Yes. All. The. Books. In Norwegian, at least. Hundreds of
thousands of them. Every book in the library's holdings.
By law, "all published content, in all media, [must]
be deposited with the National Library of Norway," so when the library is
finished scanning, the entire record of a people's language and literature will
be machine-readable and sitting in whatever we call the cloud in 15
years.
If you happen to be in Norway, as measured by your IP
address, you will be able to access all 20th-century works, even those still under
copyright. Non-copyrighted works from all time periods will be available for
download.
Here in the States, we are struggling to make even a small
percentage of English-language works accessible to the citizens of our fine
country, despite the efforts of groups like the Digital Public Library of America, Hathi Trust, and (I dare say)Google.
Which means that we are not ready for the apocalypse. But
the Norwegians, that's a people preparing for the deep future. Now they are
home to the Svalbard Seed Vault and they
will have all the books stored away.
Imagine digital archaeologists coming across the remains of
early 21st century civilization in an old data center on the warming tundra.
They look around, find some scraps of Buzzfeed and The
Atlantic, maybe some Encyclopaedia Britannicas, and then, gleaming
in the data: a complete set
of Norwegian literature.
Suddenly, the Norwegians become to 27th-century humans what
the Greeks were to the Renaissance. Everyone names the children of the space
colonies Per and Henrik, Amalie and Sigrid. The capital of our new home planet
will be christened Oslo.
