Re: Public vandalism

[dog_cow@macgui.com (D Finnigan)]

Michael Blackwrote:
> On Mon, 7 Dec 2009, D Finnigan wrote:
> 
>> I took a look at the bound Byte volumes just a few moments ago to see
>> what
>> the tables of contents look like. Most are just one page, with a few
>> two-pagers. So my idea to use take a good photo of each should turn out
>> well.
>>
>> On to the subject of this post....
>>
>> I selected a few notable Byte magazines to read over the introduction of
>> the
>> //e, Lisa, Macintosh, Power PC Macs, etc.
>>
>> I went to the volume which held the October 1986 issue of Byte which
>> features the IIgs introduction article. I scanned the ToC and saw that
>> the
>> IIgs intro article was on page 84. Ok. I flipped around and ended up at a
>> block of ads. The next page was 104, the start of some other article. I
>> flipped back past the ads... back to an article on page 70-something. I
>> checked the ToC again... flipped back past the pages more carefully.
>>
>> A sinking feeling arose.
>>
>> I examined the binding carefully and I found that the smallest stubs of
>> the
>> pages were still clinging to the binding. Someone had torn out the entire
>> Apple IIgs article from this Byte magazine. This was probably done years
>> ago
>> by some Apple fanatic, but impresses upon us all the fact that even
>> libraries can suffer "data loss."
>>
>> The quicker we get these old volumes digitized such that they can be
>> perfectly replicated as many times as needed, the better.
>>
> Just because the Apple IIGS article is missing doesn't mean it's a 
> horrible event. 

You're right. It's not really world-ending. But my point is that if it can
happen to some now-obscure computer article, it could happen to anything. It
could happen to books of much greater significance which are just freely
available to anyone on the open shelves. Not every rare/valuable book is
locked away in some basement storage vault.

> 
> In other words, you're actually lucky that those Byte volumes are still
> in the library.
> 

There's A+ in storage.