I was in a college library recently, and pulled out a tome that clearly hadn’t seen much action in recent years. It turned out not to be relevant to what I was searching for, and I was about to blithely replace it on its shelf, when I spotted a newish piece of paper sticking partially out of the back of the book. I flipped to the back inside cover, and read words that affected me more deeply than they probably should have: “This book is slated to be archived or recycled due to lack of use. If you have a reason to question this decision, please make a note of it below.”
I thought about leaving a note. In fact, I thought about making a day of it and finding as many books as I could that were slated for their deaths, writing impassioned pleas about why each should saved.
To my mind, an old book that has seldom (or never, even) been cracked still has a purpose and a useful life. Each book (and I’m thinking of non-fiction here, but a similar point can be made for novels) plumbs a unique depth of human knowledge that hasn’t been plumbed before. Even if it turns out that no one is interested in (and yes, I’m making this up) the relationship between 17th century European witchcraft and ancient Egyptian architectural mathematics, the fact that someone has spent her valuable time unearthing the connections here, and exploring tributaries of humanity that have sat unexplored, is, to me, of vast value. And so taking such a book and burying it in a storage facility, or — gasp! — recycling it… well, that’s just a genuine horror to me.
Archive or Perish
When I thought about the reality of the situation, however, I discovered a vein of sympathy for the plight of the modern librarian.
Depending on which source you believe, there are perhaps as many as a million new books published every year, worldwide. (This, I believe, is not including self-published works, which I’m sure are becoming a staggeringly large part of the statistic.) Given the rate of population growth on Earth, we can assume that there will be an ever-growing rate of book publishing as time goes by.
Again depending on who you believe, estimates peg human population growth hitting nine billion or so in the upcoming decades. Many of these will be in underdeveloped nations without much access to the tools and leisure time necessary for lots of book-writing, but still we can project that the number of books published every year will continue to grow along with the population. Let’s say that book publishing will see a modest rate of growth that will give us 1.2 million books a year by the time humanity creates its nine billionth member. And let’s say for the sake of argument that will happen in 2050.
By a crude calculation, that will mean something like 45 million new books will be published in the next forty years.
Let’s do a couple more calculations. Say an average book measures 9″ x 6″ x 1″. That’s 54 cubic inches of volume. 45 million books of this size would be 2,430,000,000 cubic inches of material, which according to Wolfram Alpha is approximately 16 times the volume of an Olympic-sized swimming pool.
The Middlebury College main library (arbitrarily chosen for this thought experiment) has a 143,000 square foot footprint. Assuming it’s 50 feet tall, that is a hefty seven million cubic feet that can be filled (that’s 81 Olympic-sized swimming pools). It is, however, only five times the volume of the 45 million books that may be published in the next 40 years, and, of course, the library is probably already fairly full of books (never mind the furniture, walls, beams, staircases, elevators, offices, and, oh, oxygen). So you get some sense of the scale of the problem of storing new books in a library.
What’s a librarian to do? Archive, naturally. (Hopefully not recycle!) Of course the future of archiving is digital — it’s far more cost-effective, I’m sure — and as a researcher far easier for searching purposes — to digitize a collection of seldom-used books than to store them in a warehouse somewhere. And doubtless there will be a slew of new academic texts that are released only digitally and not in print at all.
Necessity is, as they say, the mother of invention. Probably some very good things will (and undoubtedly have already) come out of the digital archiving revolution.
Archiving Creative Materials
The episode made me think about the archiving of creative materials.
How long is long enough to store copies of projects? When do you decide to archive them? When, after archiving them, do you decide to let go of the archives?
As a creative agency, we produce literally tons of printed materials, and while we display some of our finer work, we have limited display space in our office; so, right off the bat, we have to make quick decisions about what to archive and what to display. And of course we do keep archival copies of the pieces we produce, but certainly at some point we will face the issue of how long is long enough? When can we let go of old printed materials?
The question, interestingly enough, seems even more poignant with digital materials. While hard drives are getting more capacious, there’s still a point at which our drives fill up with old projects that we no longer need to regularly consult. (And, boy, do they fill up quickly — draft upon draft of each project; projects that never saw the light of day; every intermediate step along the way to success and failure is stored on our hard drives.) We could keep them on our working disks, but it makes sense at some point to archive them on an external medium. And while we can store nearly countless numbers of digital files in an extremely small physical space, there comes a time when the question crops up: How long do we care about these files? Do you keep multiple, redundant archives? In separate locations (in case of fire or flooding)? Do you re-copy the archives every ten years to make sure that your storage media are still viable? Do you store your files in the cloud? Do you trust the cloud? How much work and expense is justifiable to save this old and potentially useless information? (Of course, if you’re a certain personality type, you might not see this information as useless, much as I don’t see “useless” books as useless.)
Perhaps agencies and others who produce a multitude of digital files will someday (soon!) have to rely on solutions from library sciences. We don’t have Olympic swimming pools worth of documents to worry about, but we do have similar (scaled-down) archiving worries that need to be addressed.
We, too, have been waxing nostalgic here at Girl Scouts of the Green and White Mountains as we pore over ancient (to us) texts and photos. In recent years we faced a merger of two half-century-old Girl Scout councils, each with their own archives, such as they were. Now, as Girl Scouting heads into its centennial year, we are digging through decades of stuff in our “museum” (a closet). Let this serve as a warning to all dealing with or making dusty history, digital or not: label carefully! There are drawers full of photos and slides that are meaningless without captions and dates; celebrations, volunteer and girl honors, accomplishments, all lost to the sands of time–or recycling bin–without context. I enjoyed the post.
Ah, I feel your pain! Thanks for the comment!