C&RL News October 2010  516

Gary Pattillo is reference librarian at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, e-mail: pattillo@email.
unc.edu

G a r y  P a t t i l l o

Digital dark ages?
“We’re churning out vast quantities of digital data that we aren’t equipped to 
preserve.” Digital data eventually becomes unusable due to technology obsoles-
cence, temperature changes, media deterioration, magnetic fluctuations, format 
obsolescence, and data corruption. No long-term solutions are on the horizon.  
The Electronic Records Archive initiative of the U.S. National Archives and Re-
cords Administration, which manages more than 400 terabytes of data, recopies 
archived tapes every ten years, and keeps at least three copies of everything, 
with at least one copy being off-site. Other agencies have much larger storage 
issues. For example, the U.S. Geological Survey adds about 50 terabytes per 
month to its archives, and now manages about 4.5 petabytes, including copies. 
Lamont Wood, “Fending off the Digital Dark Ages: The Archival Storage Issue,” Computerworld, www.computerworld.
com/s/article/9181658/Fending_off_the_digital_dark_ages_The_archival_storage_issue (retrieved September 6, 2010).

Public access computers
In a 2008 survey of Association of Research Libraries (ARL) libraries with ap-
proximately half responding, researchers determined that 52 percent of the 
responding ARL libraries required affiliated users to login to public computer 
workstations in the library. Seventy-two percent of those libraries requiring af-
filiated users to login to public computers provided the means for guest users 
to login to public computer workstations in the library.
Lynne Weber and Peg Lawrence, “Authentication and Access: Accommodating Public Users in an Academic World,” 
Information Technology and Libraries 29, no. 3 (September 2010): 128-40. Library Literature and Information Science, 
WilsonWeb (retrieved September 14, 2010).

Information-seeking behavior
While more than 85 percent of academic researchers in a recent study maintain 
print article collections, only about half of them maintain a personal bibliographic 
database. Of those who do maintain a bibliographic database, about 57 percent 
of their collections are imported into their personal bibliographic database. When 
it comes to reading the articles, a majority of researchers prefer to use both 
electronic and print formats depending on the situation. While both formats are 
used in reading, print is still preferred over electronic formats.
Xi Niu, Bradley M. Hemminger, Cory Lown, Stephanie Adams, Cecelia Brown, Allison Level, Merinda McLure, Audrey Pow-
ers, Michele R. Tennant, and Tara Cataldo, 2010, National study of information seeking behavior of academic researchers 
in the United States, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 61, (5) (May): 869-890, 
www.csa.com (retrieved September 13, 2010).

Serials Price Projections
EBSCO expects the overall effective publisher price increases for academic 
libraries for 2011 to be in the range of 4 to 6 percent. The global recession and 
currency fluctuations, however, make precise forecasting difficult.
“Serials Price Projections for 2011,” EBSCO Information Services, www2.ebsco.com/en-us/Documents/customer 
/SerialsPriceProjectionReport-2011.pdf (retrieved September 15, 2010).

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