Volume 34, Issue 2

I write to inform our readers that this is my last issue as Editor-in-Chief – at least this time around! I served in the early 1990s, again for a single issue in the late 1990s, and have been on the Board of Editors in between, where I will now happily retreat to serve once again in the background.

Introduction In 2002–03, the Pennsylvania State University Libraries digitized 468 glass lantern slides from the collection of Mira Lloyd Dock (1853–1945). Dock was a native Pennsylvanian who was very active in the City Beautiful movement in the early 1900s and extremely influential in the founding of the Pennsylvania State Forestry Academy at Mont Alto in 1903. The slides primarily feature tree specimens in their natural settings, flower and plant specimens, as well as some European urban and historic sites. They were most likely used by Dock in her lectures to forestry students at Mont Alto and to civic groups, to whom she offered “lectures on forestry and village improvements… ‘with or without lantern slides’.”

I. Situation The United States Government Printing Office is at the epicenter of change in the ways humans create and use information to communicate, remain informed, research a topic and preserve a record.

Silver halide microfilm on a polyester base has been proven to last under reasonable storage conditions for in excess of 1,000 years. We would expect it to be the ideal choice for materials that we want for our “permanent” collections – that is for collections we expect to have, if not forever, then for a long time to come. Microfilm is, moreover, human-readable, which means that if in 1,000 years we no longer have the equipment we have today for getting to the information we have stored on discs or other storage media, good old reliable microfilm can still yield up whatever was stored in this fashion with nothing more sophisticated than a magnifying glass. Providing people still are able to read in a 1,000 years, if indeed people still exist.

Summary of Findings Executive Summary Given the depth of resources in the member libraries of the Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO), and because of the rich historical, cultural and language diversity of New York City and Westchester County, METRO supports the value of members' locally digitized information. Actively assisting members with local digitization efforts has been an important goal of METRO's Five Year Plan of Service since 2001. This survey, supported in part by Federal Library Services and Technology Act funds, awarded to the New York State Library by the Federal Institute of Museum and Library Services, pursues that goal, and moves forward the goal of collaborative digitization projects in the METRO region.