Well said Will,

Mark

----- Original Message -----
> 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.