Introduction Librarians collect and bibliographers list documents in whatever media and genres (books, journals, data sets, movies, etc.) are expected to be most useful for the communities and the purposes to be served. Once collected, documents need to be made accessible in an organized way. In part this is a matter of scale. A collection of one or very few documents can simply be placed in a ...

This study examines how IT professionals cope with the threat of professional obsolescence and how organizations may play a role in helping IT professionals cope with this threat. In answering these questions, this study draws on theories of occupational stress, specifically the theory of conservation of resources (Hobfoll 2002; Hobfoll et al. 1993), to relate the threat of professional obsoles...

Many technologies have life cycles that are shorter than the life cycle of the product or system they are in. Life cycle mismatches caused by the obsolescence of technology can result in large life cycle costs for long field life systems, such as aircraft, ships, communications infrastructure, power plant and grid management, and military systems. This paper addresses DMSMS (Diminishing Manufac...

File format obsolescence is a major risk factor threatening the sustainability of and access to digital information. While the preservation community has become increasingly interested in tools for migration and transformation of file formats, the National Library of Australia is developing mechanisms specifically focused on monitoring and assessing the risks of file format obsolescence. This p...

Electronic waste, caused by the advancements of technology and its rapidly increasing obsolescence, represents a major threat to environmental sustainability. Research in Sustainable HCI has proposed a variety of solutions to tackle this issue, but has yet to create a major impact in product design. While currently industry’s goals are opposed to research’s concepts of addressing obsolescence, ...

Is software obsolescence a significant risk? To explore this issue, we analysed a corpus of over 2.5 billion resources corresponding to the UK Web domain, as crawled between 1996 and 2010. Using the DROID and Apache Tika identification tools, we examined each resource and captured the results as extended MIME types, embedding version, software and hardware identifiers alongside the format infor...

Operating System obsolescence is widely considered an important factor when architectural choices are made during the planning phase of systems development and maintenance. In this work, we seek to understand the importance that planners actually ascribe to this attribute in practice, and ask probing questions to the managers, developers, and analysts of systems in industry in the form of a sur...

Technology life cycles affect a product manager’s ability to sustain systems through their manufacturing and field lives. The lack of availability of critical parts and technologies poses a challenge not only to the acquisition community, but to customers of products that must be maintained for long periods of time. Technology obsolescence has an especially serious impact on systems that have s...