We are fools and history tends to repeat itself...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria
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Digital media will not last forever. And the world's knowledge will not necessarily be backed up. Certainly won't last as long as the Dead Sea Scrolls or the Rosetta Stone.
Fallacious reasoning. You are pointing to two things that were preserved as much by accident as design. Yes, the rosetta stone was probably intended to be a durable artifact, but its significance today is that 1) it escaped being lost or destroyed (perhaps by someone who wanted to re-use the stone for another message), 2) it managed to be found 3) it said the same thing in three different scripts/languages, and provided a bridge to understanding Egyptian hieroglyphics.
Similarly, there was surely some intent of durability in the creation of the dead sea scrolls, but the fact that we know about them today depends on may external factors. Continued dry climate, long term success of abrahmic religions, escaping looting or reuse of the materials, etc.
Ultimately, the medium matters, but so too does the sheer number of copies. Digital storage makes the latter practical for a huge amount of information. I'll tell you, though, the people who actually feel responsibility for preserving the worlds knowledge includes a significant number of people who aren't content to trust a single strategy for preservation. Even for digital storage, there are people who work to ensure long term robustness through multiple strategies.
However I do have every SERVICE MANUAL to every model of AWA Fisk radio ever made. Not only the schematic, but alignment, assembly procedures and parts lists. I suspect it is the only complete collection in the world. In perfect condition and not available digitally. These are locked up off site with a secure documents company for safe keeping.
Remember the great fire of Alexandria...
Great that you have your own project. Obviously though, physical copies at a facility dedicated to preservation of physical copies is pretty much exactly what the Library of Alexandria was. Moreover, by forgoing digital versions, you are both missing an opportunity to ensure the information is available and useful in the future, and sacrificing its present day utility, which, I'll suggest, decreases the future likelihood that anyone will care that the information has been preserved.
Generally, I'd say that any "portfolio" that includes significant investments in planning for the "end of the world," should have much larger investments in avoiding the "end of the world." Ironically, people who prepare for the "end of the world" by coming together with other people who are preparing for the "end of the world," are actually cultivating resilience that makes the end of the world less likely/more distant, while those who hole-up and isolate themselves are helping make the "end of the world" more likely, but even then, they are making a suckers bet.
We have made an agreement with The Internet Archive to donate our entire library to their collection.
well, until some troll tells the IA that the manuals are copyright and It can't publish them, at which point they'll be well locked away out of reach as their own property. Kickstarter perhaps ?
I'm pretty sure the copyright act allows copying of full publications if a copy is not available from the publisher in a reasonable time.
In the US, at least, there are insufficient provisions for abandoned or orphan works. Moreover, the terms of copyright are so absurdly long due to the lobbying efforts of Disney that I suspect that most test equipment manuals are, unequivocally, still covered by copyright.
People are free to try to keep stuff out of the hands of the internet archive because of ill-informed paranoia (or well informed reasoning), but I'll point out that the Internet Archive is actually one of the places that has enough information to make well-informed decisions about this stuff. Also supporting them is an example of how coming together builds resilience. It increases their base of support, and their leverage in negotiating with copyright holders. They've clearly already managed to make a significant amount of information publicly available, including a lot of
technical docsAs I see it, the thing about digital preservation is that it is cheap enough that its practical to preserve things that would be very difficult to make a case for physically preserving. The manuals-plus collection is a perfect example of that. The owners could no longer make an economic justification for preserving it. Perhaps, given enough time and effort, someone could have been found who would be willing to preserve it as physical media, but the cost commitment over decades would be high enough that it would have to be weighed against other priorities, and making that decision would have involved its own non-trivial costs.
On the other hand, the case for digital preservation is such that one person with a foot in the world of digital archives was able to put together and execute a plan in a short amount of time that has delivered the short term physical preservation of most of the archive, and the likelihood that most of it will be archived digitally and made widely available, while also leaving the possibility open that some of it could also be preserved as physical media. There is a large up-front cost to digitizing the collection, but: 1) That cost has immediate benefits in making the collection more accessible/useful 2) The long term cost is tiny compared to the cost of physical storage. 3) The trend is for digital storage and distribution to get even cheaper, while physical storage and distribution will grow.
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