I, for one, have been convinced that CD-Rom _was_ the 8 track
tape of the 1990's. Our microfiche holdings trial fizzled
quickly when attorneys did not want to take the time necessary to
find and copy ALR citations on the reader/printer. How could we
expect attorneys to accept the country road speeds of CD-Rom when
they are used to the highway speeds of Lexis and Westlaw. After
considering the slowing of work product while working in the
CD-Rom format, we look down the highway to see what is on the
horizon.
According to one source, the time line for technological advance
to overtake CD-Rom will be as little as five to seven years.
After that time packet compression and delivery systems will be
able to download large files over alternative transmission modes.
If the Internet is not the vehicle, there will certainly be other
modes from fibre optics to direct satellite links.
My perspective is one of being a librarian at one of Law Firms
that is going into CD-Rom in a big way. We have daisy chained
players and multiple servers. We are currently running 13 NEC
INTERSECT players and 10 Pioneer DRM600 players off the five
servers. The servers are Wide Area Networked from Los Angeles to
San Francisco, Newport Beach, and San Diego.
We will continue to expand our usage of CD-Rom products as
advances are made. The advances in CD-Rom, in the short term,
will be in the area of expand disk capacity. The current reading
beam uses only the white spectrum of light. When readers can
make use of the different colors in the light spectrum, each disk
will explode in capacity. Blue light lasers (just around the
corner) will quadruple the storage capacity of compact disk from
650 MB to more than 2.6 GB. Now, all you have to do is reduce
the diameter of the laser beam below 0.7 micrometers and have
multi-layer disks that can be read by a number of beams reading
at different angles and shezam, you have one heck of a pocket
library.
In the _Journal of Electronic Defense_ November 1993 the
question is asked "What is a PETABYTE". Well, If a typewritten
page is about 2,000 bytes of data per side, and a MEGAByte
represents 500 pages of text, and a TERABYTE 500 million pages,
then a PETABYTE is 500 billion pages. A Petabyte is what NASA is
going for in one of its upcoming projects.
Blue lasers, dynamic random access memories (DRAM), and Petabytes
of information access will keep Opitcal Disks in the picture for
some time. Even if there are other delivery modes, the question
becomes one of whether we can stall any longer. We can either
wait for the next technology, or, we can begin with the
information currently being offered in CD-Rom format. Sure the
cost for start up is high, and vendors are not making it
inexpensive for Multiuser-Wide Area Network access, but other
vendors will come along and competition will bring down those
costs. (But, you know, I sure am glad that licensing fees are
not part of the library budget.)
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Glen Gustafson
Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton
Los Angeles, CA
lla+ala2%smrh@mcimail.com
ggust@class.org
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