CompuServe Messages

Kevin: Perhaps the biggest concern of companies in this situation is longterm access to the information. At least if it's on microfiche, all you need is a light source and a magnifying glass. Once encoded on a CDROM, you must be assured of having computer-based access for a long time. Since fiche lasts perhaps 50 years, then the company must be assured of having a computer to read the pages for at least that long. The good news is, that page scans are a very basic algorithmic problem, and no matter what the computer of the future (or next week!) looks like, there should be no problem reading the data. If, on the unlikely possibility that it looked as though CD technology were disappearing, that data could easily be written off digitally to another storage medium. From a time and cost perspective, perhaps the greatest difference (if we're talking about a lot of pages, as in most such archives), the time to snap a picture is much less than the time to scan. On the other hand, the data are in a much more malleable condition. I tend ot come down on the side of digitizing where it makes sense. If the company wants to do the job twice, they could film it now, and then digitize from the film later, once they were comfortable with the technology. Hope this helps — Rich Bowers