Slow Fires: On the Preservation of the Human Record
Libraries and archives worldwide are facing the slow deterioration of their late nineteenth- and twentieth-century print materials. Papermaking processes used since the mid-1800s have created products which, because of their acid content, contain the seeds of their own destruction. Award-winning filmmaker Terry Sanders (who created Into the Future) highlights the problem and its implications for the survival of the cultural record.
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Into the Future: On the Preservation of Knowledge in the Electronic Age
With the growth of digital technology, the library and archival community faces wonderful opportunities to provide new forms of access to an increasing amount of information, and formidable challenges in managing that information, especially in ensuring the long-term availability of, and ready access to, data in digital formats. Traditional approaches to preservation cannot address the whole range of issues that arise from data created in digital formats, carried on a variety of media, such as magnetic tape, CD-ROMs, and computer hard drives, and retrieved through a large number of software programs that routinely and rapidly become obsolete.
To inform a variety of publics about issues of preservation in the electronic age, to articulate what might be at stake for our society, and to point to ways that individuals and groups can work together to find solutions to the challenges posed, CLIR and the American Council of Learned Societies have produced a film on this subject, Into the Future: On the Preservation of Knowledge on the Electronic Age, as well as an accompanying discussion guide and a compendium of other resources.
