A Noah’s Ark for Books

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I grew up in a really small town with a very tiny, very old two room library. The periodicals were stored in a musty room in the basement. My favorite thing about the library was the aroma. I have always liked the smell of books and in this venue the odor was particularly strong. Maybe it was the age of the repository or number of volumes crammed into the confined space but the book smell was intense … and I loved it.

Books have always been an avenue of escape for me so I’ve never fully embraced the transition of books and newspapers to the electronic medium. 'Trons are fine, but I like paper; always have. I even use a legal pad for writing rough drafts of stories and blogs.

I know I’m not the only person who reveres a good hard covered tome. The New York Times reports that internet entrepreneur Brewster Kahle has a vision of creating a Noah’s Ark for Books.

Mr. Kahle runs the Internet Archive, an internet site that archives web sites for posterity. It has an electronic collection of over 3 million texts. According to the Internet Archive, since the mid-1980s, Kahle has focused on developing technologies for information discovery and digital libraries.

Kahle’s recent vision focuses on creating a physical storage area for books and magazines. The idea is similar to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, an underground storage facility in Svalbard, Norway, which preserves thousands of seeds that could be used as replacements in case the world’s seed genebanks are destroyed or corrupted.

The book repository is located in the San Francisco, California area and to-date has archived over 500,000 volumes with a goal of 10 million.

What do you think? Is electronic storage good enough? Is the idea of physical storage for the world’s written word crazy?