This is a *very* tangential rant, but it makes me mental when I hear
people say the "'disk space' is no longer an issue."  While it's true that
the costs of disk drives continue to drop, my experience is that the cost
of managing storage and backups is rising almost exponentially as
libraries continue to amass enormous quantities of digital data and
metadata.  Again, I recognize that text files are a small portion of our
library storage these days, but to casually suggest that doubling any
amount of data storage is an inconsiderable consideration strikes me as
the first step down a dangerous path.  Sorry for the interruption to an
interesting thread.

Will



On 12/6/11 10:44 AM, "Karen Coyle" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>Quoting "Fleming, Declan" <[log in to unmask]>:
>
>>Hi - I'll note that the mapping decisions were made by our metadata
>>services (then Cataloging) group, not by the tech folks making it
>>all work, though we were all involved in the discussions.  One idea
>>that came up was to do a, perhaps, lossy translation, but also stuff
>>one triple with a text dump of the whole MARC record just in case we
>>needed to grab some other element out we might need.  We didn't do
>>that, but I still like the idea.  Ok, it was my idea.  ;)
>
>I like that idea! Now that "disk space" is no longer an issue, it
>makes good sense to keep around the "original state" of any data that
>you transform, just in case you change your mind. I hadn't thought
>about incorporating the entire MARC record string in the
>transformation, but as I recall the average size of a MARC record is
>somewhere around 1K, which really isn't all that much by today's
>standards.