2025年考研英语一阅读 Text 4 原文翻译及答案解析

Visit any antiques store and you'll encounter artifacts from the past: photographs, letters, a brochure detailing the Sinclair dinosaur exhibit from the 1964-1965 World's Fair, the ephemera of history. Yet these objects aren't truly ephemeral, because they are still here, decades, even centuries later. Why? Because they're tangible.

走进任何一家古董店，你都会遇到来自过去的文物：照片、信件、一份详细介绍1964-1965年世界博览会Sinclair恐龙展览的小册子，这些是历史的短暂遗物。然而，这些物品并非真正短暂，因为它们仍然存在，历经数十年甚至数百年。为什么？因为它们是有形的。

Have you pondered the life cycle of intangible formats, digital information, given that those who produce these artifacts seldom make provision for their long-term preservation? For millennia, we've known what we've known due to artifacts that have survived, often despite their original creators' neglect. The thing itself is the medium that delivers the information. At the time of creation, no attempts were made at intentional preservation, yet analog materials have a chance of surviving and serving as the historical record that biographers, historians, and novelists rely on. Libraries and archives have traditionally shouldered the responsibility of organization, preservation, and access to information. One of S.R. Ranganathan's foundational Laws of Library Science is “Save the time of the reader.” Thus, librarians digitize the tangible so that researchers the world over can quickly search and access their holdings. The result is an embarrassment of historical riches, which brings its own needle-and-haystack problems.

你是否思考过无形格式、数字信息的生命周期，鉴于生产这些文物的人很少为其长期保存做出安排？几千年来，我们之所以知道我们所知道的，是因为那些幸存下来的文物，尽管它们的原始创造者常常忽视。事物本身是传递信息的媒介。在创造之时，没有人尝试进行有意的保存，但模拟材料有机会幸存下来，并成为传记作者、历史学家和小说家所依赖的历史记录。图书馆和档案馆传统上承担着组织、保存和信息访问的责任。S.R. Ranganathan图书馆科学基础定律之一是“节省读者的时间”。因此，图书馆员将有形资料数字化，以便世界各地的研究人员能够快速搜索和访问他们的馆藏。结果是历史财富的过量，这带来了自身的“大海捞针”问题。

Librarians' selfless devotion can act against us when users point to universality of access by holding up a cellphone and saying, “it's all in here” as evidence that libraries are less vital for researchers today. Yet how was that universality of access made possible and, perhaps more importantly, how is it maintained? Who curates what is preserved? When it comes to born-digital information, the terrifying answer can be: if not librarians and archivists, then no one. Digital information requires a great deal more care than analog.

图书馆员的无私奉献有时会对我们不利，当用户举起手机说“一切都在这里”，以证明图书馆对今天的研究者不那么重要时。然而，这种普遍访问是如何实现的，也许更重要的是，它是如何维持的？谁策展保存的内容？当涉及到原生数字信息时，可怕的答案可能是：如果不是图书馆员和档案管理员，那么就没有人。数字信息需要比模拟信息多得多的护理。

Even when a digital object is preserved, it may only be the carrier that's saved, not the information itself. As technology advances and a format becomes obsolete, the object is useless. Have you ever stared helplessly at a ZIP disk, thinking: how do I get the files off this? Without constant migration of digital assets, a nightmare about the foreseeable future is what keeps historians up at night: a historical record that abruptly stops when digital replaces digital.

即使一个数字对象被保存，可能只保存了载体，而不是信息本身。随着技术进步和格式过时，该对象变得无用。你是否曾无助地盯着一个ZIP盘，想着：我如何从这个盘上取出文件？如果没有数字资产的不断迁移，一个关于可预见未来的噩梦让历史学家夜不能寐：当数字取代数字时，历史记录突然停止。

As a librarian whose day job revolves around special collections and digital assets, I share the night terrors of historians, and I'd be lying if I said a comprehensive preservation solution currently exists. Yet researchers can take some comfort in the fact that there are a multitude of librarians devoted to discovering, organizing, and preserving digital information for researchers current and future. Librarians are uniquely positioned to understand how end users seek and use information. Thus we play an integral role in identifying, preserving, and providing accessibility to digital artifacts so that, while future researchers may find the digital realm a challenging place to ply their trade, they won't find it an impossible one.

作为一名日常工作围绕特藏和数字资产的图书馆员，我分担历史学家的夜间恐惧，如果我说目前存在一个全面的保存解决方案，那是在撒谎。然而，研究人员可以感到一些安慰，因为有许多图书馆员致力于为当前和未来的研究人员发现、组织和保存数字信息。图书馆员处于独特的位置，能够理解最终用户如何寻求和使用信息。因此，我们在识别、保存和提供数字文物可访问性方面发挥着不可或缺的作用，以便未来研究人员在数字领域从事研究时，可能会发现它充满挑战，但不会觉得不可能。