[arjie]

Modern public libraries primarily serve other purposes than paper book lending. University libraries don’t face that constraint but with the Library of Congress and Google we have a safe copy for surviving civilizations. So the only question now is how one accesses the content.

I’ve fantasized (like other datahoarders) of personal archives - and I do have a few hundreds of gigabytes of textual content archived for myself and to LORA my machines into. Copyright law does make it hard to have a co-op of book scanners but I can scan all of mine for myself.

Perhaps the future will be universal access but in the event it is not, perhaps my children will benefit from the family archive - though a future Primer must necessarily sort out the vast quantities of it that are inexplicably fan fiction erotica.

[Amezarak]

The Library of Congress embarked on a disastrous microfilm initiative concomitant with the destruction of the works being microfilmed that left millions of the only remaining newspaper archives and some books totally or partially unreadable.

[arjie]

Interesting story. I didn’t know about that. Looking it up, it appears to be well covered and one book Double Fold discusses it extensively. Thank you for sharing.