A DIGITAL ALEXANDRIA?

Dick Pountain/13 September 2009 10:56/Idealog 182

I'm a great admirer of Google, not merely for the efficiency of its search engine but for its commitment to innovation and even for its neo-hippy "don't be evil" ethic. I was excited by its project of digitising all the world's great libraries because there seemed to be a chance it could succeed, thanks to the firm's huge cash mountain and philanthropic ethic. (I've already signed that legal settlement form giving permission for my own work to go into the pot). However a recent conjunction of diverse events has made me wonder whether I should worry more.

First came a story on The Register website entitled "Google Book Search - Is it the Last Library?", reporting the views of Geoff Nunberg, one of America's leading linguistic researchers, who claims that "Nobody is very likely to scan these books again. The cost of scanning isn't going to come down. There's no Moore's Law for scanning. We don't know who's going to be running these files 100 years from now. It may be Google. It may be News Corp. It may be WalMart. But we can say with some certainty that 100 years from now, these are the very files scholars will be using." Nunberg's caution seems plausible to me because the global outlook is such that Google's wealth and good-will are unlikely to be repeated very soon. Of course this won't matter so long as:

a) the resulting digital archive is kept safe and
b) the original paper books are not destroyed after scanning

I now have reason to doubt both of these conditions. I've written here several times before about the awful problems of ensuring the long-term archival integrity of digital data: people tend to believe that today's storage formats are here to stay but there's nothing deader than an obsolete disk format (8" floppy anyone?) whose hardware, documentation and expertise have dispersed and vanished. I won't flog this horse again here - read more via the US Library of Congress's National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program at http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/.

My reason for doubting b) came following an email from reader Bob Stimpson who told me of his experiences with certain Google partner libraries. He'd encountered cases where books were incompletely scanned, their figures and plates missing, but the originals had been destroyed after scanning as part of a "brittle books scanning program". Bob asked me to alert readers via this column, which I am now doing, and I suggested he contact Professor Robert Darnton (of Harvard College and New York Review of Books) who is for me the most serious commentator on digitisation. He in turn put Bob in touch with Google's Dan Clancy, and I await further news on this front. However following Bob's email I've become hyperaware of newspaper reports about library closures, which seem to be cropping up every week in the current cost-cutting climate. 

I already know something about the destocking of libraries from my own recent purchases. Over the last few years I've accumulated a modest library of early 20th-century philosophy tomes, thanks to the wonders of BiblioFind and AbeBooks, and almost every single volume carries the stamp of some university library. Librarians in both UK and USA seem to regard scanning as an opportunity to unload old and little-read stock to make more shelf-room, while their local authorities see it as an opportunity to close public libraries and convert them into blocks of flats...

If Google's digital library really did prove to be the last great concentration of books, and if market forces do cause the destruction of the paper originals, then we might be heading for the scenario that any IT architect worth their salt most abhors, a Single Point of Failure. It wouldn't be the first time in history, the most notable previous occurences being the various burnings and sackings of the great library of Alexandria (between 48BC and 642AD) that destroyed irretrievably and forever much of the collected wisdom of the ancient world. Similarly the climate-induced collapses of successive Meso-American civilisations lost us the secrets of the Mayan calendar and who knows what other insights. To our contemporary humanist and individualist morality the loss of books must seem far less important than the loss of human lives. History is littered with massacres, famines, plagues and genocides which are far from over yet, so to get over-agitated about the loss of books might cause one to be labelled callous and elitist.

That begs a very large question indeed. We're the only species that even worries about being labelled callous or elitist - other animals just get on with being callous or dominant and don't reflect or agonise about it. Our capacity for language is what can extend our life experience (virtually) beyond the confine of a single lifetime, allowing it to be accumulated down generations. That in turn is what permits us to invent moralities that go beyond simple biological instinct. And up until a few decades ago the only way that worked was through books. When we put our books at risk we're risking everything that has made us what we are.

[Dick Pountain doubts very much that anyone will ever come to relish the smell of an old laptop...]