Congress formalized a separate Law Library

During consolidation, content is abstracted from its native context and made available for reuse in other contexts.

The cluster of causes that reinforced the forensic shift is not hard to isolate: the embrace of empirical methods and materialist theories to understand natural causes and effects; the harnessing of that understanding by economic systems that apply this knowledge to create ever finer instruments and accumulate greater amounts of evidence; the

Because imagination is memory in the future tense.

Digital memory is ubiquitous yet unimaginably fragile, limitless in scope yet inherently unstable.

our information technologies all derive from the single insight that matter records the history of the universe because it is a slow, cold form of information. The universe writes its own autobiography in atoms.

The realm of emotional intelligence, empathy, and imagination—all necessary for judgment in the context of incomplete information or conflicting aims—is beyond the reach of our machines.

Information has value to the extent that it has the potential for reuse.

Even as Jefferson was president, the Age of Reason was yielding quickly to the Age of Matter, when empirical science rigorously based on evidence superseded natural philosophy and natural history.