It's getting a little off-topic, but ... . Arguably the single
event causing the greatest information loss was the destruction of the
library at Alexandria, which broke countless links in chains of
transmission of unique manuscripts. Acid paper and nitrate film have
destroyed lots of copies, but most information of any signnificance
produced in this era has been reproduced in lots of copies, and
procographically recopied at a trivial cost compared to the cost of
copying a manuscript by hand (which is why there were so many unique
copies in Alexandria).
Giles
#### ## Giles Martin
####### #### Quality Control Section
################# University of Newcastle Libraries
#################### New South Wales, Australia
###################* E-mail: ulgsm@dewey.newcastle.edu.au
##### ## ### Phone: +61 49 215 828 (International)
Fax: +61 49 215 833 (International)
##
The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together
-- All's Well That Ends Well, IV.iii.98-99
On Tue, 27 May 1997, Kenneth Whistler wrote:
> P.S. For those who, like me, worry that all electronic data
> not in plain text (and ASCII plain text at that) is in constant
> danger of disappearing into the enormous historical bit bucket
> of undecipherable formats using undecipherable encodings on
> obsolete media, consider the following: Perhaps the greatest source
> of information loss in the longrun was the shift by the publishing
> industry to use of cheap high-acid papers early in this century.
> Ask librarians about the conditions of their pre-War collections
> (my nieces just asked, "The Gulf war?") of books. Or how about
> all the nitrate movie film stock collapsing into dust?
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