? I hope so. Will it convince some more switchers, again, hopefully. Right now I’m stuggling to understand the “why” behind this move, but if it’s a “maintenance pre-release” for some to-be-announced Apple software, hardware, or internet service, then perhaps it will end up being one of those things that 1-5 years from now changes the computer world like iTunes for Windows did when “hell froze over” and Apple released its “first” Windows app.

As a practical usability matter, I’m curious to see how well Safari 3.0 (Mac and Windows versions) are going to perform on the sites where Safari currently has difficulties. These are mostly websites built using poor, non-standards-compliant code, and/or Micro$oft backend stuff. Hopefully Apple has taken the opportunity with 3.0 to make the browser work even with those websites that expect IE’s buggy-ness. Otherwise the Windows user experience with the new browser will be frustrating at times, and this will only make Apple look bad (even though, of course, the problems really lie with bad website designers and/or Micro$oft).

This observation carries over to the speed question, which Jobs touted as one of the key Safari advantages in his speech. Safari was shown to be significantly faster than IE and Firefox. Its speed advantage over Firefox on Mac is well-known and is not a surprise. Part of this is due to the skill and expertise of Apple programmers, and some of it is due to the fact that Firefox maintains more compatibility with broken websites and components. Does Safari’s speed edge on Windows come from it being better written software or does it come from Safari only agreeing to work with well-written, standards-compliant websites?

The MacOS X Leopard final preview seemed like the biggest “maintenance release” aspect of the keynote. There were some “new” features that had not been publicly shown before, but there weren’t that many of them and they could not qualify as earth-shattering. Leopard still looks great, fast, worth the $129 for the “premium” version (Jobs joked that $129 was the price for the “basic” “home” “premium” and “ultimate” editions, of course, there is only one desktop Leopard version unlike Vista). There also looks to be a lot that will help developers write beautiful and useful apps. And it looks really fast.

The UI enhancements looked subtle, but good. “Brushed metal,” we were informed, is “gone” from the desktop / Finder. The opacity and transluscence of many more elements looks nice, and seems to emphasize the desire for technology and computers to be unobtrusive. So score there…

Of course, just as “brushed metal” fades away from the Mac desktop, it appears slightly tweeked and without explanation as the new unifying element of Apple’s website. When the site was taken down during the keynote, the expectation was that there would be some sort of new hardware product, something to buy. Instead, the website got its own “maintenance release” which saw its navigation bar updated from its 2001-2002 vintage “Aqua” look to something more similar to a 2004-2005 vintage “Brushed Metal” appearance. Of course, the website is more solid gray, the “brush” lines aren’t there.

The Apple website looks good, and the partial redesign was long overdue. So nothing really “wrong” there, but, as with so much else today, nothing really game-changing either.

Overall, I’ll admit to some disppointment, because I expected more “new” stuff, and instead it was generally a “maintenance release” keynote. But I won’t go so far as some, who are already selling derisive t-shirts: http://www.macmerc.com/news/archives/4028 to commemorate the speech.

I am left wondering about the regular iApps - it’s been a few keynotes now without any mention of iLife, iWork and all their real and imagined subsidiary applications and features. They deserve a maintenance release too, and I hope that something cool is in the works for them and that we won’t have to wait 6 months or more to find out about it.

I downloaded and installed the JumpBox version of MediaWiki today, and I was totally impressed with how easy it was to set up and use. JumpBox packages certain open source server software packages, like MediaWiki and WordPress, along with all of the dependencies that are required to run them. With virtualization software like Parallels or VMWare, setting up the software is as simple as double-clicking the JumpBox package.

The end result is that software that would have required a web server to operate can be simply installed on a desktop or laptop computer without needing to download and install a bunch of random components and potentially screw up your primary operating system.

I have a MediaWiki-powered wiki running on a web server of mine, but I am only using it to track my own academic research notes. Wiki markup, along with the ability to automatically save multiple versions of documents, is what appeals to me, not the ability to have many collaborators access and edit the documents. I see myself using a JumpBox MediaWiki implementation as a mirror of the server-installed wiki. If I’m someplace without an internet connection I can still work on my wiki as if I was online.

I’m downloading the JumpBox versions of Trac and Joomla! right now and I plan to give them a try next. Trac is open source software for bug tracking and trouble tickets that is used mostly by software developers. My plan for it is much less ambitious. I’d like to see if I can adapt its project management capabilities to academic research that I’m doing. Instead of following “bugs,” “fixes,” and “releases” I want to see if Trac helps the process of planning research and writing.

Joomla is a widely used content management program that runs on a variety of web servers and allows users to have different levels of access, add / remove content, etc. I’m interested in playing around with this software to see what its capabilities are to potentially recommend it to people I know.

JumpBox gives me the ability to sample all of these server programs without a lot of hassle.
The idea of using virtualization and packaging server based programs for use on personal computers is a really neat concept and so far my experience is that JumpBox has implemented it really well.

A Canadian company announced that they will donate 100,000 copies of the computer game Civilization 3 along with a special game module designed to simulate Canadian history. According to GameSpot.com:

Developed by Toronto, Ontario-based media firm Bitcasters, HistoriCanada simulates scenarios from Canada’s past, allowing gamers to take control of one of its European or aboriginal cultures to relive history, or change it in the process. In addition to the core gameplay (which builds off of Civilization’s social, economic, and military simulations), HistoriCanada also includes artwork, text, and short video clips on a wealth of topics as a result of cooperation with The Canadian Encyclopedia and Historica Minutes.

A Bitcasters representative told GameSpot that sponsor and distribution details are still being finalized, but 20,000 copies will be sent directly to high schools by Canada’s National History Society, where teachers will be able to use it in extra-credit assignments and otherwise experiment with the game in the classroom. The remaining 80,000 copies of the game will distributed directly to 12- to 18-year-old students through mail or retail outlets, likely by an as yet undetermined sponsor.

I loved the Civilization series of games when I was a teenager, mostly but not exclusively because of my interest in history. Although the strategy aspect of the game made playing on a computer-generated “random” world exiting, playing the real historical scenarios always appealed to me more. I really envy the students who will get to play the game as part of their history curriculum.

My only reservation, of course, is the issue of how accurately the game scenarios have been constructed. For instance, in the regular game’s “technology tree” a player can advance in knowledge of technologies that end up completely anachronistic to their civilization’s history (Incan stealth bombers and Russian AEGIS cruisers, to give a couple examples, always amused me). Not to mention the “wonders of the world” that a player could build given the requisite technological advances. I would always laugh when I read something across the screen like “Shakespeare’s Theater has been built in Paris,” “The Hanging Gardens have been built in Boston,” etc.

I hope that the developers of the Canadian history mod have been sensitive to spacial and cultural considerations in addition to temporal ones. If the “civilizations” are limited to Canadian cultural groups, then hopefully they’ve been sensible enough to only make certain technologies or wonders available to certain players. Counterfactual history is useful to an extent, but there are some counterfacutals that are so completely “wrong” that they would serve only to teach the students a really screwed up version of history.

For instance, if the game gave players the impression that native societies were on more or less equal footing with settler and immigrant civilizations, the result would be that a clever student game-player might end up “winning” as a native civilization. Of course, history in Canada, the United States, Australia, and other settler colonies is full of examples of smart, clever indigenous people going against the dominant trend of their peoples’ mistreatment, disenfranchisement, etc. at the hands of European immigrants. But it would be a disservice to students to teach them that history could have gone radically differently if only the natives had made a few different choices. All of this is speculation on my part, because I haven’t played the game mod for Canada.

The complete story from GameSpot: “2K donates Canada-specific Civ III mod to students”

All Things Considered on NPR has a piece about how initially reluctant publishers are beginning to change their minds about Google’s Book Search feature. I was particularly interested in the statistic that Google has digitized over a million volumes in a couple of years. It is possible to imagine them being able to achieve the goal of digitizing all the world’s books in another five to ten years. Technically speaking, they obviously can do it. Whether or not there will be legal or business orientated roadblocks and objections seem like the potential stumbling blocks.

The other really interesting fact was the representative from Oxford University press who remarked that in the past one and a half to two and a half years “321,000 times” people clicked their books to link to the press’ website and purchase them. The key point, he said, “We spent nothing to do that. That’s why we’re a big fan of this program.”

The complete story on NPR’s website: “Publishers Warm to Google’s Book Search”

Political scientist Pete Moore downloaded a bunch of Coalition Provisional Authority documents about the early period of the US occupation of Iraq. His son inadvertently turned on the “view / track changes” option in the “view” menu in Microsoft Word, and there ended up being a treasure trove of information contained in the markup.

My son made his discovery while impatiently waiting to play a computer game on my laptop. As part of a research project, I had downloaded 45 documents from a section of the CPA Web site known as Consolidated Weekly Reports. All but three of the documents were Microsoft Word. I had one of the Word documents up on my screen when my son starting toying with the computer mouse. Somehow, inadvertently, he managed to pull down the “View” menu at the top of the screen and select the “Mark up” option. If you are in a Word document where “Track changes” has been turned on, hitting “Mark up” will reveal all the deletions and insertions ever made in the document, complete with times, dates and (sometimes) the initials of the editors. When my son did it, all the deleted passages in a document with the innocuous name “Administrator’s Weekly Economic Report” suddenly appeared in blue and purple. It was the electronic equivalent of seeing every draft of an author’s paper manuscript and all the penciled changes made by the editors.

Moore was especially concerned with the substance of the data contained in this electronic marginalia. It gave him unprecedented insight into the thinking of bureaucrats working for the CPA. During the rest of the article he describes the ostensibly deleted theories that the CPA had for why violence was going up or down in Iraq. Even in the midst of these revelations, which show the extent to which the CPA used ethnic stereotypes and reductionist arguements to “understand” Iraq, Moore takes note of the theories that are missing:

Nowhere in any of these theories, including the “boring” one, does the author address the dissolution of the Iraqi Army as a major contributor to the violence. Nowhere, in fact, does the author seem to know which “bums” or “losers” are attacking the Americans or why. Indeed, the most remarkable passage in the entire deletion is a simple statement by an Iraqi businessman, whom the writer quotes in passing while explaining why American-induced economic prosperity will end the fighting. “It is nothing personal,” the Iraqi says. “I like you and believe you could be bringing us a better future, but I still sympathize with those who attack the coalition because it is not right for Iraq to be occupied by foreign military forces.” In the world of the CPA circa 2004, first one American glosses over this Iraqi’s prophetic words, and then another tries — unsuccessfully, as it turns out — to delete them.

Moore’s work is politically-charged because of its contemporary resonance. However, it makes me think about what sorts of tools and techniques the historians of the future will employ in the course of their research. Additionally it shows how even in electronic records that are tightly controlled a candid and unvarnished reality can be discovered or surmised. In a sense this should be incredibly reassuring to historians in the twenty-first century who fret that the rise of email and electronic documents will render the past inaccessible for scrutiny.

The complete article from Salon: “The secret Iraq documents my 8-year-old found”

A flip side to the concept that guides Google, Wikipedia, and so many other internet and computer firms–that we need an ever-expanding capacity to store and access informaton–is the idea that computers should learn how to forget. A recently published working paper from Harvard University suggests that there could be good public-policy reasons for implementing this kind of solution:

Why would we want our machines to “forget”? Mayer-Schönberger suggests that we are creating a Benthamist panopticon by archiving so many bits of knowledge for so long. The accumulated weight of stored Google searches, thousands of family photographs, millions of books, credit bureau information, air travel reservations, massive government databases, archived e-mail, etc., can actually be a detriment to speech and action, he argues.

From a technological perspective this sort of thing seems like it could be very easy to implement. Microsoft Outlook, for instance, already has a feature that will delete or archive all messages after a certain date. Companies that have found archiving every email to be either costly, embarrassing, or both are increasingly adopting “email retention policies” to limit their legal liabilities.

These practices seem fairly “dumb” (in the computing sense of the term). That is, it might end up being a lot more difficult to implement “smart” forgetting of information. It seems like it would be very difficult to teach a computer or a program to forget based on multiple criteria that approaches the level of sophistication of the human brain. We could very easily tell a computer to save all messages from a certain person whom we’re especially close to and with whom we share intimate communications. But some of these are bound to be trivial and worthy of forgetting. Still, sometimes a message that looks trivial based solely on its content might have a tremendous amount of emotional significance for its sender or its recipient. A child’s finger painting might not be a Monet, but his mother still saves it for decades.

The idea that computers would be smart enough to discern what to keep and what to get rid of based upon an almost endless number of factors, including less tangible emotionally based ones, suggests sentience and humanity.

Leaving aside the implications for artificial intelligence, the author of the working paper focuses on the issue from the standpoint of public policy. Would it be a good practice to implement? And, how could it best be implemented? My concern here is that future historians researching their past might be deprived of important ways of understanding our society. Then again, they might learn a lot about us by considering what we programmed our computers to forget.

The complete article from Ars Technica: “Escaping the data panopticon: Prof says computers must learn to ‘forget’ “

The complete working paper from Professor Mayer-Schönberger, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University: “Useful Void: The Art of Forgetting in the Age of Ubiquitous Computing”

Dave Barry reviews David Shipley and Will Schwalbe’s Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home in The New York Times. It’s a fairly lighthearted review about a somewhat serious (at least for business) matter. Most of the advice that the book gives comes down to what intelligent people would consider “common sense” or rules similar to other forms of communication. Barry writes:

E-mail, for all its efficiency, often fails to achieve its intended result; a vague or carelessly worded message can cause major problems — personal, legal and financial — for senders and receivers. Helping you avoid these problems is the goal of “Send,” an informative, entertaining, thorough and thoughtful book. The authors are media veterans — David Shipley is deputy editorial page editor of The New York Times; Will Schwalbe is editor in chief of Hyperion Books — with extensive, and not always positive, experience sending and receiving e-mail. They summarize their essential message in two rules: “Think before you send” and “Send e-mail you would like to receive.”

I was pleased to find that my own email habits seem to conform somewhat naturally to the guidelines that they recommend. I probably err on the side of writing too much, or sending emails that are lengthier than they should be according to Send. My excuse is that I am trying to compensate for what Shipley and Schwalbe correctly note is one of email’s most profound limitations: the inability to accurately convey emotion or tone.

My other failing as an emailer, according to the book, has to do with my closings. I generally just use a dash and then my first name, adopting a style similar to signing a note. Sometimes I will close with “Love” on a personal email and sometimes I resort to “Sincerely” if the email is a more formal request and I don’t know the recipient. Shipley and Schwalbe recommend that the standard closing should be “Yours Ever.” I haven’t read Send to know their explanation for this, but I am intrigued because this was the closing that I’ve read in numerous instances of British Government correspondence that I’ve read while doing research. The British tradition seems alive and well, even in something as mundane as office emails.

The complete review in The New York Times review: Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home

Robert Townsend lists on the American Historical Association Blog several problems with Google Books and its program of scanning books to make them accessible on the internet. His critique is mostly focused on the accuracy of Google’s scanning, or rather the inaccuracy of its OCR, which he believes has led to a variety of problems.

The problem of quality control only exacerbates my most basic worry about the larger rush to digitize every scrap of information—that we are adding to the pile much faster than the technology can advance to extract the information in a useful or meaningful way. When I have asked people who know a lot more about the technology than me about this problem, they tend to wave their hand and mumble about “brilliant scientists” and “technological progress.” Forgive me if I remain unconvinced. Even for someone fairly proficient in Boolean search terms I find a lot of the results from Google Books (and Google more generally) just page after page of useless and irrelevant information. I find it increasingly hard to believe that Google can add tens of thousands of additional books each month to the information pile—many containing basic mistakes in content and metadata—and the information results will actually grow better over time.

The problem with Townsend’s quick dismissal of the opinions of “people who know a lot more about technology than [him]” is that there is stunningly brilliant work being done in field of search technology not to mention OCR software.

I remember a consumer flatbed scanner ten years ago that would take 5 minutes or so to scan a flat page of text, and the OCR recognition was pitiful. By contast, I am now able to use my digital camera and tripod to photograph documents for my own research at about 5 to 10 pages a minute (depending on page size, condition, binding, etc.) and my personal OCR software is upwards of 90% successful at recognizing type (I still wouldn’t dare try anything handwritten). For my own research, the OCR capability is something I’m experimenting with, not relying upon. Digitizing the documents I’m finding in archives is immensely useful, however, because I can enlarge the images on a large monitor and zoom in to read them much more effectively than I could with a magnifying glass. Five or ten years from now, when OCR is even more advanced, there’s nothing stopping me from running it on my TIFF images.

My own experience with research thus far is beside the point of Google Books. I offered the experience as some form of vindication for the technology underlying Google’s book scanning process. If a lowly graduate student like myself can do what I described fairly easily and inexpensively, what tools must Google have at its disposal?

Townsend in his piece continues to be a nay-sayer, and concludes that the Google’s immense financial resources are reason to be mistrustful of the motives behind its efforts.

So I have to ask, what’s the rush? In Google’s case the answer seems clear enough. Like any large corporation with a lot of excess cash the company seems bent on scooping up as much market share as possible, driving competition off the board and increasing the number of people seeing (and clicking on) its highly lucrative ads. But I am not sure why the rest of us should share the company’s sense of haste. Surely the libraries providing the content, and anyone else who cares about a rich digital environment, needs to worry about the potential costs of creating a “universal library” that is filled with mistakes and an impenetrable smog of information. Shouldn’t we ponder the costs to history if the real libraries take error-filled digital versions of particular books and bury the originals in a dark archive (or the dumpster)? And what is the cost to historical thinking if the only substantive information one can glean out of Google is precisely the kind of narrow facts and dates that make history classes such a bore? The future will be here soon enough. Shouldn’t we make sure we will be happy when we get there?

Of course, the problem with the argument that the Google “library” is “error-filled” is that it is constantly being updated and revised. The “errors” that do exist, as the result of faulty OCR or scanning, are going to be fixed as part of the Google’s process. The fear that actual libraries will relegate their scanned books to a “dark archive” or “dumpster” seems unfounded at this point. It is hard to imagine any historian or scholar tolerating that sort of destruction no matter how accurate and complete the digital archive becomes. Rather, the digital should complement, supplement, and augment the original physical archive.

A fellow Berkeley student, Jo Guldi, has used Google Books much more than I have for her research and dissertation work. On her blog she writes about how many new places Google Books search results have taken her by introducing her to a wealth of obscure 19th century texts. Google Books and Google search results were one of many starting points for her work, and opened up new avenues of inquiry for her.

I expect that Google Books, combined with many of their other search technologies, will help scholars in a wide variety of ways. Instead of criticizing their efforts, graduate students as well as established scholars should be lending the expertise we have with the content to Google and other organizations that have the technical and financial resources to help us with our research and writing.

Townsend’s critique on the AHA Blog: American Historical Association Blog: Google Books: What’s Not to Like?

In his new book, Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper, Nicholson Baker brings up an interesting point. For thousands of years,
paper records have allowed historians to glimpse human culture of the past. But
scholars of the future, Baker points out, might not be so lucky — thanks in part
to an over-reliance on technology.

What’s gotten Baker worried is the microfilming of our libraries. In the 1970s, a
movement began among librarians both in the United States and abroad to transfer
key historic documents from paper to microfilm. Paper, it was argued, is
impermanent, fragile and extremely susceptible to decay. Only through the
then-current technology of microfilm could archivists effectively preserve these
valuable historical records.

Ironically, in many cases the original paper copies were destroyed in the
process. Bindings were often cut from books to allow the pages to lie flat for
scanning. Newspapers were thrown away by the thousands — after all, libraries
now had access to a “permanent” edition. In many cases, no further original
copies of these publications are known to exist.

This destruction is a crime, says Baker, and one that has to stop. In his book,
he attacks the studies conducted in the 1970s that “proved” microfilm aged more
slowly than paper. The advertised 500-year lifespan, he claims, can occur only
under the most meticulously maintained climate and temperature conditions — a
task beyond the capabilities of many libraries.

The full article from the San Francisco Chronicle: Paper Trail: Can Digital Media Match The Longevity Of Plain Old Print?