It's almost 2014, and the digital age is still a ways off

Harvard historian Robert Darnton in the New York Review of Books, [$] reviewing Arlette Farge's 1989 book The Allure of the Archives, says there may be 129,864,880 different books. ( Google has probably scanned 30 million.) But books aren't the half of it:

The French Archives Nationales contain 252 miles of documents, measured according to shelves loaded with boxes full of manuscripts, and they do not include material related to defense, foreign affairs, and overseas territories. France's one hundred provincial archives contain far more -- about 1,753 miles. Still more can be found in municipal archives, various university archives, and private collections. Most of it has never been read, much less scanned.

Photo credit: Ben Schumin's photostream, shelves at Archives II, http://www.flickr.com/photos/schuminweb/10159531696 per Creative Commons

Harold Henderson, "It's almost 2014, and the digital age is still a ways off," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 30 December 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]