Internet Archive video

It's been quiet around here for a long time, but I thought I would share this short documentary.


Internet Archive from Deepspeed media on Vimeo.


This film, directed by Jonathan Minard, is "focused on the future of long-term digital storage, the history of the Internet and attempts to preserve its contents on a massive scale."

It includes "a tour of the Internet Archive's headquarters in San Francisco, the book scanning center, and the book storage facilities in Richmond, California."
And boy does it ever pose some interesting and big questions about libraries, access, and preservation! Environmental sustainability, too: the headquarters heats itself with energy from the servers! That is awesome.

The Future of Libraries

So, here's quite a topic for our first Blog entry: The future of libraries. I'd like to thank whomever suggested it for making me think about it and do a little research. Thinking about the future of libraries can be scary. After all, will we still have jobs? Will we want those jobs? My one day of thought and research on the subject by no means makes me an expert, but it does make me a little clearer on the topic.

A few years ago a colleague who was working for NYU's Digital Library department explained that in the future, the digital library would be run in a way analogous to the non-digital library, and that Access Services would handle access to the digital library. At the time I liked this explanation, because it gave me some small sense of what I might be doing in the future. Now I'm not so sure. I'm not sure it's what we'll be doing in Access Services, and if it is, I'm not sure I like it.

I found this 10 minute video on the future of libraries that I thought speculated on our future as well as anyone possibly can.


After all, things are moving so quickly it's hard to predict what technology might offer next year, let alone 5 to 10 years down the line.