There are a lot of politicians who are now trying to recast very recent, documented truths as something else. That's not new, but the extent and efficacy are a bit startling.

Alexandria was not the only store of knowledge destroyed over the millenia. Some of them we're only finding (or have not yet found). It's a dreary and dispiriting part of human existence that we develop wisdom, poetry, mathematics, science, etc. and then wipe it out to rewrite some narrative for the purposes of would-be autocrats of because of ideological conflict where one ideology (at least) can't abide the other's existence.

Another challenge like 'how do we manage lots of non-paper media that's stored on all sorts of short-lived and custom formats' or 'how do we do archaeology in the digital world when the things you'd like to 'dig up' are going to have disintegrated?' is the challenge that people who are looking at building vaults that must last and be unbreached for thousands of years to store nuclear wastes. In those time periods, cultures could rise and fall and any language we have now may not exist. And images seem the solution at first, but how do we explain complex ideas to what may be no-longer complex societies who might find these repositories? And by building more and greater defenses around them to avoid breach, you also say to any potential party of the future 'Hey look, we thought something important here needed protected A LOT....' which often translates as 'We need to dig that up!'.

The great impermanence of language, of common understandings, of permissiveness when it comes to religions, races, genders, governments, cultures, etc. really is a problem for any notion of continual improvement and building on the shoulders of those who went before.

I, for one, am glad for the preservers.

On Sat, Sep 12, 2020 at 1:24 AM Phil Pugliese - philpugliese at yahoo.com (via tml list) <xxxxxx@simplelists.com> wrote:
p.s. 

here's a few items I can attest to that are relevant, I believe;

Way back in the '80's an editorial appeared in the op-ed section of the local paper bemoaning the fact that, for the very first time, a portion of a US census had become inaccessible. 
It seemed that the 1960 census was the first one that was NOT fully printed out to hardcopy. A lot of the data was stored on magtape that required special 'readers' to access the data.
The special reading device had long since gone out of production & the last one had just broken down & was unrepairable.
He then went on the speculate about all the data that was currently stored exclusively on magnetic media.

At the small college where I worked for 30 years something similar happened.
A whole bunch of financial data was placed beyond reach after various equipment upgrades over the years rendered the data unrecoverable.
I was actually put in charge of trying to recover & convert as much as possible but by the time I was assigned the task a great amount of data was already lost.

I suppose, in theory, all the data in both examples above where theoretically recoverable but there's always the issue of cost, don'tcha' know.

In the second case, during a major remodeling, all the old unusable media was discarded.
I was in charge of that too. I worked graveyard, so, every morn, just before the garbage trucks came to empty the dumpsters, I hauled a load of boxes, full of media, out & dumped them in.
But even that wasn't enough so when we ran out of time my boss noticed that there was an unlocked storage room inside a building that was due to be gutted so he stuffed it with what was left over & locked the door behind him! We never did hear what happened to those items.

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On Friday, September 11, 2020, 09:30:48 PM MST, Timothy Collinson - timothy.collinson at port.ac.uk (via tml list) <xxxxxx@simplelists.com> wrote:


I'm asked why I waste my time on my bibliography work.  Indeed, I've sometimes asked myself.

Here's a chunk of the answer...


If what I do makes it just a little easier to find something or to join up the dots, then it's been worth it.  It may only be a tiny part of the universe of books, but for TMLers at least it's a part of us!

(Curious that I came across this just as I'm half way through writimg a little adventure thats a response to the burning (or not) of the Library at Alexandria.)

(Or perhaps it's not that curious.  Maybe it's all around.  On the radio just this afternoon they were paying tribute to Deirdre la Faye who died last month)


Perhaps more useful would be https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deirdre_Le_Faye as the BBC may not work outside the UK.  Not sure.

Apparently her love (and excellence) of spending every day working in Jane Austen archives and research, seeking out new snippets of information etc. was unparalleled and a terrific contribution to knowledge.

Maybe one day my obituary might say something similar as a response to the question above.

Well, I can dream.




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