Libraries

The Rosetta Disk, for example, is one of its attempts to create a permanent archive: it’s a wafer of nickel containing all the world’s languages in raised microscopic text. “We aren’t creating the Rosetta Disk specifically with an apocalypse in mind, or for a society that's undergoing major upheaval,” Long Now Director Laura Welcher told Hopes&Fears, “but over the span of millennia, I think you have to expect that to happen occasionally.”

Let us now turn to the human experts for answers.

From The near and far future of libraries — Hopes&Fears — flow "Technology"

From the AP:

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) -- Jeffery Bailey spends nearly every day at his public library. It's not just that he loves books. For the 43-year-old who sleeps in a tent outside a local church, the library is pretty much the only place he can go that won't charge him to provide safety, warmth, useful services and entertainment.

Many public libraries discourage homeless people from hanging around all day. "It could be the way you dress, the way your hair is," says Bailey, whose scruffy denim jacket could use a good wash.

But just as Bailey needs his library, the library needs him: In this digital age, many people who used to depend on libraries can find what they need online without leaving home. Menaced by budget cuts, many public libraries are effectively failing to justify their relevance, reducing their hours year after year.

THE BRIEF
Libraries are in rough shape these days. Long treasured as bastions of knowledge, they’re being assailed on two fronts: funding cuts and technological disruption. Why borrow a book when you’ve got the Internet and a Kindle?

But rumors of the library’s demise are greatly exaggerated. The challenges that libraries face have spurred their radical reinvention as makerspaces and digital archives built to last thousands of years. 

The libraries of the future will preserve and transmit knowledge as always. You just might not recognize them.

From Timeline.com - Is the Library Really Dead?

From The New York Times Arts Blog:

LONDON — At a moment when libraries and archives in the Middle East face threats of damage and destruction from war and ideology, the British Library has announced that it has now made four million images from its Endangered Archives program available online.

The initiative, established in 2004 and supported by the Arcadia Fund, has so far financed 246 projects in 78 countries, attempting to preserve manuscripts, records, newspapers, photographs, sound archives and even rock inscriptions that are at risk of loss or deterioration.

“What’s at stake is what beliefs and biases will shape the way history is told,” Holland Cotter wrote in The New York Times in a 2012 article about the Great Mosque in Djenné, Mali, and the Endangered Archives program’s attempt to preserve and digitize the thousands of Arabic manuscripts housed in the mosque and in the city.