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OF ALL THE BOOKS I have read, Ray Bradbury's dystopian novel
"Fahrenheit 451" sits on a shelf of its own in my mental library.
Its main theme, the destruction of written literature by fire,
strikes me as one of the most horrible threats to culture and
history as we know it. In spite of its proven trustworthiness
for the purpose of storing information (demonstrated by vast
collections of centuries-old books), paper appears pretty much
defenseless against the flames of fire. The amount of human
labour that goes into composing a single page of text grossly
outweighs the amount of thermal energy released by burning that
same page, but the ink is of no concern to the flames.
This weekend (Friday, September 21st, 1996), most of Linkoping city library turned into ashes.
Just as in "Fahrenheit 451", the destruction was deliberate.
In contrast to the novel, the destruction was not sanctioned by
the state. Regardless of the cause, hundreds of thousands of
volumes, some of which may have been unique and priceless, no
longer exist. Fortunately, a large collection of manuscripts
and 17th-century books in the basement appears to have been
left untouched by the fire, and is now being brought to safety.
From Svenska Dagbladet September 22nd 1996
To me and to a lot of other people, this is obviously a major
disaster. I have never visited this particular library, as I
live in Uppsala rather than Linkoping, but loss of information
is a loss to all those who came too late to study it, i.e. just
about everyone. To some people, including me, preservation of
information is a duty in itself. We may not find a particular
book, an old issue of a particular newspaper, or the minutes of
a club that no longer exists interesting enough to keep a copy
of it ourselves, but we recognize its potential value to some
future researcher, and thus arrange to preserve it anyway, while
thanking past generations for their generosity towards us.
I'd like to put Project Runeberg in this perspective. When
digitizing is brought up as a possible way of preserving the
contents of old books, one objection often heard is that no
currently used machine-readable medium is known to have better
durability than paper. There simply haven't been any digital
media around for so many years (except possibly for 19-century
Jacquard mill punched cards, which I don't consider adequate
for the purpose) that we can estimate their technical lifespan.
While true, this objection is only partially relevant. The idea
behind digitizing books is not about transferring them to a more
durable physical medium, but about starting a process of routine
duplication and distribution. A melted CD-ROM disk is of course
no more useful than a burned 20-volume printed encyclopedia, but
the digital medium combined with plenty of copies in well-known
and reliable hands allows for cheap and accurate restoration of
any missing copies.
Obviously, no digital reproduction will be able to give justice to
the physical properties of a skillfully bound book or a medieval
manuscript. These items are valuable for more reasons than their
information content, and should to the extent possible be preserved
for the benefit of future generations. However, the sheer amounts
of printed matter produced today are creating a heavy burden on our
libraries. Since these are produced for the purpose of distributing
information rather than becoming collectors' items, I believe that
we can do away with them and employ digital distribution for their
contents, thus freeing more resources to deal with existing precious
items of a physical nature. Adequate fire protection is part of it.
The iterative process of duplication resembles the oral tradition,
which in Bradbury's novel regains its position as the primary medium
of literature. The individual human brain becomes a temporary storage
volume which is destroyed when the human dies, but before that happens,
the information content has been transferred to a young child, and
thus the cultural heritage of civilization is retained for as long as
some society is willing to maintain it, irrespective of any physical
containers. In my opinion, Project Runeberg and other efforts of the
same kind serve as inspiration for and the beginning of a digital
tradition with historic implications.
The Phoenix may survive, but for what purpose, if it doesn't sing?
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