[ Thanks to Dave Guard for this
link. ]
“Libraries have been around for a lot longer than software, and
librarians long ago learned many of the data management lessons
that have only now begun to surface in the world of software and
databases. By contrast, software is a young, rapidly changing
field, and this has affected its outlook. Five years may seem like
an eternity in software development, but in the archival business,
it’s just the blink of an eye.“What libraries have not dealt with historically, however, is
the dismaying array of data storage mechanisms and file formats
that software data represents, the troublesome transience of the
tools needed to access that data, and the overwhelming quantity of
the data that is produced…”