Re: [ARSCLIST] Long-term/preservation audio

[Bradleys <stonecottage@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Steven C. Barr's views are congruent with my own.

Google is a good model to consider. How useful would Google be for most of
us most of the time if it only indexed important sites and the most
important parts of those sites on the internet? For me it would have very
limited usefulness. Because Google indexes everything and doesn't try to
make a decision as to what matters we can find things that are amazing.

I would expect that 1000 years from now that storing everything that has
been recorded and every movie ever made up through the present would be
trivial. The problem for the present body of everything (most of which may
already be lost to us but some "unimportant" materials still survive won't
be "there is too much of it" but that "there is far too little of it".
Accordingly, I think the greater task at hand at present is not providing
useful indexing, categorization, and ratings of what we have (or might
choose to have/keep) but just preserving everything we can find. The ability
to sort it all out, I believe, will be there in time if only we do the best
we can now to save as much as we can for as long as we can.

Ralph Bradley
Maryville, Tennessee