![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
The remainder of the month of April 02021
May. 1st, 2021 11:42 pmHello again! Let us begin with the idea that neither Sylvia Plath nor Anne Sexton are supposed to be punchlines about angsty teenage girls.
Also, history is vast enough that those people who we have thought about as impossibly ancient were writing poetry about those they thought of as impossibly ancient.
Michael Collins, the Apollo 11 pilot who did not get to walk on the moon, is now among the stars at 90 years of age.
A fire in South Africa spread to a historic university library, causing damage and destruction of materials that may never be recoverable. Worse, if the investigation turns out to conclude the fires were set deliberately, someone may have caused the destruction of scholarship and resources that could have been used for greater scholarship. And despite the seeming availability of everything in digital form these days, the amount of archival material that has been actually digitized is minuscule, and cannot replace an actual visit to an archive for serious research. Not to mention that doing digitization and preservation the right way is extremely resource-intensive, both initially and in the long term, so the more things get digitized, the more resources are needed to maintain those digital archives and make them accessible.
( And the rest inside )
Last for tonight, the possibility that what we think of as the collapse is the inevitability of change coming for us all, and that we can do better for ourselves by both learning from those who have already faced apocalypse and by trying to make the change as non-damaging as possible.
Also, history is vast enough that those people who we have thought about as impossibly ancient were writing poetry about those they thought of as impossibly ancient.
Michael Collins, the Apollo 11 pilot who did not get to walk on the moon, is now among the stars at 90 years of age.
A fire in South Africa spread to a historic university library, causing damage and destruction of materials that may never be recoverable. Worse, if the investigation turns out to conclude the fires were set deliberately, someone may have caused the destruction of scholarship and resources that could have been used for greater scholarship. And despite the seeming availability of everything in digital form these days, the amount of archival material that has been actually digitized is minuscule, and cannot replace an actual visit to an archive for serious research. Not to mention that doing digitization and preservation the right way is extremely resource-intensive, both initially and in the long term, so the more things get digitized, the more resources are needed to maintain those digital archives and make them accessible.
( And the rest inside )
Last for tonight, the possibility that what we think of as the collapse is the inevitability of change coming for us all, and that we can do better for ourselves by both learning from those who have already faced apocalypse and by trying to make the change as non-damaging as possible.
