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Chapter 1

The Learner’s Digital Domain

In the third century BC, the Library of Alexandria was tasked with collecting all the world’s knowledge, storing a copy of every written work in scroll and book form. Of course, papyrus isn’t particularly durable, as the infamous burning of the library unfortunately demonstrated. Even without fire, paper records are precariously fragile and temporary.

Now that so much of our writing and recordkeeping are digital, we might presume that all the world’s knowledge is safe from loss or destruction. You’ll often hear people say that the Internet is forever. Once you post something online, it never goes away. And while it’s true that making copies no longer requires labor-intensive transcription or paper-intensive reprinting, we face new challenges. The Internet isn’t forever. Certainly technologies become obsolete. Websites go away. Links “rot,” sometimes faster than paper does.

The preservation of digital materials requires us to think differently about storage, in part because of the ever-changing formats in which we store data—Word documents, WordPerfect documents, Google Docs, PDFs, Rich Text Format—which of these will be around and legible thousands of years from now?

We must rethink storage too, because the amount of that digital material we are tasked with preserving is skyrocketing. All of the Library of Alexandria—about 500,000 scrolls—could fit onto a single USB drive today. In 2012, IBM (n.d.) estimated that the digital universe contains 2.5 quintillion bytes of data. No doubt, that number has continued to grow exponentially since then. It’s hard for people to fathom a number that big; it’s also hard to fathom that the contents of the Library of Alexandria can now fit in your pocket.