Digging up a 15-year old speech, and a lesson in preservation

Publishing industry consultant, Mike Shatzkin, talks about a 15 year old speech of his that he found in his father’s papers.

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One thing I’ve heard often and dismissed is that we need print to preserve intellectual property. I figure that digital files are less destructible than paper and that, with any care at all, it should be possible to create more reliable preservation of bits than of atoms.

I still think that. However…

A month ago I was helping my sister clean out some of the old files of my father’s (now gone over eight years, but it takes a while to get around to this stuff.) Among his papers, I found the hard copy of a speech I had delivered at a VISTA Conference (VISTA is now a company called Publishing Technology) in November of 1995. As I started to read it, I realized I hadn’t seen it in a long time. I checked and it wasn’t on my web site. I checked further and it wasn’t in my hard drive.

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