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It’s a commonplace of contemporary thought that we live in an information age. Most people in the industrial world today take for granted that they can get information of any kind they wish, cheaply and easily, drawing on the internet, public libraries, and many other resources. Today’s glut of information only exists, however, because abundant energy and material resources can be assigned to information storage and distribution by each industrial society. The end of the age of cheap energy places that at risk; the savage budget cuts beginning to impact library systems in many countries are a harbinger of greater troubles to come.
Compounding the difficulty is the fact that most of the technologies used for information storage and retrieval are fragile and expensive to maintain, and cannot be accessed at all without specific technologies that may be difficult to keep working in a challenging future. Most digital storage media also have very short shelf lives—CDs, for example, begin to break down within a decade even when properly stored. If current trends persist, much of the knowledge that exists today could be lost as the technological and material basis that supports it goes away.
Faced with this challenge, CCF has taken a cue from history.
Sheneset is the ancient Egyptian name of a small town on the eastern bank of the Nile in Upper Egypt. Sometime in the fourth century of the common era, the librarian of a Gnostic monastery located near Sheneset took a collection of books forbidden by the religious orthodoxy of the time, and buried the volumes in a pottery jar in the desert. Many centuries later, when the name of the town had changed to Nag Hammadi, the jar and its contents were rediscovered, and as a result Gnostic teachings that survived nowhere else can be studied today.
We feel that parallel steps need to be taken to preserve the cultural heritage of the past and present into a potentially difficult future. While burying books in pottery jars is unlikely to be an appropriate strategy, a range of projects to keep valuable resources from being lost are called for. We encourage supporters of CCF to consider taking up one or more of the following projects:
- Collecting at-risk books, especially those being discarded by public and university libraries
- Learning methods of preserving and curating books for long term survival, and of transforming digital resources into forms that can endure and be used in the absence of specific technologies
- Establishing local, private, subscription-based lending libraries, especially where public libraries are being shuttered or stripped of useful materials
Resources:
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