Digital Deposit: Lack of storage space is no excuse
Submitted by dcornwall on Mon, 2007-10-15 12:34.
This past weekend I was at my local Costco and not one, but two brands of 1 Terabyte (1000 GB) drives selling at around $300. I also saw a 500 GB (1/2 T) drive for $130. All of the drives were USB friendly meaning you could take one off the shelf and plug it into a USB port and have all that memory available to you.
What can you store in a Terabyte? According to an FBI article on digital forensics, plenty:
"a terabyte is equivalent to about 250 million pages of text, which would stack 10 miles high if printed on both sides of the page."
Surely that's enough space for even smaller libraries considering telling the Government Printing Office that they would like PDF ("access derivitives") delivered to them based on their profiles.
I admit, space isn't the only issue. But it's the objection I've heard most often and I honestly believe that technology has taken it away.
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4 terabytes are coming soon
You're right Daniel that space is no longer an issue. The news today is that Hitachi has developed technology for 4 terabyte desktops and 1 terabyte laptops! Since the technology to build local digital collections is already available (LOCKSS, Archive-it, ...) and the hardware/space issue is moot, can we then hope that libraries are at least in the planning stages for building digital collections? After all, that's what libraries do...build, describe, preserve and give access to collections of use to their local communities.
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