And it's unclear, too, how to best store electronic data to avoid losing it. If you take a piece of paper, it lasts 500 years. If you take a CD- ROM, it lasts 10 years. There's a new type of CD-ROM, which might possibly last 100 years, but it's very, very expensive. New York Public Library President Paul LeClerc warned that, unless someone keeps pace, parts of contemporary civilization might be lost to future generations.
Many libraries have their own projects underway.
One purpose of the librarians' conference, he added, was to avoid overlaps in saving the past's treasures. The Library of Congress is digitizing books on travel in America, and the Germans are digitizing a lot of travel books from around Europe. Whatever the landscape of the libraries of the future, their holdings may well be more digital than in book form. Digitized books won't exist there. They will be in your home, on the Internet.