Viswanathan K's Thoughts

I saw this pic of a cello tape that Etsy seller Light Life sells “for sealing up your boxes and making them look like they're libraries for tiny flatlanders”, as Boing Boing put it and I just had to share it: And while we are on books, when the teacher at my daughter’s school introduced the word “library” to the class, my two and a half year old responded with “It has a lot of books”. Here’s hoping she stays interested in books for the rest of her life, and in the short term, in school books!

Paul Sawers thought what the future of libraries would be and made some interesting points. Before you switch off, no, Sawers isn’t a Luddite who hates technology. He starts by pointing out though that most of us think of a library as a “bricks-and-mortar building filled with paper books”, yet “at a more abstract level, it’s really just a repository of information”. And yes, digital format counts as information. By this definition, Wikipedia and the entire Internet is a library and Google is the new Dewey Decimal system to find what you want! Having acknowledged that the library of the future is indeed digital, Sawers comes to the biggest issue with the new format of information. While a digital library doesn’t run the risk of loss of data (like what happened to the Library of Alexandria), Vint Cerf, one of the founders of the Internet, said it does run the risk of “bit rot”: “This means, you have a bag of bits that you saved for a thousand years, but you don’t know what t...