John Lawrence wrote: > Is this e-info dying a natural death.... thru inattention, thus > relieving clogged info-highways, or is this a serious issue > of non-archiving of essential knowledge?
It would seem the issue is a serious one. No doubt, much more information is being produced than is worth retaining. Publishing is no longer the privilege of a few, but everyone can create his or her personal Web site. Some of those individual efforts are enormously inspiring and valuable. They might never have developed in a world in which publication was still controlled by a limited number of publishing houses. Other efforts, while publicly available, are destined to an audience of mainly insiders (family members, some specific interest group, etc.). Yet, they occasionally serve the interests of a larger group of people as they may serve as the crucial node in the search for something else. Example: Yesterday I was searching some historical information on Beethoven for an article I am writing. I ended up finding what I was looking for on the personal pages of an astrophysicist at the University of Sidney, Australia, who happens to have an intertest in the issue. That information would not have been obtainable after just a few minutes of searching without the existence of the World Wide Web. Moreover, in the pre-WWW era I would unlikely have looked for it in the archives of the likes of physicists (even though I am myself one). My hunch is that we better err on the side of retaining information than deleting it. If there is a need to "clean up" a site, producers of large quantities of information/documentation should create an electronic archive of what is out of date for most users. Such an archive could either remain accessible through the Web or information should be available via the Web on how archived documentation could still be obtained. Beyond Web sites catering for particular current interests maintained by individuals and individual institutions, there is a need for sites that dedicate themselves to archiving as such, selecting their sources from across institutions. One example I know of is <http://www.amphilsoc.org/library/guides/ahqp/>, serving a probably limited audience with most valuable documentation about the history of quantum physics. The UN system itself, and UNESCO in particular, could probably set an interesting example by creating a Web-based archive of its own history, including the digitization of exemplars of key publications of the past that have gone out of print and are difficult to obtain. I am thinking here of key publications such as those about math/science education that made UNESCO famous in the nineteen-sixties and seventies; the report of the Faure Commission "Learning to be (1972);" or the four volumes of case studies on "New educational media in action" published by UNESCO's International Institute for Educational Planning in 1967.) --- Jan Visser, Ph.D. President, Learning Development Institute E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fax and voice messages: North America: (1-928) 569-7978 Europe: (44-870) 125-7432 Phone: Florida: (1-954) 981-4275 France: (33-4) 902-49275 Check out: http://www.learndev.org ------------ ***GKD is solely supported by EDC, an NGO that is a GKP member*** To post a message, send it to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. In the 1st line of the message type: subscribe gkd OR type: unsubscribe gkd Archives of previous GKD messages can be found at: <http://www.edc.org/GLG/gkd/>
