marbleflan:

The ongoing saga of whether or not the UK will continue to record its laws on vellum is seriously my favorite thing happening in the news right now. Because it’s like:

Every American I have ever met on an airplane upon learning I’m a rare book librarian: “So, will you even have a job once everything is digitized? Because like once it’s all digitized we can just burn all the books. Pulp ‘em. Toss them out the window. Make some space for the future.”

Meanwhile over the pond: CIVILIZATION AS WE KNOW IT WILL END IF WE DON’T RECORD LAWS ON A MEDIUM THAT WILL LAST LONGER THAN 500+ YEARS.

They literally offered a class last week in my university’s main library on how to recover digital data from floppy disks that are like 15 years old. The UK is wringing its hands about paper because it might only last 500 years. Just think about the difference in scale there.

It’s so interesting. Kirschenbaum writes in Mechanism of two modes of ensuring the longevity of information: proliferation and durability. In the former, the idea is that the more copies there are the more likely something is to survive. If you make a million copies of a book, for example, even if half are destroyed you still have 500,000 books. In the latter, you try to make one stable version that will endure. The former is the underlying principle of ‘the internet is forever.’ The latter is the Trajan column–it’s Ozymandias. The former is why insects reproduce on a scale of hundreds with the expectation that most will perish; the latter is the gestation of elephants, one at a time. 

I’m overgeneralizing, but I guess what I’m suggesting is that Americans are really into proliferation–the way to save ideas is to spread them. The UK is really into durability–the way to save ideas is to preserve them, hermetically sealed in calf skin.