Our modern history is defined by the advent of writing. Writing is humankind’s principal technology for collecting, manipulating, storing, retrieving, communicating and disseminating information. Cave drawings gave way to hieroglyphics; stone tablets evolved into scrolls, then bound books; the invention of typeset documents gave more and more people access to the written word and today, we can send emails and text messages all around the world in a matter of seconds. Man has evolved, documentation has evolved, and with it, the way in which we manage calibration.
In the beginning, there was no way to document calibration findings other than with a pen and paper. This information was brought back from the field, entered into a form and filed away. Just as the Library of Alexandria (one of the largest and most significant libraries in the ancient world) housed thousands of papyrus scrolls, managing hundreds or thousands of paper calibration documents comes with inherent risk including misplaced, lost or damaged documents or in the case of the Alexandria library, a fire allegedly started by Julius Caesar. Additionally, a paper and pen system is labor-intensive, time consuming, prone to errors and provides little to no analysis of historical trends.