universal library

Whenever I read Annalee Newitz's column, I usually come away annoyed at the self-satisfied tone, but her last column entitled "The Myth of the Universal Digital Library" was excellent. I was most appreciative of this statement:

[C]omputer networks...cost money and require massive amounts of power. They take up real-world space. And they break.

This fact is somehow lost on most people, which is surprising since anyone with a computer knows the problems associated with data management, including data loss. I was instantly reminded of Being Digital, by MIT Media Lab director Nicholas Negroponte. I'm not going to link to it because I don't recommend reading it. His basic thesis is that in the Internet era (which had just begun at the time he wrote it), it is "bits not atoms" that are important--that is, information not matter. He probably had a nice staff of underpaid student sysadmins to keep all his lab's machines running, then when they became obsolete, shipped the atoms over to China where they were burned so that some could be reused, and others inhaled to cause cancer. So it's all well and good to say that the atoms don't matter when you have other people taking care of them. As Newitz rightly shows, digital archives are created and maintained by people, so they have all the problems and limitations that come from that.