But like any enormous enterprise undertaken by volunteers on the Internet, it has its high points and low points. Dr. Boli often looks to see what old books have newly appeared in the collections (“old” defined as “before the 95-year copyright limit in the United States”), and he has lately noticed a trend that he had predicted, but did not expect to see in full flower quite so soon.
A veil has fallen over much of the past because its literature is written in letters we can no longer read. Or at least that was Dr. Boli’s first guess, but now he is not sure what is happening—except that whatever is happening seems to show a profound ignorance of the past.
For example, a volume of Thackeray’s works was recently added to the Internet Archive.
The uploader filed it as “the complete works of william makepeace charkeray by various.”
What Dr. Boli had thought was a particularly legible form of blackletter type is no longer legible to current readers. (The word “blackletter” itself is unknown to the Firefox spelling checker.) But even if the type is difficult, doesn’t everyone know that there is only one third name that follows the two names “William” and “Makepeace”? Apparently not. Furthermore, the title of the individual volume (The Adventures of Philip on His Way Through the World) is not catalogued at all, so you will never find it from the metadata. The uploader apparently does not understand how sets of books work.
An archive of documents from the Shakers includes several neatly handwritten iterations of the Holy Laws of…Lion.
Again, even if the cursive is illegible, which it seems to be to many people younger than forty or fifty, what place would have holy laws in the minds of a Christian sect? Anybody?
In spite of research that might suggest the contrary, it has become dogma on the Internet that sans-serif type is easier to read than serif type. Does this mean that we are actually losing the ability to interpret serif type? It looks that way:
“The Great Debate Between Robert Young Hayne of South Carolina and Daniel Website of Massachusetts.”
But what happens when we add the confounding factor of a foreign language—namely German written in Fraktur? We get a curious result:
This is filed as “Dr. Martin Futher’s Complete Works.” Note that whoever it was—librarian, volunteer, AI bot—who uploaded this book was able to read and translate the German for “complete works,” including the lower-case K in “Werke,” which does not look like a K at all to English-speakers. Yet somehow the name Martin Luther meant nothing to the person, or at least not enough to trigger a doubt about the interpretation of the author’s name. (Actually, the author here is listed as “Various.”)
And finally, what happens when the language is a dead language—meaning one that Google Translate refuses to deal with in any but the most rudimentary and dismissive manner?
This is filed as Unknown by Various. At least we didn’t identify the author as Tommy Tertius.
These are all good books, and thanks to the tireless volunteers at the Internet Archive they are available to anyone who needs them. Good luck finding them.