Library fires have always been tragedies – just ask Galen | Hacker News Reader

Library fires have always been tragedies – just ask Galen

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55 pointsdiodorus41 comments

Not always! When the Library of Ashurbanipal burned in 612 BC, it fired and consequently preserved all the clay tablets inside. Ironically, we might not be able to read the tablets today if the library hadn't burned.

My understanding is when many of these tablets (not Ashurbanipal’s specifically) were removed to the moister confines of Europe they became unreadable

The only known manuscript of Beowulf was damaged in a library fire in 1731 [0]. Lost in that fire was the only known manuscript of the Saxon poem The Battle of Maldon [1]. The poem itself was preserved via a translation done c. 1724, but the original text was lost. An original transcription was subsequently discovered in the 1930s, so we still have access to the words, just not the original artifact. [2]

This very same library is home to the only known manuscript of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight [3].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_library#Ashburnham_Hous...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Battle_of_Maldon

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Battle_of_Maldon#History_o...

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Gawain_and_the_Green_Knigh...

> "fire broke out in Ashburnham House"

They should have seriously considered naming the house differently.

The collection of books rescued from Ashburnham House is now, I understand, mostly in the British Library—this includes Cotton Nero A.x.

Ashburnham House presently is home to some classrooms and a school library—perhaps a very distinguished one, but probably not adequately resourced to look after the Cotton manuscripts!

How much data was the Library of Alexandria? A gigabyte? I ask because I see sites disappearing off the net all the time. I've even seen sites being shut down because of the pandemic. Some people got COVID and were financially drained and couldn't afford the $15.00 it takes to renew a domain along with a bare minimum hosting bundle. It's very sad to witness. Archive.org's Wayback Machine is doing a great job, but even that is problematic since we don't know how long even that will be around, and we might need an archival site that backs up Wayback!

Comparing the Library of Alexandria with random web sites is unwarranted. Libraries are curated.

And websites who can't afford hosting, and there's hosting for $5 these days, BTW, self-curate themselves out of existence.

> Libraries are curated.

Generally, yes. But does Library of Alexandria count as such if officials were confiscating all the books on ships arriving to Alexandria, putting them in the library, and only returning copies to the ship crews and passengers (once these were furnished)? To me, Library of Alexandria in a way was the Internet Archive of the ancient world.

It was curated, but not by the Librarians of Alexandria. The curation was done by travellers who decided that particular books were important enough to bring with them.

Incidentally I've imagined the Librarians scrambling to grab books from the shelves as the Library burned, and wondered if they would have actually "saved" anything.

The idea being, anything the librarians thought worth saving probably existed in other libraries, and would be more likely to have multiple copies survive to this day. Meanwhile, if they grabbed some book of third-tier poetry at random, that would be more likely to be a unique volume.

Along the same lines you could argue that any book collection is being curated by writers, as it's the writers who decide what books are important enough to write.

> Comparing the Library of Alexandria with random web sites is unwarranted. Libraries are curated

I wasn't trying to compare, just making an analogy / metaphor. As in: how many libraries of Alexandria do we lose each day on the web? Because it it's too high a number, then the web is fundamentally broken.

> And websites who can't afford hosting, and there's hosting for $5 these days, BTW, self-curate themselves out of existence

But it shouldn't have to be like that. I've seen some real gems out there that disappeared and weren't backed up on Wayback. Literally all the owner needed was $5 as you say and the site could continue.

There's some complexifiers to this that seem worth recognizing, especially since the "financially drained" that was mentioned was pandemic-related and therefore is likely part of a broader cluster of problems:

1. $5 and tail risk. Even if your financial hardship isn't that bad, if it's still making things more unpredictable, that could be $5 plus a cascade of overdraft fees one day. If things are worse, of course, it could also be your last meal for the month, or your last chance to not go homeless. Better get rid of any expense you can.

2. $5 and executive function. The payment card you were using expired. Are you going to remember to update the info when you're in constant low-grade panic or depression?

3. Relatedly to (2), $5 if you can get to that point in the first place. Maybe you had your site hosted on something more expensive, for… whatever reason. Now you have to remember how to transfer all the files and hope everything still works, and so on.

4. Kind of like (3), $5 except for the more-expensive domain name that seemed like a good idea at the time. Oops. Where are you going to move to? Will anyone be able to find it afterwards anyway?

5. $5 and relationship overhead. Which of these five-dollar hosters are trustworthy? Will they stay that way?

There's probably more.

If we care about preserving the independent Web, these sorts of problems definitely present themselves over the long run. I'm theoretically an affluent-by-many-standards technologist, but I've had issues over time that resulted in my previous sites going splat and just… couldn't really pull together what it would take to revive them, and wasn't that motivated. Decentralization of maintenance-energy overall while having individual sites relying on one or a few people has real inefficiencies that way if permanency is valuable.

> As in: how many libraries of Alexandria do we lose each day on the web? Because it it's too high a number, then the web is fundamentally broken.

If your brain remembered every piece of information it stumbled upon, you'd cease to function before your first birthday.

Your computer would be out of RAM before it gets past its BIOS check.

And your HDD would get filled to capacity in less than a week and become inoperable.

The web doesn't have to preserve everything. 99% of everything is garbage, and I'm being conservative. Forgetting is an essential capability, and we should focus on quality, not quantity.

Ironically, you've said something worth remembering.

It's fine, we reinvent it every day from first principles.

It's possible to set up static hosting for free. I actually saved $5 (+1$ tax) a month by doing that.

> And websites who can't afford hosting, and there's hosting for $5 these days, BTW, self-curate themselves out of existence.

It is not a given that the more a website can afford hosting the better quality they are. For example, many good-quality websites die because the webmasters themselves died (and thus cannot keep hosting the website), and meanwhile there are endless examples of SEO-bait content farms that provide little value, but can easily afford hosting.

This means this "self curation" ends up curating for newer websites better ranked in search engines, which would be the online analogue of libraries having no books from before 2000, and being full of modern day magazines and newspapers of dubious quality. Were Beowulf a website, how long would its owner be able to host it?

I'd guesstimate that a scroll could contain something like 33 kB of text (in modern equivalent single-byte encoding with inter-word spaces), since the Iliad is divided into 24 "books" (presumably scrolls - the division may even have taken place in Alexandria itself!), has around 120000 characters, and the average Greek word length as per https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1076/jqul.8.3.175.409... is around 5.5 (add 1 for inter-word spaces). Assuming there were 400000 of such scrolls in the library (that seems to be a higher end estimate), it comes out as something like 12 GB.

Thanks, wow you could keep it on a 16gb USB flash drive!

Apparently, the whole Library of Congress collection would take up 10 petabytes of storage, give or take. So the size of the Library of Alexandria can be very roughly assessed at 1.2 microLoC's.

Some archives store books in image format in addition to text, is that 10 petabytes of pure text?

The LoC has extensive media collections besides the books. The textual collection is on the order of 10 terabytes of data though, not petabytes.

For a moment I was wondering what a micro Line of Code is... then I noticed the mention to the Library of Congress.

I imagine that the biggest bulk of data would come from illustrations, though. The first example that occurs to me is Euclid's Elements.

That would probably depend on what percentage of scrolls contained illustrations in the first place.

Relatedly, did we ever figure out what was in that collection? I vaguely remember hearing that the book list was recovered.

Susan Orlean wrote The Library Book, in part about the Los Angeles Public Library burning, possibly due to arson. The fire marshal said he saw the fire so hot in one corridor that it was clear: https://www.worldcat.org/title/library-book/oclc/1039296901&...

Digitizing rare objects would go a long way toward preserving them: A digital copy is not the same thing, but it's far better than nothing. It also provides near-immediate access to people worldwide in a moment, instead of to only those who can travel to a certain location and schedule a visit to the rare artifacts room. It's a great democratizing of information (I'm preaching to the choir, I know ...).

It's surprising to me that such work often has to struggle for funding (IIRC). I would happily support a tax increase to cover a nationwide and worldwide digitization project: It's a one-time cost (beyond ongoing storage and bandwidth), and provides so much value for eternity.

..................

In college, I was studying in the enormous main library. There were private cubicles with doors around the edges of the stacks, going up six floors - a great place for quiet and to not be found, when I really needed to focus. I didn't tell anyone: nobody knew I was there or ever went there.

I remember one night I took a break and walked from the cubicle through the stacks to the elevator lobby, to use the bathroom. As I approached I heard a faint sound, getting louder, kind of like a bell. It was the fire alarm. It had been going off for 20 minutes. Five large floors of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves beneath me; nobody knew I was there or ever went there.

Concentrating rare assets still goes on today, and not just libraries. Museums concentrate them, too.

And schools...

I was thinking about that the other day, as I passed a major art museum: Has a modern museum ever suffered a calamity that damaged much/most of its treasures?

The Iraq Museum in Baghdad was looted in 2003 (and the artifacts that were not recovered presumably sold to collectors), the Delhi Natural History museum burned to the ground in 2016 (total collection loss) and the Brazil National Museum burned down in 2018 with huge losses.

In 2018 the National Museum of Brazil burned.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-45392668

"Most of the 20 million items it contained, including the oldest human remains ever found in the Americas, are believed to have been destroyed. "

This was my first thought too -- they also lost lots of records of human languages, many now extinct.

On August 25, 1914, the German army ravaged the city of Leuven,Belgium, deliberately burning the university library, destroying approximately 230,000 books, 950 manuscripts, and 800 incunabula

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_of_Belgium

In World War 2 a massive amount of damage was done to libraries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_libraries_damaged_duri...

Large fires that result in great cultural loss still happen...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Universal_Studios_fire

A little less recently and less literary, the 1973 National Personnel Records Center fire destroyed an enormous number of US Army and Air Force military service records and continues to cause great frustration to historians and genealogists. Newer National Archives facilities, such as the one in San Bruno, are built in a bunker-like fashion in order to prevent damage and contain fires.

The 1937 and 1965 fox/mgm fires should have been a wakeup call for better archival methods.

In India, there are vast numbers of palm leaf manuscripts rotting in temple vaults. There is so little support for scholarship. It's really sad what we are probably losing every day.

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