Even before I started University way back in the 1970s, I was working as a tape librarian - a library of some 60,000 tapes of data recorded by boats and land crews undertaking seismic oil exploration - setting off explosives or using a strong vibrator to shake the earth and record echos from which the strata deep below could be mapped. A fascinating technology.

Yesterday afternoon, I was speaking with my modern day counterpart at Saudi Aramco, who is responsible for about 10 times the number of "field tapes" we had back in those days - and the tape's capacity has risen by several orders of magnitude too. But there's still the same issue of knowing where a tape is if needed, of keeping backup copies off site, and of managing the whereabouts of each tape plus the 10,000 or so extra reels (sorry - cartridges now) which are used for processing work-in-progress.

Some things remain the same, it seems - such as the need to be utterly sure that the data from the field does NOT get overwritten - it would cost a fortune to send a crew back to a surveyed area. And the need to ensure that the right process tapes are available at each stage along the way. The mechanisms may have changed, tape use may now be recorded automatically to a database of some sort, but there's still the issue of loosing tapes or the records of a tape along the way which means "dead" units in the system; too much of that leads to a squeeze on active / available resources that we were very familiar with way back when.

These days, there are some commercial TMS (tape management systems) available, and there's OpenTMS too. As opposed to the old system I once wrote, this latter is written, I understand, largely in Perl and hence my delegate's attendance on the course. Wow - what would I have given to have had Perl on those old Xerox SDS9300 computers. What took me weeks to develop in Fortran would have been a couple of days of work ... and all the extra admin and tracking facilities described to me could have been practically implemented too.
(written 2006-05-28, updated 2006-06-05)

 M401 - Well House Manor - Seeing how others do it
  [3368] Well House Manor hotel, Melksham - recommended to you by our customers - (2011-07-23)
  [3333] Honesty and a friendly welcome goes a long way - (2011-06-25)
  [3054] Longhope Hotel - (2010-11-16)
  [2911] Feeding the Grockles - (2010-08-09)
  [2885] Twenty Questions - (2010-07-24)
  [2502] Monday night, Tuesday night - (2009-11-13)
  [2441] Not your cup of tea? - (2009-10-08)
  [2413] Sanity checking the price, and selling up to increase income - (2009-09-21)
  [2311] Floor to ceiling - (2009-07-30)
  [2308] A new place in pictures - (2009-07-28)
  [2127] Call in the professionals! - (2009-04-12)
  [2105] Hire Car, from Atlanta Airport - (2009-03-27)
  [2007] Launch of Melksham Food and Drink Festival - (2009-01-24)
  [1915] Quietly putting prices up - (2008-12-02)
  [1758] Lindors Hotel, near St. Briavels, Wye Valley - (2008-08-18)
  [1672] The Composting Cone Challenge - (2008-06-10)
  [1597] Comparing hotels - as a guest and from the proprietors view - (2008-04-01)
  [1547] New bathing idea for hotels from Hotelympia - (2008-02-20)
  [1525] Just one thing let the service down - but that is my memory - (2008-01-31)
  [1458] The wrong way to put up prices - (2007-12-05)
  [1454] From Sunday to Monday, from Melksham to the Balkans - (2007-12-03)
  [1413] The little gestures that can really count - (2007-10-27)
  [1406] Away or home - which do I prefer? - (2007-10-25)
  [1374] Maidenhead Coffee Challenge - (2007-10-02)
  [1356] Crystal Ball - How long do I need to be online? - (2007-09-18)
  [1354] Match the Bedroom to the Hotel - (2007-09-17)
  [1347] Wireless Internet Access at hotels - an update and some pitfalls - (2007-09-12)
  [1333] Kasteel Elsloo - Michelin rated hotel. - (2007-09-05)
  [1301] Plastic or China - (2007-08-12)
  [1287] Work and play at Well House Manor - Football and Shell Shortcuts - (2007-08-02)
  [1205] Arrival and Departure experiences - another hotel - (2007-05-26)
  [1091] The Psyche is all wrong. - (2007-02-24)
  [1026] The Wheatsheaf 2, The Bell 0 - (2007-01-09)
  [1011] Well House Manor and Beechfield House, Hotels, Melksham - (2006-12-29)
  [966] CSL, KISS and RTFM - (2006-12-05)
  [714] Room for Octopuses - (2006-05-08)
  [699] Extremes costs of getting on line - (2006-04-25)
  [693] The on line booking experience - (2006-04-21)
  [619] If its Sunday, it must be the Norland - (2006-02-23)
  [514] Crazy Day-sies - (2005-12-02)
  [17] Differing tastes - (2004-08-17)

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Finishing up in Dhahran
The eye
(Perl) Callbacks - what are they?
Coloured text in a terminal from Perl
New Tape Librarian
Boys will be boys, saved by Ubuntu
Keeping customers informed by email
Perl for Systems Admin - suid scripts
Where is a web site visitor browsing from
Hotel Technology Requirements