I have owned my laptop for 4 years now, and when Norton does its weekly virus scan, it counts the number of files on the machine. I'm now approaching 1 million. Though not all those files are documents, it goes without saying that I'm sitting on thousands and thousands of .doc, .xls, .pdf, jpg, .wav, and many other types of files that contain some kind of content. Just try to find one specific file (let alone a final version). Any article I write for ITI, any contract I issue, or any plan I produce goes through many versions. Even the photos I shoot exist in various crop permutations and resolutions. And, quite frankly, the only way I can tell these files apart is by their date and time stamp, the telltale "f I tend to place at the end of a file name when I think it's finished, and often by the fact that I have either officially released it to someone as an email attachment or emailed the final to myself under an appropriate subject heading. If I have trouble finding my own documents on my own machine, it's not hard to imagine what chaos must prevail in the scholarly communications world that is rapidly moving from publishing journal issues packed with sequentially numbered articles to the more amorphous article-by-article publishing spanning preprint servers and institutional repositories.
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