Jul 22 2003
Time will say nothing, but I told you so…
What a prophetic line. I went looking for two technical reports, both published in the early/mid 80’s in the Yale CS department:
Johnson, L., Soloway, E., Cutler, B. and Draper, S. (1983) BUG
CATALOGUE: L Technical Report 286, Dept. of Computer Science, Yale
University, October.
Spohrer. J.C.. Pope, E.. Lipman. M., Sack. W.. Freiman, S., Littman.
D.. Johnson, L.. and Soloway. E. BUG CATALOGUE: II, III, IV. Tech.
Rep. 386. Dept. of Computer Science, Yale Univ.. New Haven,
Conn., May 1985.
Yale replies:
Due to the dates of the requested technical reports, they are no longer available from the department. I'm sorry for the inconvenience. |
So will all “unpublished” work written before the WWW end up in the bin? This is why the WWW and projects like the Internet Archive are so important: ideas, unless written down (and made accessible!) disappear like sand through the fingers. But I digress: I just want some old tech reports. I’m just surprised that the shelf life of research findings from the Yale CS department is only 20 years. Plenty of papers summarizing the BUG CATALOGUEs have been written and published, but I want to get back to the source! Ah well. Technology, and time, marches on.
Update, 8:04 PM:
From Digging for Googleholes by Steven Johnson at Slate(.msn.com):
| Googlehole No. 3: Book Learning. Google is beginning to have a subtle, but noticeable effect on research. More and more scholarly publications are putting up their issues in PDF format, which Google indexes as though they were traditional Web pages. But almost no one is publishing entire books online in PDF form. So, when you’re doing research online, Google is implicitly pushing you toward information stored in articles and away from information stored in books. Assuming this practice continues, and assuming that Google continues to grow in influence, we may find ourselves in a world where, if you want to get an idea into circulation, you’re better off publishing a PDF file on the Web than landing a book deal. |
Ah! The very theme I was prepared to rant about!