考研英语阅读：2025年考研英语一 阅读 Text 4

[1]Visit any antiques store and you’ll encounter artifacts from the past: photographs, letters, a brochure detailing the Sinclair dinosaur exhibit from the 1964-65 World’s Fair, the ephemera of history. Yet these objects aren’t truly ephemeral, because they’re still here, decades, even centuries later. Why? Because they’re tangible.

[2]Have you pondered the life cycle of intangible formats, digital information, given that those who produce these artifacts seldom make provision for their long-term preservation? For millennia, we’ve known what we’ve known due to artifacts that have survived, often despite their original creators’ neglect. The thing itself is the medium that delivers the information. At the time of creation, no attempts were made at intentional preservation, yet analog materials have a chance of surviving and serving as the historical record that biographers, historians, and novelists rely on. Libraries and archives have traditionally shouldered the responsibility of organization, preservation, and access to information. One of S. R. Ranganathan’s foundational Laws of Library Science is “Save the time of the reader.” Thus, librarians digitize the tangible so that researchers the world over can quickly search and access their holdings. The result is an embarrassment of historical riches, which brings its own needle-and-haystack problems.

[3]Librarians’ innate altruism can act against us when users point to universality of access by holding up a cell phone and saying, “it’s all in here,” or noting “I never have to leave my laptop” as evidence that libraries are less vital for researchers today. Yet how was that universality of access made possible and, perhaps more importantly, how is it maintained? Who curates what is preserved? When it comes to born-digital information, the terrifying answer can be: if not librarians and archivists, then no one. Digital information requires a great deal more care than analog. Even when a digital object is preserved, it may only be the carrier that’s saved, not the information itself. As technology advances and a format becomes obsolete, the object is useless. Have you ever stared helplessly at a ZIP disk, thinking: how do I get the files off this? Without constant migration of digital assets, a nightmare about the foreseeable future is what keeps historians up at night: a historical record that abruptly stops when digital replaces analog.

[4]This phenomenon is frightening because it’s pervasive, from the photos on your phone to the official U.S. federal government publications integral to documenting our republic and informing its electorate. There’s also the horror of sheer volume; we are drowning in a sea of unorganized digital information. Digital objects increase exponentially in a way tangible formats do not. In the 1990s, a family might had a few hours of home movies documenting three generations. My millennial sister has thousands of hours of video from her two-year-old’s still brief time on this planet with no organizational metadata (i.e., it’s unsearchable). So when it comes to preservation, the situation is akin to bailing that digital sea with a teacup. From a “historical record” standpoint, this doesn’t even touch on the issue of authentication, which is increasingly important in an era of deep fakes, manipulation, and after-the-fact revision of primary sources.