Natural disasters costing us our history

The recent earthquake(s) in Italy made me think about my visit to that wonderful country so many years ago.  I remember being awed at the architecture, the history, the age of everything there.  Here in Iowa we think something that’s over 100 hundred years old is old. Iowa has been a state since 1846, and I went into restrooms in Italy that were older than that!

What really got me to thinking was, how much history was destroyed and can never be retrieved?  Granted, there is nothing to compare to actually seeing a document that is 400 years old.  But to have that document disappear forever is just too much to grasp.   Think of the significance of the Magna Carta, signed in 1215.  There are still copies of this historic document hanging  around, all but one of them in England.  The Magna Carta is perhaps the one document that moved the English-speaking world away from feudalism and towards the constitutional law we have today.

What if all the copies were destroyed?  A major loss, no doubt.  Well, thanks to some forward-thinking on the part of the British Library we have a digitized version of this that, theoretically, should last forever.  Hopefully they also preserved this image on microfilm, which, when prepared properly, should last for 500 years.

The loss of life due to the earthquakes in Italy is terrible.  Loss of life due to anything except maybe old age, is terrible.  That life can never be brought back.  Losing our history is unthinkable, and also unnecessary.  Our historical documents (and when I say “our” I mean humans, not just those of us in the USA) need to be preserved NOW.  Once preserved on microfilm, then they can be digitized and made available to everyone.  Through the wonder of the Internet, I just now looked at the Magna Carta!  Digitization is the key to availability and archiving, and microfilm the key to preservation.

If you want to get some more insight about digitization, I suggest you read Dick Eastman’s excellent newsletter.