Automated underground library storage - cool!

Take a look at this YouTube video "The Joe and Rika Mansueto Library: How It Works" to see a way to store books beneath a library and retrieve them on request for patrons. And there's a cool dome to study in! It's another approach to focusing on public space, moving collections out of the center, beyond the removal of physical items and replacing them with digital versions. Very interesting.

Microfilm? Really?

Does Analog Still Matter? - Here's a vendor site endorsing archiving digital materials in microfilm. Microfilm is not that popular these days, mainly because it's not as flexible or efficient as full-text documents are for searching and retrieval.

That being said, microfilm does last, without the issues digital information can have of needing to change storage media (magnetic media doesn't last forever) and retrieval equipment as technology advances.

It's been interesting reading responses to a posting of this announcement in some library lists. One of these, by Laval Hunsucker on the NGC4LIB list, offers an interesting perspective, and some great examples, on an even longer lasting medium: paper.

Anybody remember floppy disks?

A column on information storage formats going obsolete from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Anybody remember floppy disks?

For me, I'm ready to see floppies die. We have patrons dropping in all the time who saved documents to a floppy, and now cannot get it to work on any machine on campus. I know they're not exactly dirt cheap (or as cheap as a floppy yet), but I wouldn't trust my data to anything other than a flash drive.