Thomas Temin, chief editor of Government Computer News, has predicted that by the year 2000 government agencies will replace nine-track tapes with CD-ROMs. What the metamorphosis means for journalists is that CD-ROM drives will become a necessity to access federal information. And the change could take place swiftly as the cost of CD-ROMs comes down. Since 1986, Jerry McFaul, a computer scientist with the U.S.

Geological Survey (USGS), has helped a number of government agencies convert to CD-ROM information storage and retrieval with the group he formed, SIGCAT (Federal Special Interest Group for CD-ROM Application and Technology). The lifespan of CD-ROMs has been questioned and SIGCAT, along with CD-ROM manufacturers, have begun testing the longevity of the media. Mike Martin, a science data systems technologist at the California Institute of Technology's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, reported in the March issue of CD-ROM Professional that the idea of CD-ROMs lasting for hundreds of years, error-free, may yet only be a dream.

But Martin concluded in his report that CD-ROM is probably the most durable and long-lived media today. Still, Robert Deller, a consultant for the government on computer equipment and the director of market research for Selbre Associates Inc. in Bethesda, Md., said that in five years, nine-track tapes will be replaced by erasable laser storage discs, which have been around for the last four years commercially, but are still too expensive for widespread use in government agencies.

Deller added that recently the move in government agencies has been to closed cartridges used in automatic tape libraries. He said many government agencies have turned to automatic tape libraries because the computer-run tape libraries are more efficient than open reel, nine-track tapes. Ed St. Jean, director of input process systems for the Internal Revenue Service, said that two years ago the IRS launched a pilot project using automatic tape libraries that use cartridge tapes to store data.

St. Jean said that today the IRS uses mostly nine-track tapes because tapes are inexpensive. But, he said after using the automatic tape libraries, the agency expects to implement the new technology by the year 2008 in order to process information more efficiently. St. Jean said the greatest benefits of the automatic tape library have been the savings in human resources and the decreased risk of damaging the tapes.

Because nine-track tapes can be creased or bent, St. Jean said, cartridges are a more reliable method of processing information without altering the data. 'In our environment the task of loading the large number of tapes is too labor intensive,' St. Jean said. 'We have to mount 2,000 tapes e week to load into the master file. If we had on line, we wouldn't need an operator to mount the tapes.' Other government agencies that use the libraries include the Department of Treasury, the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Health and Human Services.

Deller argues that as automatic tape libraries give way to laser discs in the next five years, CD-ROMs will continue to be used by government agencies. A problem that hastens the move to CD-ROMs is that nine-track tapes are sensitive to dust particles and can be creased and damaged. While nine-track tapes deteriorate eventually, there is doubt that nine-track tapes will ever be extinct. Temin said that when CD-ROMs or cartridges are commonly used to store public information, the information previously stored on nine-track tapes will remain on the tapes for years before the data is transferred to another means of storage.

'Just like punch cards still exist out there somewhere, nine-track tapes will be around for a long time, probably 20 years,' Temin said. Deller said nine-track tapes will still be used in governmental agencies to a small degree to move data because they are inexpensive, portable and they can hold a large amount of data. St. Jean also agreed that nine-track tapes not be replaced entirely, although they will used less by government agencies.

He said ti IRS will continue to use nine-track tapes to share information with agencies that still only use nine-track tapes.