Forget the burning of the library of Alexandria. Right now, we’re losing more information than ever in history, and just as Caesar’s  setting fire to antiquity’s greatest repository of knowledge was accidental, today’s loss is equally unintentional. As a couple of readers have noted here recently, we’re losing art and information to the forward march of technology.

Some examples from my own warehouses of art and information:

• I can’t play my LPs or singles. My wife and I  haven’t had a turntable since at least 1996, when we bought this house. The only reason we had one at the previous house was that my theatre company had an extra one that we used at home to record cues. How many of us have turntables any more? And no, not all of the records that I still have are available on CD, and some never will be. I have the limited edition Deutsche Grammophone boxed set of Roxy Music’s albums (from back when such things had to be ordered through the mail, by sending a letter with a check). The original LP version of the album Manifesto has a wonderful (original) version of “Angel Eyes” that was subsequently remixed into what I’ll call “the hideous disco version” by Bryan Ferry. All subsequent versions of this album include the Hideous Disco Version. I haven’t heard the original version (or, as I like to call it, “the real version”) in almost 15 years. Except I can still hear it in my head.
• I have dozens of cassette tapes that play almost nowhere:  not in my car, not on a computer, not on my iPhone, etc. etc. So in essence, they’ve lost their primary advance:  portability. For most of these, that’s not a problem (the ones I cared about I’ve now got in digital files or on CD). But there are dozens that I recorded myself — of my band, or of discussions with various writers and interview subjects.
• Recently I took a hard look at the 120 or so square 3.25″ hard computer disks in my home office closet. They were formatted for my Apple IIGS, which I used until 1992 when I got my first Mac. I wrote on that computer for five very industrious years — probably 10 or 15 plays, most of them full-length, innumerable essays, short stories, poems, failed novels, detritus, and utter drivel. I hope it’s all printed out and in my files, because I pitched the disks. No way to read them.
• Should I even go into the hundreds of thousands of emails I’ve sent and received, all of them deleted? God knows I’m not saying I should have printed them out and filed them, but surely somewhere in all that there were virtual letters I would have liked to keep for reference in my dotage. As I’ve switched from one email client to another — from the Claris version of Mail to Microsoft Entourage to the Apple version of Mail — I’ve lost one archive after another of this correspondence.
• Same thing with my calendars. I can tell you what I did day to day in the 90’s because I used leather daybooks. My son pointed out to me that the iPhone deletes appointments older than 3 months. (To save memory, no doubt.) They get backed up onto the computer you sync with — but maybe that’ll change too.

I could go on in this vein — and discuss Betamax tapes and VHS tapes and so forth. But let’s talk about those things we never thought we’d lose:  books. One of this blog’s correspondents, my friend the theatre producer Isabel Storey, points out that the shelf life of our archives is geting shorter and shorter:

Each progression of the way we record words seems to make them less permanent. We still have stone tablets dating back thousands of years…paper lasts at least a few hundred…but words stored in electronic devices – do they even really exist anywhere – and will anyone ever remember, find them, even tomorrow?

It’s not just words. (Hence my laundry list above.) But what happens when in our zeal to replace the printed word with the electronic version we toss out too much collective wisdom? I’m referring to this piece in The New Yorker from 1996 concerning Nicholson Baker’s battle with a library that was destroying its card catalog — and its books! — to set up electronic versions. Here’s the abstract of that piece, which has stuck with me all these years:

Baker received an e-mail from a librarian following the move inviting him to “save” the card catalogue. Having ignored an inquiry from the Rochester library, Baker agreed, and made a formal request to inspect the card catalogue. It was denied by Kenneth E. Dowlin, the City Librarian. Baker sued for legal access (Baker v. San Francisco Public Library). He found that there were more books in the cards than in the new on-line catalogue, and realized that San Francisco is a case study of what can happen when telecommunications enthusiasts take over big old research libraries and attempt to remake them, with corporate help, as showplaces for information technology. The S.F.P.L. is now essentially broke, and relies on corporate benefactors. It has sent more than two hundred thousand books to landfills — many of them old, hard to find, out of print, and valuable. The New Main (library)’s shelf space is inadequate. “Weeding” takes place in all libraries in moderation, but the San Francisco librarians had to do it in a sweeping, indiscriminate fashion. The Old Main library has a Discard Room where workers from the Department of Public Works would pick up books to load their trucks. Baker found last copies of old books there. Since January, the book-dumping has ceased, following an expose in the San Francisco Chronicle. Now there are giveaways to the public and to charity. Dowlin will run for president of the American Library Association next year. After the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989, Dowlin combined departments. Many books were moved to an abandoned building, and damaged. D.P.W. trucks took loads from the library several times a week. Dowlin obtained a large grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency for repairs and a new computer system. In 1992, the library signed a multimillion-dollar agreement with Digital Equipment and put its catalogue on-line. In the sixties, City Librarian William Holman amassed books with the ambition of making the S.F.P.L. a high-level research library. Subsequent librarians built on this until Dowlin: “S.F.P.L. is a public library, not a research facility.” He introduced a program of “levelled access,” offering current material supplemented by “focus collections.” In December 1989, William Ramirez, then Chief of the Main Library, wrote a memo objecting to the foreseen change “from a strong reference, research resource and service center to an undistinguished ‘popular library.'” Many of Dowlin’s employees have resisted the change, protecting books by hiding or falsely stamping them. The new book return system damages books, and reshelving is slow. Last May, Baker presented his charges at the invitation of the Intellectual Freedom Committee of the Librarians’ Guild. In July, a letter from representatives of fund-raising affinity groups went out to every member of the library and staff, attacking Baker for using Holocaust references in his speech. In August, Baker, a historian and two librarians measured the shelves of the Old Main. High preliminary figures were leaked to the press, printed and then retracted. Kathy Page admitted that storage capacity in the New Main was inadequate. Dowlin attacked Baker in the press and called his writing “crap.” The library once kept a “Withdrawal Register,” but there is no record of books discarded or destroyed since 1987. There is a computer file entitled “Purge of Items Declared Withdrawn,” which shows troubling losses. Baker was told that there is “really no need to keep a history” of books that are gone.

Almost 15 years later, this is still painful to read. If something with all the commercial appeal of The Traveling Wilburys’ first CD could go out of print — which it was for almost 10 years, despite four top-ten singles and nine million albums sold in the U.S. and Canada– what chance does a book have of ever reappearing? Yes, books have gone out of print since books were invente, but they weren’t blown aside by the gale force of technology.

For all the wonders of the age of digitization– of which I am an acolyte, from which I make my living, via which I am now sharing this with you — it has carried with it twin unforeseen curses:  the deluge and the drought. The deluge has swamped us with so much information that we now cannot contain, process, or access all of it. (This would be my hundreds of thousands of emails that, had I saved them, I would never have the time to read.) It has been accompanied by a drought that leaves vast trunks of information and content without access to any tributary of support. All we can do is gaze upon the dusty boxes of floppy disks and wonder what might be encoded in them in a language every bit as dead and unknown as the Maya glyphs.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 8th, 2009 at 10:50 pm and is filed under On reading, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.