Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor, Your Huddled Books Yearning to Survive

Once upon a time there was a special place that gave meaning to surrogates we used in everyday life. We used to exchange these substitutes without a thought about their representational value because we knew they symbolically held the same value as items stored inside that special place. Then, one day, some genius decided the items in the special place were no longer needed, and the surrogates we exchanged were to be valued on faith alone. Obviously that did not work, and the exchange items have been floating in limbo ever since. I’m speaking, of course, about United States currency, which used to base its value on the gold stored at Fort Knox, Kentucky. There is a reason why Goldfinger wanted to get into that bastion, and why James Bond had to stop him: without gold the dollar has no meaning. So it is with the books in our libraries that the evil Information Scientist wants scanned and destroyed: without the books, their images have no meaning.

I wish True Archives could claim credit for this beautiful analogy, but it belongs to Carl Posy, Head of the School of Religion and Philosophy of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and former Academic Director of the National Library of Israel. Carl spoke at our library in 2012 and described his gold standard theory, one which I hope every archivist will take to heart. Biblioposers work hand in hand with the Information Scientist, cheerfully feeding original books into the maw of destruction because they have always viewed the codex as a disposable commodity. Only the archivist, dedicated to the preservation of three-dimensional information bearing artifacts, is in a position to save the book, just like James Bond saved the gold at Fort Knox. He never stopped to question "why"...