Tiny libraries

Information Outlook, June, 2005 by Stephen Abram

You know you're an old fogy when you tell stories of the dinner plate-size disks we used in the early eighties. Ours were about 10 inches across and held just a few documents. They could only be used on an AES word processor, and we couldn't easily port them to another machine. We thought that people who could do "word processing" (rather than merely typing) had advanced technical skills, and their pay at my firm was more than that of the librarian--me!

Once we got our first Osborne luggable PC and some early Apples, the mystique vanished, along with the WP jobs and the WP supervisor. Personal computing became personal--no more WP pool. We happily stored files on cassette tapes and then 5 1/4-inch disks, followed by 3 1/2-inch diskettes. 'Twas still pretty small portable storage until CD-ROM and then DVD came along. I even recall the day our AES hard drive disks crashed, with an ear-splitting noise heard throughout the office tower. Yep--I am an old fogy.

Most of us are familiar with the small keychain drives we now use instead of floppy diskettes. Variably called USB drives, flash memory, or thumb drives, these neat and inexpensive devices are gearing up to change our world. Yes, they do a great job of letting us move software, documents, and files from one computer to another. Their capacity is also getting huge. It's easy to find affordable USB drives with 40 GB of space. It's also easy to find cheap ones that work on nearly every PC and beyond. They're so ubiquitous that most PC manufacturers have moved the USB slot to the front of the computer box with the other drives (if there are any; they're disappearing) so we can get at it easily. I get frustrated when I use hotel business centers and have to crawl under the desk to access the USB port. I always make the point on the comment card: evolve!

One manufacturer has gone beyond supporting storage of just what we choose. SanDisk's BookLocker was released in early 2005. Have you felt the weight of our kids' backpacks? We are building a steady future income for chiropractors, drugstores, and manufacturers of back pain relievers. Our little tykes should cart USB thumb drives instead of huge tomes of textbooks to and from school. SanDisk aims to change the face of textbooks by providing class collections on a secure drive called the Cruzer USB drive, which carries the BookLocker software that securely provides electronic texts for educational applications and markets (using a proprietary digital rights management solution).

The big leap is that readers will need a PC, laptop, or PDA to read off the BookLocker. Given the storage capacity, one can imagine a whole class collection easily and cost-effectively delivered to our learners. Since fewer than 1,000 books cover more than 80 percent of the U.S. K-12 curriculum, there's hope for the backpack toters of the future. Some schools of dentistry have loaded the entire first year's reading onto a CD. Why not a USB drive that allows you to make notes on the text (highlighting at a minimum) and fill in exercises and quizzes?

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In my first job, I supported a national accounting and audit practice. The huge shelves of statutes, rules, regulations, and guidelines were far too big for an audit bag. FASB, ICAEW, AICPA, IASC, CICA, etc., were the alphabet soup of my life. In my day (old fogy talk), clients called the library and we sent the relevant rule to them by photocopy in internal mail. It got faster when fax became ubiquitous. The rules are online and on CD now too.

It's easy to see how one of these USB tools can be purposed for auditors' or accountants' needs. The USB collection would have no need to be online (which the CD was meant to fix) but would be easily updateable (which CDs do poorly). No need to increase the laptop cost and weight with a CD drive. Ahhh, modern technology.

SanDisk is releasing a secure digital (SD) card with built-in USB, so it may even be time to retire your memory card reader. It's about the size of my thumbprint. Amazingly, SanDisk has managed to embed high-speed USB 2.0 connectivity into the SD card, bringing plug-and-play convenience to a new level.

Now all you have to do is plug your SD card directly into any USB port to begin transferring your data, images, audio, or video between devices. The new mechanical design does away with the need for a removable cap (which old fogies like me are continually losing!) and even features an LED that blinks when data transfer is taking place, all on the tiny form factor.

What I find most exciting is the potential to cost-effectively bring your own content and storage device and your own personalized software to your library. All you need to do is plug in your thumb drive and start to work; when you unplug, no one need know you were there. Imagine being able to use your own bookmark lists wherever you go, your own files of Word and Excel, your IM buddies list, your e-mail contacts, and your own personalized browser default settings! Sounds a bit like the CIA's or KGB's spy technology in the hands of teenagers. Cool.