In 1986 the BBC spent about $4 million turning a book that monks wrote in 1086 into a fancy digital archive. By 2002 almost nobody could open it anymore. Meanwhile the original book is still sitting in a building in London, and researchers read it all the time. I think about that story every time someone calls libraries the real data centers, because once you run the numbers the joke holds up way better than it should. The white and gold hall in these photos is the library at Admont Abbey in…