The Workshop was valuable because it brought together partisans from
various groups and provided an occasion to compare goals and methods.
The more committed partisans frequently communicate with others in their
groups, but less often across group boundaries. The Workshop was also
valuable to attendees--including those involved with American Memory--who
came less committed to particular approaches or concepts. These
attendees learned a great deal, and plan to select and employ elements of
imaging, text-coding, and networked distribution that suit their
respective projects and purposes.
Still, reality rears its ugly head: no breakthrough has been achieved.
On the imaging side, one confronts a proliferation of competing
data-interchange standards and a lack of consensus on the role of digital
facsimiles in preservation. In the realm of machine-readable texts, one
encounters a reasonably mature standard but methodological difficulties
and high costs. These latter problems, of course, represent a special
impediment to the desire, as it is sometimes expressed in the popular
press, "to put the [contents of the] Library of Congress on line." In
the words of one participant, there was "no solution to the economic
problems--the projects that are out there are surviving, but it is going
to be a lot of work to transform the information industry, and so far the
investment to do that is not forthcoming" (LESK, per litteras).
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