--On Friday, November 10, 2017 11:48 +1300 Brian E Carpenter
<brian.e.carpenter@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> Do any libraries actually keep paper newsletters any more?
>
> Very few. I'm not sure it will turn out to be such a good
> decision 100 years from now - historians often use ephemera of
> this kind - but that's the way things are going.
>
> Now that SM has set me straight, I am not suggesting any action
> at all.
With apologies for the lateness of this comment, but prompted by
both your comment above and Phillip's more recent one, I am.
I suggest that ISOC consider the function of the IETF Journal
and do so in the light of the plenary session of Internet
history of a few years ago. I note that it is called "IETF
Journal" and not "IETF Random and Transient Musings". If the
content is of any value, even as a snapshot of thinking about
the IETF by people that ISOC and whomever is advising it
consider interesting and/or important, then I think ISOC needs
to assume some explicit responsibility for preservation.
That does not need to be paper but, in addition to the
considerations Phillip mentions, I think we need to be concerned
about bit rot and issues of, not only difficulties recovering
bits from media but easily interpreting the bits once received.
One advantage of paper (and stone tablets, etc.) over modern
digital forms is that we a few thousand years of demonstrated
and successful experience with preservation. I wish I were
optimistic that today's HTML or PDF, with bits distributed
around the network, would be as reliably accessed even a few
hundred years in the future, but I'll bet a single-density 5.25
inch floppy disk that no one can successfully prove it will be.
Or ISOC (and the IETF) could conclude that the IETF Journal is
really a newsletter of no lasting value. However, if that is
the conclusion, I wonder whether even more money and other
resources could be saved and put to better use by discontinuing
it entirely
john
.