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Georgetown library goes up in flames: Lesson for Washington elite on the need to digitize
May 1, 2007 | 7:21 am
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By David Rothman
Georgetown has long been home to elite Washingtonians—ranging from JFK and his wife to Power People within the Washington press. It’s a history-minded neighborhood.
So you can imagine the feelings of the locals when some prized items in their 72-year-old library building went up in smoke.
“Onlookers gasped as D.C. firefighters carried out item after historical item,” the Washington Post reports. “Most were severely damaged: a warped 1840 oil painting of a freed slave, a soot-covered copy of a D.C. atlas from a century ago, a photo left unrecognizable by flames.”
A little bit of Katrina in D.C.: Some memories wiped out
So now some members of the old D.C. elite know how how people in New Orleans must have felt when Katrina so brutally destroyed the city’s libraries. Might the fire leave them with a better appreciation of the need for massive digitization of America’s libraries? Alas, Katrina and Georgetown are but mild hints of the damage that a terrorist attack on the Library of Congress could do to America’s heritage. Shouldn’t “homeland security” address digital archival issues for everything from books to oil paintings? Isn’t memory—knowing who you are—part of security? The old Georgetown elite isn’t nearly as powerful as in past years, and in fact most of the top Bushies probably live in elsewhere in D.C. or in Northern Virginia, but I hope the fire is still a lesson for all.
Related: Videos from NBC’s Channel Four and the Washington Post, as well as a Washington Examiner story. Also see Timely advice for librarians, post-Katrina––and a scary nuclear scenario for the Library of Congress and Copyright vs. data backup in the dirty-nuke era. Needless to say, digitization help for local libraries could be part of a TeleRead approach in the U.S. or elsewhere.
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Comments:
We are a vein and arrogant lot of fools. Documents and artwork this important shouldn’t be left to east podunk libraries that don’t have proper protection. Regional history is important but the protection of originals should always take precedent over the pride of having the original in a 200 year old brick building with poor design and no fire suppression of any sort.
Richard, I appreciate your concerns, but in the real world, people will often want the documents close to them–rather than having to visit, say, a large academic library. Of course, one advantage of digitization is that it would make the visits less necessary and thus lower the resistance to storage at large institutions. Thanks for your thoughts, and I hope you’ll hang around the TeleBlog. – David
My mother (now in her 80′s) works as a volunteer in a small museum in Port Macquarie (east coast of Australia). It contains priceless records of the early convict settlement of the area. A risk but then I seem to recall another case of records being kept in a big, publicly funded centralised library with state of the art storage (for its day). It was the library of Alexandria – now we barely know anything about it (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria). The same thing happened to various museums in Europe during WW2. The best “storage area” for books and phots is probably thousands of downloads on people’s computers spread all over the world.