– Bibliobabble? –
(click for full article)
The surge towards a print-less e-library recasts academic librarians as “rare book engineers”
Is “just in time” preserving what will be needed for a (hopefully) long future?
How preservable and verifiable are digital bits?
Who ensures there are physical, tangible copies of information that may come in handy one day…
even if it seems passe or unnecessary in current socio-cultural perceptions?
What if cloud data gets scrambled, wears away, ebook vendors aggregate totalitarian-ly,
Where are our contingency plans for the preservation of knowledge and culture?
How will we verify digital content?
and so on….
Polysemic Stupor 
A vision of a possible distant(?) future. Historians wonder what occurred in the late 20th century as sources of new information, within a few decades, begin to disappear from the records. Some suggest a new socio-religious iconoclasm, whilst others cite the lowering standards of education as a cause of a collapse in numeracy and literacy……
The paradox of technology: always over-confident and reliant on complex processes.
Ironic that Early Medieval manuscripts have a greater likelihood of survival than digital texts. All it would take: an unexpectedly powerful solar flare, a disruption of the Earth’s magetic field……
I’m stockpiling books–“real,” printed books. Hopefully I’ll have a giant underground library by the time the Apocalypse hits…
awesome! me too
yep – not many institutional administrators think of those things. The most awareness I find of the risks and dangers of digital loss, uncertainty – are from large digital companies like Berners-Lee’s W3C and ICT and business/tech aggregates. Ironically. If you didn’t see this at Scholarly Kitchen – check out the next post…a providential addendum 🙂
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