Digitized to Our Detriment?

Twenty-two acknowledged concubines, and a library of sixty-two thousand volumes attested the variety of his inclinations; and from the productions which he left behind him, it appears that both the one and the other were designed for use rather than for ostentation.
Edward Gibbon (1737 - 1794), historian; On Emperor Gordian the Younger; The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Google’s announcement last week (Dec. 13, 2004) that it will begin converting some of the nation’s leading research libraries and Oxford University into digital files that will be searchable over the Web, leaves the Misanthrope a bit suspicious.

The Misanthrope recalls Nicholson Baker’s 2001 book Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper. The book jacket says, "Since the 1950s, our country’s libraries have followed a policy of destroying to preserve. They have methodically dismantled their collections of original bound newspapers, cut up hundreds of thousands of so-called brittle books, and replaced them with microfilmed copies." The results, as Baker discovered, were that there are no longer any complete editions remaining of most of America’s great newspapers.

Will this eventually happen to the books we have today? More importantly, what will happen to libraries? Will they become a casualty of state and federal budget cuts once everything has been digitized? This most likely will not result in The Misanthrope’s lifetime or two generations hence, but what happens when it does? If everything is technically in one spot, couldn’t some corporation or government leader ultimately control it all?

Thanks to input from colleague B2, we were reminded of Alexandria’s famous ancient library, considered to have the greatest collection of books in the ancient world. Founded by Ptolemy I Soter, king of Egypt, in the city of Alexandria, it was expanded by his son Ptolemy II Philadelphus early in the 3rd century BC. In the time of Ptolemy II, according to historians, the main library in the Alexandrian Museum contained nearly 500,000 volumes, or rolls, and an annex in the Temple of Serapis contained some 43,000 volumes. Most of the writings of antiquity were preserved in these collections from which copies were made and disseminated to libraries throughout the civilized world.



It is largely through such copies that ancient works have survived to modern times, for the Alexandrian library was partially or wholly destroyed on several occasions.

Maybe it does not matter whether we have access to history or not, humanity continues to repeat its mistakes – not just in a march of folly, but in a hyper-speed race of perversity to our own detriment.