Posts tagged Datageddon

Burning Libraries in the 21st Century

We remember the Library of Alexandria as one tragic fire. The truth is slower and sadder: most libraries die not in a blaze but by a thousand small defundings — and in the 21st century we are too sophisticated for torches, so we let the spreadsheet do the burning. I write this watching my own life’s research go the same way, and using it to ask a question the size of a civilization: when knowledge does not pay this quarter, and keeping it is no one’s job — where shall all the institutional knowledge go?

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