Washington, DC suffered two devastating 3-alarm fires on Monday, to two historic landmarks on opposite sides of town. One of them was the Georgetown Library, renowned not just for its prominent location in Georgetown, but for its many original pictures and documents of Washington and American history (
Read Examiner article). Many of those documents and paintings were damaged beyond repair, and there is no present guess on how much was permanently lost.
Some of the people aware of the things that have been lost or damaged, have commented that there are no copies of most of them... not even in the Library of Congress, another single source of original, unarchived historic material. It has been mentioned that there were no scans of images, and no e-text copies of the books. That means those items have been lost to time, and won't be recoverable. And it surely won't be the last time a fire takes out an old building full of historic, unarchived materials.
Could this event serve as a wake-up call for archiving documents and images as electronic files? After losing irreplaceable artifacts, the idea of storing electronic copies of them, in multiple archive locations for protection, seems to make sense. It would also be a monumental task, but one that would be worthy of government backing and concerted effort, a national mission to preserve our past.
It is often true that new technology is developed or implemented not because of desire, but out of need... witness the many technologies that have developed during the desperate needs of wartime, or after the devastating effects of a natural disaster, disease or famine. Could e-books, long a niche market, become a hot market item thanks to a disasterous loss of our history, and a desperate desire to preserve that history at any cost?
Could DC Library fire serve as a wake-up call for e-books?
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