Hi Jeri and others I am chiming in a bit late after recovering from the excitement of my son's wedding. Interesting topic, as a Librarian and owner of a small personal lace library myself I have wondered often about this. Like you I used to think that my books would increase in value as they become rarer and hard to find. On the other hand, I have also been keen to acquire ebooks for my uni students as they are easier to locate and download and serve students at multi campuses. However, researchers (serious students like us lacemakers) keep telling me of the benefits of thumbing through a print book and being able to just flick back and forwards visually between pages etc. They are frustrated with ebooks and ebook readers still don't seem to allow this quick flicking either with time lapse between loading each page. I can certainly see their point,. I think the print book is probably going to outlast the digital age for serious researchers providing that the print books can still be produced economically. Print on demand may be the only way this will be possible. I lose patience with downloading from the Arizona site despite the fantastic content. Maybe when my life is not so busy I will enjoy using it more. Having said that, I have used it for researching my book and it was a most valuable resource.
Lorelei is also correct in saying that digitized collections are being archived in new and exciting ways which may improve retrieval in surprising ways. However, volumes and volumes of books are being destroyed after digitization because storage is too expensive. If the systems crash like Lucy and others have predicted a lot of knowledge will certainly be lost. Digital backup and storage is also expensive and everything eventually comes down to cost. Thanks for raising the topic Jeri and thanks for all the great insights everyone. Thanks also for your work in preserving the lace resource centre. - To unsubscribe send email to majord...@arachne.com containing the line: unsubscribe lace y...@address.here. For help, write to arachne.modera...@gmail.com
