| Sumario: | For all its woes, nowhere beats Silicon Valley in California for finding the next big thing in information technology. Unfortunately, the region's entrepreneurs and engineers often fail to take into account how well their inventions mesh with social institutions. Vicky Reich and David Rosenthal, respectively a librarian and a researcher at Stanford University, are exceptions. They want to ensure that readers will still be able to access electronic academic journals even centuries after they have been published. There is always the Library of Congress in America and other national libraries around the world where copies of most publications are kept. Reich and Rosenthal's program works by getting libraries to install a piece of software on a personal computer with a large hard disk, turning it into a cache for web pages. The program then pulls down the content of various journals that the library in question has subscribed to. If the system detects that one of its copies is damaged or missing, it asks the original publisher, or the cache of another library, to send it a fresh copy. If a cache runs out of storage space, for instance, libraries simply boot up a new personal computer with a larger hard disk, which will then automatically fetch the material from other caches. The program, which is supported by the National Science Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Sun Microsystems and others, has shown that it works.
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