Peter Sinclair: Eternal libraries

"Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Mankind has always had something of an Ozymandias complex: the urge to pass word of himself along; to advise the ages that, however briefly, he existed.

The impulse has expressed itself in many forms, the library being perhaps the most universal. But the hazards of time and tempest and human hate make libraries an uncertain memorial to the works of man. Look what happened to the most legendary, the Great Library at Alexandria.

This repository of ancient wisdom amassed about 500,000 scrolls in the 500 years before it was gutted by the holy fire of militant Christianity 1600 years ago; and it wasn't long before the second-greatest, its sister-library of Constantinople, also went up in fanatical smoke at the hands of the Turks.

The internet would seem to be ideal for the purpose, and indeed San Francisco's non-profit Internet Archive (free access to bona-fide scholars, registration required) has already begun a gigantic accumulation of all that man has ever thought or done or dreamed.

Amassing the archive — established by Brewster Kahle, developer of the Alexa search-engine, itself named for the first Great Library — must be rather like building a digital version of the Pyramids.

Yet in spite of these efforts, according to Michael Keller of Stanford University's Green Library, the likelihood is that even more will be lost now than in the past. He points to the fate of some of Nasa's earliest photographs of Earth from space, unviewable now because we've lost the operating system and forgotten the data-format.

As digital media become at once more universal and more transient, he believes we have to rethink the nature of archives for the very long term (at least, as measured by man).

He cites the nuclear waste generated by power-plants, weapons production, even medicine. Somehow, he says, we have to let our remotest descendants know where it lies buried.

So he's come up with the idea of the Rosetta Disk. Under the auspices of San Francisco's Long Now Foundation, this modern Rosetta Stone was unveiled at Stanford last month as the centrepiece of its 10,000-Year Library symposium.

Just 75mm in diameter, made of pure nickel, it will carry a record of our uniqueness deep into the future. Also a long-term linguistic archive, it will provide the means to decipher potentially dead languages in the far future.

On it, etched to a fineness which will require a powerful microscope to read, are the first three chapters of the Book of Genesis, translated into 1000 languages. Who's funding this thing, the Christian right?

The whole exercise should prove slightly mystifying to our remote descendants. What, they may wonder, are we trying to tell them?

And if, somewhere in the deep gulfs of time, they have forgotten how to construct a microscope, the Rosetta Disk will amount to nothing more than an ancient frisbee of inscrutable purpose.

But the Long Now Foundation is hedging its bet. It is also working on a 10,000-Year Clock, something along the lines of Stonehenge, powered by seasonal temperature changes. It will tick once a year, strike once a century, and the cuckoo comes out every millennium.

That should give the generations yet unborn a bit of a start.

Ozymandias

Library at Alexandria

Internet archive

Alexa search engine

Stanford University Green Library

Long Now Foundation


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