In computer science, spooling refers to a process of transferring ata by placing it in a temporary working area where another program may access it for processing at a later point in time. This temporary working area could be a file or storage device, but probably not a buffer. Traditional uses of the term spooling apply to situations where there is little or no direct communication between the program writing the data and the program reading it. Spooling is often used when a device writes data at a speed different from the rate at which the target device reads it, which would allow a slower device to process it at its own rate. Data is only modified through addition or deletion at the ends of the area, i.e., there is no random access or editing.