Repository: UIHistories Project: Dedication - Grainger Engineering Library Symposium [PAGE 34]

EXTRACTED TEXT FROM PAGE:

QUESTION: The Library of Congress is now making efforts to put everything in digital form. Will that include their vast selections of music and art and so on? ANSWER: (Mr. Wedgeworth): Yes, that's their stated intent, and I think that's very true. In fact, one of the early targets for some of the newer systems that will enable us to incorporate images and sound will be special collections in libraries that are now very difficult to access unless you are on the spot. What we would like to be able to do,forexample, at the University of Illinois is to make it possible for a researcher in Australia to look at the letters in the H. G. Wells collection before they decide they have to make a trip to Champaign-Urbana—to actually see the documents online. That just simply isn't possible today, but there are other illustrated materials, other sound materials, video materials, that equally could be made accessible in some other format.

QUESTION: Right now we have a really cumbersome, orfairly cumbersome, way of adding historic information electronically— disks and so forth. Are there technological advances being worked on now that will help us store information in a better way? I can picture a hundred years in thefuture assimilating all of this electronic information that we also want to save, much like the hundreds of years of printed information that exists now in the Library. ANSWER: (Mr. Allen): It's clear that industry is daily improving the techniques and capacity for storage, so I don't know what you reference when you say how difficult it is. I don't have to do it, so I'm sure I don't appreciate the difficulty, and we are not in that business. At least I am aware that that industry is constantly improving its capacity in the smaller and smaller units and facilitating, I believe, easier ways to do that converting. But I am not an expert on that.

PAGE 3 4