A short post, with mostly links pointing to videos about the UK’s British Library. I learned from a YouTube video by Tom Scott (link listed further down) that the British Library needs to have a copy of anything published in UK and Ireland and that the copies are stored in massive towers traversed by robots. The technology and the philosophy behind it is fascinating, but it also brings difficult dilemmas: All information is physical, and if we keep storing increasing amount of information, we will hit physical limits with land and materials.
This is Tom Scott’s YouTube video that got me started:
Tom Scott jokingly expressed disappointment about not being allowed to attach cameras to the robot. The British Library already released such a video themselves:
The British Library has an excellent website explaining the details:
If you publish anything in the UK and Ireland, you need to give one copy to the British Library. This system, called legal deposit, has existed in English law since 1662. It was updated in 2013 to include electronic publications. (https://www.bl.uk/services/legal-deposit)
The amount of publications the British Library has is massive:
34. We receive a copy of every publication produced in the UK and Ireland through legal deposit. Last year we received over 500,000 printed and digital items and over 100 terabytes from the UK web domain. https://www.bl.uk/stories/blogs/posts/50-facts-about-the-british-library)
It even has the legal requirement to store copies of digital publications:
Each year, our UK Web Archive collects a ‘snapshot’ of all the UK websites that we can identify. This includes at least four million websites, with several billion files. (https://www.bl.uk/services/legal-deposit/web-archiving)
Here is the 2013 video discussing the new digital requirement:
The archive is currently down, probably due to the 2023 cyberattack: https://www.bl.uk/about/cyber-attack.
The robotic book tower at the British Library is an impressive feat of engineering, but is it sustainable? Our current information paradigm divides information into two main types: digital, which is composed of discrete 0’s and 1’s, and analogue, which is composed of more continuous elements such as ink on paper a.k.a. books, film, and stone carvings. Regardless of the type, the information is stored somewhere physically. Even digital information is physical. Think of your computer, USB thumb drives, and gigantic servers you access via the Internet. With many analogue formats, you can read the information with human eyes while with digital formats, you need a computer to read the information. We sometimes fail to realize the physical nature of digital information because it is invisible to our eyes. The arrangement of atoms to form the information is still very much physical, as small as they are. One analogue format that is not human readable is vinyl records, which requires a record player.
The physical dilemma of the British Library’s storage approach in steps:
- People will continue producing new information in different formats.
- If a government requires new information to be stored perpetually, the archive can only grow.
- Since the Earth is physically finite, the archive runs into physical limits. This archive would be competing with other demands for land and materials. At some point, there would be no more land, materials, or both to keep growing this archive. What do you do, then?
Underlying the desire to have the information we produced exist forever is the desire for us to be remembered forever, even after we die. This desire of wanting to be remembered forever in some physical form, even a humble booklet, conflicts with the physical limits of our world. Just as how we are in a cycle of birth-life-death, our use of physical resources to create information needs to be a cycle so that others may live and create information using the physical resources we surrender. Perhaps we will figure out a way to keep expanding without hitting physical limits. Until then, we might have to make peace with the reality that we might be forgotten.
City Untangled 