A Book! A Book! My Kingdom for a Book!

How much time do we spend attempting to give millennials the illusion of research? We scan, we type in metadata, we build search engines, and we neglect our mountainous backlog of paper resources, all to provide a superficial sampling of documents for cursory review. What are the results of this Sisyphean task? An explosion of in-depth historical inquiry based on the time honored tasks of internal and external criticism of primary source materials? Here at True Archives we laugh at that conclusion. There seems to be little hope of a new Herodotus appearing suddenly as a result of our endless labor in rendering digital surrogates. Even if a scholar was able to take our pathetic sampling of images to compose a monumental tome, who would keep and maintain it? Certainly not the Information Scientist, who loves holding the historian hostage to a world of byte sized snippets of facts, custom made for skim reading and shallow understanding. In the future, the heroic Archivist must step forward to save the book in addition to the material that makes composition of the book possible.