Tri-Li Summer Reading Website

There’s cold, there’s colder, then there is what you have been living with for weeks now. Mrs. Dewey, your boss, insists that you call her Melly but there is something about her that makes you keep going back to Mrs. Dewey. She’s got this intensity about her which, no matter how friendly she is, makes her seem like anything but a Melly.

You pick up another carton of microfilm from the sled dogs and start your long walk down into the crypt. It’s not really a crypt, it’s really an abandoned mine just south of the Arctic Circle. Everyone calls it the crypt though and you really wish they wouldn’t, the place is creepy enough as it is. Underground there are miles and miles of shelves filled with reels of microfilm. That microfilm has every book, every magazine, every newspaper ever written on them. There are millions of them, literally in cold storage.

One day you asked Mrs. Dewey (“please sweetie, call me Melly, everybody does” really nobody did), why they didn’t just put it all onto a big hard drive someplace or even out onto the web.

“Computers and the internet change all the time” she cheerfully informed you. “Why I bet you’ve never even heard of Cobol or Fortran but when I was younger they were THE computer programs of the day. So much wonderful information gets lost when new computer systems come into vogue. Not this lovely microfilm though. All you need to access it is a lamp, a reel, and a magnifier. On top of that this film, in this place, will last for a thousand years.”

You are helping to create a repository for human knowledge, thoughts, and dreams for many generations to come which is amazing as an idea. Still, it is really cold here and there is something about those shelves after shelves buried a mile underground which you find vaguely creepy. You are always glad to get back to the surface and the bright Arctic sun.

These kinds of repository do exist but they are in abandoned mines in Pennsylvania and Kansas.