In Neal Stephenson’s book Seveneves there’s a civilization that manages to maintain a lot of humanity’s knowledge following a global disaster by getting a copy of the Encyclopedia Brittanica printed on acid-free paper and making copies by hand over the generations. They also assign designated young people on the autism spectrum to memorize different sections.
Seems about as plausible as any other method.
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Which is something many libraries have been aware of for decades, prompting them to invest in both acid-free paper and de-acidification processes.
Electronic archives definitely have their advantages. So does microfilm, until your reader breaks and can’t be fixed because no one manufactures the parts for it anymore.
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I expect that for anything we really want to keep copying is the important thing. We have a handful of papyrus from thousands of years ago, but most of what survived late antiquity is what people thought was worth copying out, again and again over the centuries. My guess is digital is going to be the same thing – in the long term what matters will be less the form and more if anyone bothers to keep it available.
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Plenty of stuff that nobody thought was particularly important at the time survives too, and is a lot more interesting when trying to understand the day-to-day life of ancient peoples than the records of which kings begat which offspring.
The great thing about durable forms of information is that nobody needs to make that kind of effort. You can go through a few dark ages without people actively maintaining knowledge yet it’s still retrievable later.
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I just read that! Enjoyed it.
This idea was also a central premise of Mote in God’s Eye. The Moties kept museums of technology specifically because they never solved the problem of wiping themselves out through catastrophic war every few centuries. They instead optimized the rebuilding process by caching “reindustrialization” museums all over their home planet, built to survive war. They child “get back to where they were” really quickly, almost like a save-game for their civilization.
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I have an archivist librarian friend and she says books are still the best way. Everything digital has to be constantly migrated because the drives and devices needed to read the media don’t last long and stop being supported. A CD may last 1000 years, but that’s useless because the drivers stop being updated for the (now broken) mechanical drive needed to read them within a pathetic twenty years.
I know we have many librarians and museum curators here among the Mutants who can speak to this much better than I. I’m just relaying what my friend said.
Totally! Among the Sumerian cuneiform tablets, for example, the local wool shop’s accounting ledger is way more interesting than who the princess married or whatever. The former tells so much more about their society and how it worked.
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Yeah, I was thinking of the papyrus era. Unlike clay tablets there isn’t too much left, and while it is definitely of great interest in trying to understand day-to-day life, I don’t think there is anything to dismiss in what we have left from writers like Aristotle and Aeschylus and Euclid and Herodotus.
We really would love more of it…and honestly I’m not sure clay slabs are a good model for how we could have saved that. Where people at least copied these through some pretty miserable times in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages.
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In addition to the constant migration of digital resources for libraries maintaining an online archive depends on the goodwill/continued existence of publishers. There are online archival resources like LOCKSS and Portico, but they depend on publishers being willing to participate.
And as for publisher goodwill, well, to take one example, when Taylor & Francis purchased Haworth Press in 2007 all the archival agreements libraries had with Haworth were wiped out.
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It’s worse than that. A huge number of records from the early US (1609-1840s) period was microfilmed at the now-National Archives in the 1920s and 1930s. Hundreds of thousands of records. Those films are now fading, and many have become unreadable. Unfortunately when archivists moved them over to microfilm they threw away the originals. Gone.
ETA; Fixed the date
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The failure in multiple digital media referenced is primarily a social one of changing standards. Yes, we regularly shift what the current age is, but can we obtain reliable hardware that will be able to read the same media for 100 years? Or at least long enough to where we can replace it by using the knowledge saved.
There’s another disadvantage for books: volume and foresight. Sure, you can produce a copy on acid-free paper. Is it printed that way? Now do it for 300,000 volumes. A million? You’re going to pick and choose. Considering just how many ISO/ANSI standards there are, etc…
One of the problems is, you probably need one specific version. Hard to know in advance which one. In the moment, if you have a wide digital archive you can potentially copy and recreate things as needed, and depend on backup hardware stockpiled to provide a sufficient lead time.
In some ways, the goal is to get a large archive to protect as much knowledge as possible, and then hastily build up a support architecture capable of copying and recreating it.
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Written records that have lasted a thousand years… with use? With any exposure? What level of completeness? There’s a lot of fragments. Sure, you can bury some scrolls in the desert, but that ain’t the same as a reference library.
You need an archive that allows you to read it regularly and doesn’t lose segments randomly.
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That would be my Twilight Zone episode
(and I think I would take it over the one that we are all in…)
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Any archival system that doesn’t take this factor into account isn’t likely to weather hundreds of years, let alone thousands of years.
The only way to be absolutely sure any kind of human artifact will last X years is to build it based on technology that has already been around X years.
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And getting people to stop changing those standards is impossible because technology keeps changing.
Print has its flaws. So does electronic storage, and the flaws of electronic storage are significant enough that putting all our data in one digital basket and throwing out print is a really bad idea. We can lose a lot more in a lot less time from a server crashing than we can from the slow deterioration of books.
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Also, capitalism.
Not providing for backwards compatibility in order to make users repurchase media, outlawing users accessing their “purchased” content outside the control of the seller, overlong copyright, and so on has a lot to do with our inability to rely on digital media. If it was simple and legal for users to move stuff into the new formats without corporate interference not nearly as much would be lost
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To paraphrase Truman Capote “That’s not printing, that’s chipping”
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Toni Morrison wrote a play based on Othello.
(gift link)
so if Florida wasn’t the Florida of DeSantis, but instead a more forward thinking state, it would have been an interesting alternative to the traditional Shakespeare curriculum.
Apparently, the playwright views her play as a response to the original, not a replacement.
Ms. Morrison also had a suggestion: “I’m thinking it would be more fulfilling for the viewer if she or he had read ‘Othello.’ ”
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Grab yer saw, Bugs Bunny.
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