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Agreed, that's clearly part of it, but the overall thrust of the article seems to be 'if we don't do this physical books will disappear', which seems to be dupl
by singular 15y ago
Agreed, that's clearly part of it, but the overall thrust of the article seems to be 'if we don't do this physical books will disappear', which seems to be duplicating the work of national libraries.
It's a pity they seem to gloss over that, since the duplication of that effort does need some justification - perhaps the national libraries don't cover enough foreign books? Or they don't trust the government? Also it's a bit misleading, acting as if it doesn't already happen.
- jerf 15y agoOn the broad scale of history, neither national governments, nor their commitments to historical preservation, are something you can rely on. I do not mean this as a modern-day political snark at any particular government, I mean this as a historical comment. Of course there's no guarantee your archive will survive indefinitely either, but if we treasure them and have several of them the odds go up substantially.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- mechanical_fish 15y agoIt is partly a matter of redundancy. Unthinkable as it might be, libraries do burn. They do have budget cuts. They get burglarized. Their archivists make mistakes. Better three universal libraries than two. Better four than three. When we're sure we have too many we'll deal with that; they are far easier to destroy than create. It is true that things might be more efficient if everyone pooled resources and, say, kept track of the fact that we have ten distributed copies of Book X in the world but only three of Y, so we should be looking out for more copies of Y. Which brings us to a second reason to start a new public archive: as a pilot project to explore different ways of running public archives. Modern infotech is evolving fast; presumably there is lots of room to experiment with different strategies, and the national libraries have only so much budget for research.