Linux.com

Putting CD's (DVDs) on shelfs seems to be trying to shoe horn new data into an old model. What if we came up with a new model that leveraged new possibilties. Here is a suggestion, why dont we build a standalone system that runs in a kiosk mode (KDE?) and has a interface to a large number of CD images (isos) then with a cdburner people may copy all the CD's they like, and walk away with them. You could also have a vending machine full of blanks which sells them at a small markup over costs, and turn the whole thing into a small profit center of the library. You see if the images are CopyLeft, then we can make and distrbute as many copys as we want, something that you cant do with books. Then all we need to do is write a tools to update the image catalog and it would never need Libraian oversight. This removes the huge problem of overhead, both in the intial aquiring, and in maintaince. While I agree there are alot of things we can learn from libraries, there are also a few things we can teach them, no one should bend completly but instead we should arrive together at the best common solution

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