Chapter 38

Ruminations

Monday afternoon

Released from the hospital, I went straight to the library to see everyone and was glad to find out the days had passed without any glitches. That’s the way it goes when good people work together.

After that, I picked up a few groceries, headed home and first thing, logged into my university account to email Mark. But as I sat at there, images of that long-ago library, and its terrible, senseless destruction, flooded my mind. Why did I go to Alexandria at such a dangerous time? Could it have been a warning of troubles ahead here or even a foretelling of the end of this indispensable campus library?

Before I could begin to worry; the Crocodile was in my head: ‘Artemus, you also must prepare for a time in your own future. It will be known as the second dark age. When you return to your own time, your own world, seek us and we’ll talk further.’

Those words ran through my mind in a loop, over and over. I tried to shift that loop to my subconscious. No luck. How could I contact them? I didn’t know. Anyway, I didn’t feel like checking emails or phone messages for work or home either. I wasn’t ready to jump back into my life; I was too tired. I went to the living room to a nice cushy chair. I wanted to relax while my head was still full of Alexandria, the desert and people, the whole experience and what I’d learned.

I began to wonder what had happened to all those people and places in the terrible years that followed. In those days, large library collections existed only when sanctioned and supported by powerful authoritarian emperors who sometimes ruled under the heel of religious leaders. Libraries were not redundant and often annihilated during or after a conflict or change of rulers. But what does that have to do with me? Now there are university libraries everywhere, large and small. It would be a much harder task to get rid of so many comprehensive collections in so many different places.

Why did Crocodile mention a second dark age? How could something like that happen now? I wondered if the current trend toward centralization of digital technologies and services put us in danger of losing control over selection of products and services. Could suppliers get together and form monopolies? Was Digital World becoming big enough to threaten our autonomy, our freedom of choice? Were the Guardians hinting at concern for any of those sorts of things?

Centralization of libraries would remove local control, which wouldn’t be good for the library or the user. And what about digitization? There would surely be unintended consequences of universal digitization. What if digital information became the only format for materials and services; and Digital World was the only supplier of everything for every library? That sounds like a monopoly. Then I would have to agree with David’s reluctance to have his work published only in digital formats.

Which would more likely endure: hard copies or digital copies? Surely, if someone’s intention is to destroy certain published works, it would be easier to press the delete button on a digital feed than hunt down all the paper copies.

I knew the Nag Hammadi find and later the Dead Sea Scrolls had excited scholars and regular readers; and much had been learned about the distant past that couldn’t have been learned any other way. If we became entirely and altogether digitized and someone hit delete too many times or pulled the main plug, all of it would just disappear. There wouldn’t be anything to dig up later.

My mind raced, I grabbed a pencil and yellow pad and sat down at the kitchen table to make a hard copy of my ramblings. Paper’s good, no one can hack it. I started with basic, fundamental threats. Oops, hacking could also bring on disastrous consequences if we depended exclusively on the cyberworld.

What else? I think it’s a minefield. Can one ever know if digital is one-hundred-percent safe and protected? This seems to me a pivotal question for my time. I don’t think there are any easy answers. It looks like information isn’t any safer in a thoroughly digitized world than it was in the distant past. Could it lead to a new version of totalitarianism?

Everything’s so complicated now. There would surely be unintended consequences if digital collections were consolidated. I wonder if others have thought about such things. Maybe I’d better start talking to my colleagues, get them thinking. I decided to work on this tomorrow.

I was plenty tired. It was easy to let go; I slept without dreams.

 NEXT.....Chapter 39
Consequences