Yes. All. The. Books. In Norwegian, at least. Hundreds of thousands of them. Every book in the library’s holdings.
By law, “all published content, in all media, [must] be deposited with the National Library of Norway,” so when the library is finished scanning, the entire record of a people’s language and literature will be machine-readable and sitting in whatever we call the cloud in 15 years.
If you happen to be in Norway, as measured by your IP address, you will be able to access all 20th-century works, even those still under copyright. Non-copyrighted works from all time periods will be available for download.
The Norwegians, that’s a people preparing for the deep future. Now they are home to the Svalbard Seed Vault and they will have all the books stored away.
Imagine digital archaeologists coming across the remains of early 21st century civilization in an old data center on the warming tundra. They look around, find some scraps of Buzzfeed and The Atlantic, maybe some Encyclopaedia Britannicas, and then, gleaming in the data: a complete set of Norwegian literature.
Suddenly, the Norwegians become to 27th-century humans what the Greeks were to the Renaissance. Everyone names the children of the space colonies Per and Henrik, Amalie and Sigrid. The capital of our new home planet will be christened Oslo.
Can America afford to be left behind?
Seriously, though, smaller countries with friendlier attitudes toward government and the humanities surely have an easier task than Americans in preserving our past. But we’re hardly trying.
Our libraries do what they can, but the idea of digitizing literally every book published in this country is a goal that we should shoot for and fund.
Source: The Atlantic
