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Dead tree or cyber winged budgets?

Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post is not so thrilled that the 2009 budget is digital instead of paper--even if 480 trees were saved. Considering that I can't even access some of my own publications that were on the "disk" version of 1999, I wish the American public and future researchers good luck in accessing important documents that trendy lawmakers have decided need to get on the digital bandwagon. Let's hope there are always a few paper copies kept in secure libraries and archives.

"Honestly, I am still using the paper books, as is most of my staff," Tom Kahn, the staff director of the House Budget Committee, told me by e-mail. "Online is much harder to use. It makes the information less accessible and harder to ferret out. Frankly, it is no fun staring for hours at a computer screen to find obscure spend-out rates. You can't underline, can't make a note on a page, and who wants to read a computer in bed?"

I love being able to get snippets, or even whole chapters, on-line--like Ruth's article. But I don't want to give up the 3 newspapers I read everyday--in paper with my coffee. I particularly enjoy being able to get archived older articles--and I sure hope the digitizers can keep up with ways for us to read them. But when I have to read closely, I print it off. I hate trying to scroll across the page to figure out columns for years and amounts and quantities.