A colleague and I have been talking recently with people at the US Government Printing Office (GPO) about using technologies like XML, XSLT, and OpenURL to enhance archiving of and access to government publications. That’s why I had several govt document related meetings on my ALA schedule.
The GITCO meeting included a discussion led by the GPO Superintendent of documents, Judy Russell, on the growing problem of “aging and aged” CD-ROM products. While this includes aging media, the larger problem is aging software. Many (if not most) early CDROM products used proprietary disc-based software to provide access to data (like dBase, for example). But as OS environments evolve, these programs stop working. Emulation of older OS’s is a short-term solution, but that doesn’t scale or endure well.
Clearly, the current move towards separation of content (data) and presentation (software/access) in publishing will help to prevent this in the future. But the problem of what to do with what’s already out there is a big one.
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