[Taxacom] Centrally supported electronic archive

[Thomas J Simonsen]

If the Great Library of Alexandria had been stored electronically  
(with safe backups of course), the fire would have been a local  
nuisance - not a global disaster.

Let us not forget that the literature that DID survive the Dark Ages,  
did so because it was available to, and hand copied by, Arabic  
scholars in Baghdad and Cordoba - and to a lesser extend by European  
monks (though they were generally more interested in northern  
mythology such as Beowulf, and Mediterranean classics such as Cesare  
and Cicero). If the literature had been available electronically, it  
is quite likely that more works had been available to the scholars in  
the fist place, and thus potentially survived the DA. Furthermore,  
instead of the time consuming and error prone process of hand copying  
the texts, they could have engaged in the much quicker process of  
file-sharing (which of course could have lead to a lot of legal issues  
- but that is another problem).

Thomas

Quoting "John Grehan" <jgrehan at sciencebuff.org>:

> But some did, so the question might be whether anything would have
> survived at all if the knowledge had been stored electronically?
>
> John Grehan
>
>> bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu] On Behalf Of P. Bryan Heidorn
>> But we should remember that most paper and knowledge did not make it
>> though the dark ages. Paper with few copies can not survive many
>> hundreds of years and is not a good archival format unless monks are
>> busy making fresh copies.
>>
>
>
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---------------------------------
Thomas J. Simonsen, PhD, Post Doc
Department of Biological Sciences
Biological Sciences Centre
University of Alberta
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, T6G 2E9
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