[HN Gopher] Library Fires Have Always Been Tragedies. Just Ask G...
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Library Fires Have Always Been Tragedies. Just Ask Galen
Author : diodorus
Score : 44 points
Date : 2021-06-12 01:22 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (daily.jstor.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (daily.jstor.org)
| WalterBright wrote:
| Concentrating rare assets still goes on today, and not just
| libraries. Museums concentrate them, too.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| And schools...
| wolverine876 wrote:
| I was thinking about that the other day, as I passed a major
| art museum: Has a modern museum ever suffered a calamity that
| damaged much/most of its treasures?
| nilstycho wrote:
| Not always! When the Library of Ashurbanipal burned in 612 BC, it
| fired and consequently preserved all the clay tablets inside.
| Ironically, we might not be able to read the tablets today if the
| library hadn't burned.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| My understanding is when many of these tablets (not
| Ashurbanipal's specifically) were removed to the moister
| confines of Europe they became unreadable
| ______- wrote:
| How much data was the Library of Alexandria? A gigabyte? I ask
| because I see sites disappearing off the net all the time. I've
| even seen sites being shut down because of the pandemic. Some
| people got COVID and were financially drained and couldn't afford
| the $15.00 it takes to renew a domain along with a bare minimum
| hosting bundle. It's very sad to witness. Archive.org's Wayback
| Machine is doing a great job, but even that is problematic since
| we don't know how long even that will be around, and we might
| need an archival site that backs up Wayback!
| slver wrote:
| Comparing the Library of Alexandria with random web sites is
| unwarranted. Libraries are curated.
|
| And websites who can't afford hosting, and there's hosting for
| $5 these days, BTW, self-curate themselves out of existence.
| jhgb wrote:
| > Libraries are curated.
|
| Generally, yes. But does Library of Alexandria count as such
| if officials were confiscating _all_ the books on ships
| arriving to Alexandria, putting them in the library, and only
| returning copies to the ship crews and passengers (once these
| were furnished)? To me, Library of Alexandria in a way _was_
| the Internet Archive of the ancient world.
| nindalf wrote:
| It's possible to set up static hosting for free. I actually
| saved $5 (+1$ tax) a month by doing that.
| ______- wrote:
| > Comparing the Library of Alexandria with random web sites
| is unwarranted. Libraries are curated
|
| I wasn't trying to compare, just making an analogy /
| metaphor. As in: how many libraries of Alexandria do we lose
| each day on the web? Because it it's too high a number, then
| the web is fundamentally broken.
|
| > And websites who can't afford hosting, and there's hosting
| for $5 these days, BTW, self-curate themselves out of
| existence
|
| But it shouldn't have to be like that. I've seen some real
| gems out there that disappeared and weren't backed up on
| Wayback. Literally all the owner needed was $5 as you say and
| the site could continue.
| dasyatidprime wrote:
| There's some complexifiers to this that seem worth
| recognizing, especially since the "financially drained"
| that was mentioned was pandemic-related and therefore is
| likely part of a broader cluster of problems:
|
| 1. $5 and tail risk. Even if your financial hardship isn't
| _that_ bad, if it 's still making things more
| unpredictable, that could be $5 plus a cascade of overdraft
| fees one day. If things are worse, of course, it could also
| be your last meal for the month, or your last chance to not
| go homeless. Better get rid of any expense you can.
|
| 2. $5 and executive function. The payment card you were
| using expired. Are you going to remember to update the info
| when you're in constant low-grade panic or depression?
|
| 3. Relatedly to (2), $5 if you can get to that point in the
| first place. Maybe you had your site hosted on something
| more expensive, for... whatever reason. Now you have to
| remember how to transfer all the files and hope everything
| still works, and so on.
|
| 4. Kind of like (3), $5 except for the more-expensive
| domain name that seemed like a good idea at the time. Oops.
| Where are you going to move to? Will anyone be able to find
| it afterwards anyway?
|
| 5. $5 and relationship overhead. Which of these five-dollar
| hosters are trustworthy? Will they stay that way?
|
| There's probably more.
|
| If we care about preserving the independent Web, these
| sorts of problems definitely present themselves over the
| long run. I'm theoretically an affluent-by-many-standards
| technologist, but I've had issues over time that resulted
| in my previous sites going splat and just... couldn't
| _really_ pull together what it would take to revive them,
| and wasn 't that motivated. Decentralization of
| maintenance-energy overall while having individual sites
| relying on one or a few people has real inefficiencies that
| way if permanency is valuable.
| slver wrote:
| > As in: how many libraries of Alexandria do we lose each
| day on the web? Because it it's too high a number, then the
| web is fundamentally broken.
|
| If your brain remembered every piece of information it
| stumbled upon, you'd cease to function before your first
| birthday.
|
| Your computer would be out of RAM before it gets past its
| BIOS check.
|
| And your HDD would get filled to capacity in less than a
| week and become inoperable.
|
| The web doesn't have to preserve everything. 99% of
| everything is garbage, and I'm being conservative.
| Forgetting is an essential capability, and we should focus
| on quality, not quantity.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Ironically, you've said something worth remembering.
| slver wrote:
| It's fine, we reinvent it every day from first
| principles.
| jhgb wrote:
| I'd guesstimate that a scroll could contain something like 33
| kB of text (in modern equivalent single-byte encoding with
| inter-word spaces), since the Iliad is divided into 24 "books"
| (presumably scrolls - the division may even have taken place in
| Alexandria itself!), has around 120000 characters, and the
| average Greek word length as per
| https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1076/jqul.8.3.175.409...
| is around 5.5 (add 1 for inter-word spaces). Assuming there
| were 400000 of such scrolls in the library (that seems to be a
| higher end estimate), it comes out as something like 12 GB.
| ______- wrote:
| Thanks, wow you could keep it on a 16gb USB flash drive!
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Apparently, the whole Library of Congress collection would
| take up 10 petabytes of storage, give or take. So the size of
| the Library of Alexandria can be very roughly assessed at 1.2
| microLoC's.
| steelbrain wrote:
| Some archives store books in image format in addition to
| text, is that 10 petabytes of pure text?
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| The LoC has extensive media collections besides the
| books. The textual collection is on the order of 10
| terabytes of data though, not petabytes.
| marc_abonce wrote:
| I imagine that the biggest bulk of data would come from
| illustrations, though. The first example that occurs to me is
| Euclid's Elements.
| jhgb wrote:
| That would probably depend on what percentage of scrolls
| contained illustrations in the first place.
| actually_a_dog wrote:
| The only known manuscript of _Beowulf_ was damaged in a library
| fire in 1731 [0]. Lost in that fire was the only known manuscript
| of the Saxon poem _The Battle of Maldon_ [1]. The poem itself was
| preserved via a translation done c. 1724, but the original text
| was lost. An original transcription was subsequently discovered
| in the 1930s, so we still have access to the words, just not the
| original artifact. [2]
|
| This very same library is home to the only known manuscript of
| _Sir Gawain and the Green Knight_ [3].
|
| [0]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_library#Ashburnham_Hous...
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Battle_of_Maldon
|
| [2]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Battle_of_Maldon#History_o...
|
| [3]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Gawain_and_the_Green_Knigh...
| jhgb wrote:
| > "fire broke out in Ashburnham House"
|
| They should have seriously considered naming the house
| differently.
| meristohm wrote:
| Susan Orlean wrote The Library Book, in part about the Los
| Angeles Public Library burning, possibly due to arson. The fire
| marshal said he saw the fire so hot in one corridor that it was
| clear: https://www.worldcat.org/title/library-
| book/oclc/1039296901&...
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(page generated 2021-06-13 23:01 UTC)