Google and The Quest for Information Archiving

I’m imagining a future 3,000 years from now when scholars and archaeologists attempt to put together the scattered fragments of our digital cuneiforms like we attempt to do today with the scant remains of Mesopotamian cultures from the past that were just as vibrant as ours. 

I wonder how far Google will get before the barbarians invade and the library is burned?

As early as the third millennium B.C., Mesopotamian scribes began to catalogue the clay tablets in their collections. For ease of reference, they appended content descriptions to the edges of tablets, and they adopted systematic shelving for quick identification of related texts. The greatest and most famous of the ancient collections, the Library of Alexandria, had, in its ambitions and its methods, a good deal in common with Google’s book projects. It was founded around 300 B.C. by Ptolemy I, who had inherited Alexandria, a brand-new city, from Alexander the Great. A historian with a taste for poetry, Ptolemy decided to amass a comprehensive collection of Greek works. Like Google, the library developed an efficient procedure for capturing and reproducing texts.

Onward and Upward with the Arts: Future Reading: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker

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