MY LIBRARY OF THOUGHTS (Everything Happens For A Reason Book 1)

Neil Gaiman: Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming

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But libraries are about freedom. Freedom to read, freedom of ideas, freedom of communication. They are about education which is not a process that finishes the day we leave school or university , about entertainment, about making safe spaces, and about access to information. I worry that here in the 21st century people misunderstand what libraries are and the purpose of them. If you perceive a library as a shelf of books, it may seem antiquated or outdated in a world in which most, but not all, books in print exist digitally.

But that is to miss the point fundamentally. I think it has to do with nature of information. Information has value, and the right information has enormous value.

A. There are three ways you can create a Gates Notes account:

For all of human history, we have lived in a time of information scarcity, and having the needed information was always important, and always worth something: Information was a valuable thing, and those who had it or could obtain it could charge for that service. According to Eric Schmidt of Google, every two days now the human race creates as much information as we did from the dawn of civilisation until The challenge becomes, not finding that scarce plant growing in the desert, but finding a specific plant growing in a jungle.

We are going to need help navigating that information to find the thing we actually need. Libraries are places that people go to for information. Books are only the tip of the information iceberg: More children are borrowing books from libraries than ever before — books of all kinds: But libraries are also, for example, places that people, who may not have computers, who may not have internet connections, can go online without paying anything: Librarians can help these people navigate that world.

I do not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens: And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is. Physical books are tough, hard to destroy, bath-resistant, solar-operated, feel good in your hand: They belong in libraries, just as libraries have already become places you can go to get access to ebooks, and audiobooks and DVDs and web content.

A library is a place that is a repository of information and gives every citizen equal access to it. That includes health information. And mental health information. What the libraries of the future will be like is something we should be imagining now. Literacy is more important than ever it was, in this world of text and email, a world of written information. We need to read and write, we need global citizens who can read comfortably, comprehend what they are reading, understand nuance, and make themselves understood.

Libraries really are the gates to the future. So it is unfortunate that, round the world, we observe local authorities seizing the opportunity to close libraries as an easy way to save money, without realising that they are stealing from the future to pay for today. They are closing the gates that should be open. Or to put it another way, our children and our grandchildren are less literate and less numerate than we are. They are less able to navigate the world, to understand it to solve problems. They can be more easily lied to and misled, will be less able to change the world in which they find themselves, be less employable.

All of these things. And as a country, England will fall behind other developed nations because it will lack a skilled workforce. Books are the way that we communicate with the dead. The way that we learn lessons from those who are no longer with us, that humanity has built on itself, progressed, made knowledge incremental rather than something that has to be relearned, over and over.

There are tales that are older than most countries, tales that have long outlasted the cultures and the buildings in which they were first told. I think we have responsibilities to the future. Responsibilities and obligations to children, to the adults those children will become, to the world they will find themselves inhabiting. All of us — as readers, as writers, as citizens — have obligations. I believe we have an obligation to read for pleasure, in private and in public places.

If we read for pleasure, if others see us reading, then we learn, we exercise our imaginations. We show others that reading is a good thing. We have an obligation to support libraries. To use libraries, to encourage others to use libraries, to protest the closure of libraries. If you do not value libraries then you do not value information or culture or wisdom.

You are silencing the voices of the past and you are damaging the future. We have an obligation to read aloud to our children. To read them things they enjoy. To read to them stories we are already tired of. To do the voices, to make it interesting, and not to stop reading to them just because they learn to read to themselves. Use reading-aloud time as bonding time, as time when no phones are being checked, when the distractions of the world are put aside.

Let's be friends.

We have an obligation to use the language. We must not to attempt to freeze language, or to pretend it is a dead thing that must be revered, but we should use it as a living thing, that flows, that borrows words, that allows meanings and pronunciations to change with time. We writers — and especially writers for children, but all writers — have an obligation to our readers: Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all. We have an obligation not to bore our readers, but to make them need to turn the pages.

One of the best cures for a reluctant reader, after all, is a tale they cannot stop themselves from reading. We all — adults and children, writers and readers — have an obligation to daydream. We have an obligation to imagine. It is easy to pretend that nobody can change anything, that we are in a world in which society is huge and the individual is less than nothing: But the truth is, individuals change their world over and over, individuals make the future, and they do it by imagining that things can be different.

Pause, for a moment and look around the room that you are in. Someone decided it was easier to sit on a chair than on the ground and imagined the chair. Someone had to imagine a way that I could talk to you in London right now without us all getting rained on. This room and the things in it, and all the other things in this building, this city, exist because, over and over and over, people imagined things. We have an obligation to make things beautiful. Not to leave the world uglier than we found it, not to empty the oceans, not to leave our problems for the next generation.

It accepts works from the author or publisher as part of copyright law. Larry, sorry to be so blunt, but your comments are ill informed. This project is quite different from the Google Book Scanning project. Visit the Archive in San Francisco, and prepare to be amazed. Stop being such a capitalist. The importance of this project is apparent. While the authors of said books will not receive royalties—monetary or otherwise—their work instead can be eternalized. A fair trade-off in the name of future historical accuracy, if I do say so myself.

Are you folks above seriously protesting the owning and storing of physical books? Do you also run around torching bookstores, or what? Crazies come in all forms, and paranoia latches onto anything. When it came to copyright IA played by the rules. Being an avid reader of books, magazines and comic books, all of which are being digitized in this manner by Independant Libraries or by the personally owned Companies such as Marvel Comics and DC, etc.

I simply enjoy holding a book in my hands and turning the pages, and the smell of paper is also something I would miss as well as having immediate access to my bookcases that I love for their appearance. They might be great for students. Including copying and storing it or shredding it or giving it away for free to anyone I want.

Will that be fine with you Larry? Fact is there is nothing you can do about it and that bothers you. If they buy or are given a book, a real book, they get to keep it. What is your problem with them collecting books? I have valued books since my mother taught me to read long before I started school, and I am so grateful that you are preserving the physical objects that seem to be getting less and less important to so many people.

I likewise have a few books that I would gladly donate to anyone, as long as I knew that it was going to be kept or offered and not simply re-sold or trashed. But if it were possible to a personally donate small sets of or individual books and b have a system by which it could be determined if you already had the book, I think this project would become very rich in books indeed. I have an recently received MSIS degree. Having a few archives that preserve the same material is a good thing. It plans ahead for disaster if something were to happen to one archive and also makes accessibility to physical objects wider as you can spread them out geographically.

I would really like it if this article could be proofread by someone with English as a first language, in conversation with the author.

Many of the ones in the Library Of Congress are falling to dust. They had been printed on pulp paper. Older books still are printed on hemp paper. Hemp paper will last a long long time. The Library of Congress throws out a lot more works then you think. They tossed the census, for crying out loud. Its collections are the most comprehensive in the country, but it is not a library of record in the legal sense; it is not required to retain all copyright deposits and, except for the period , it has never attempted to do so.

The Library of Congress does not preserve copies of every book published. It is the research library of the Congress. The majority of the collections are received through the Copyright registration process, as the Library is home to the U. Materials are also acquired through gift, purchase, other government agencies state, local and federal , Cataloging in Publication a pre-publication arrangement with publishers and exchange with libraries in the United States and abroad.

Through these exchanges the Library acquires material that would not be available otherwise. The remaining items are made available to other federal agencies and are then available for donation to educational institutions, public bodies and nonprofit tax-exempt organizations in the United States. Reducing the relative humidity that far has been recommended.

We are going to be working on cost effective ways of doing dropping the humidity and will try to get that low. As we understand the Library of Congress does, when we want to access the books again after they have been in such a dry environment, it will need to slowly re-hydrate. In regard to the June 7th comments referencing the Library of Congress, we at the Library would like to provide the following point of clarification on our temperature and relative humidity RH controls: The Library of Congress has a state-of-the-art, specialized facility in Fort Meade, Maryland, designed to efficiently hold library collections at a controlled temperature and relative humidity optimized for the long-term preservation of the collections.

Collections are removed from the cool module and from the cold and freezing vaults to a staging area, which allows the materials to acclimate to a warmer temperature without the formation of condensation http: They appear to be harrowed at the task of rescuing this collection. You can read about it on CBC here. This story might be on interest, , books in immediate threat of being burned!

Some rare and vintage. Otherwise you risk losing masses of data in the migration to the next system as CarlosMay says. Have you considered using other spaces for storage? Underground storage may have some cost advantages. Of course, there may not be the right sort of geology near you for easy access. I think if you plan to store books archivally at this massive level, you do need to think about the location.

Not that there is any one perfectly safe place, but San Francisco d0es have a high probability of having earth quake damage. I think this storing of a physical archive is fantastic. Do you accept credit card or cash donations? I believe both the government and private corporations have bought space in these underground facilities- there are several but I know of one in particular in Pennsylvania Iron Mountain is the company, the storage space is in Boyers PA but there are more companies- Underground Vaults and Storage, Hunt MidwestSubTropolis, for example.

It may be beneficial to have such an important depository of texts split in two or more parts. These would be better than abandoned coal or metal mines no toxic vapours or waters. They also have lower seismic risk than Richmond. Brewster — get thee to Hutchinson Kansas.

Lots of space for lease in mined-out salt mines there. But … you need to build a second one, identical in content, somewhere far away in a safe location. Important works could and should be stored redundantly in places that vary in climate and politics, but for the great mass of literature in an archive that large, it might be sufficient to just store parts of it in different locations so risk was statistically distributed. In a sense, there is already a great deal of redundancy built into the stuff mankind has written even without duplicating individual works.

A one-way robotic mission to the moon to accomplish such a task might be an interesting challenge. Figuring out what kinds of information to include as a rosetta stone for aliens to help them understand such a repository if they ever encountered it would be a fun problem, too. It has begun to bother me increasingly that the traditional library system with all the preservation, indexing and legal resources at its disposal has no interest in hundreds of thousands of software titles which are in danger of being lost to the world.

Are you making any attempt to deal with the problem of brittle books? ISTM that the book will slowly acidify over time.

See a Problem?

Even without careful control of temperature and humidity, the middles of the pages were preserved in a largely anaerobic state by the pressure of being stacked together. The brittle book problem is a result of residual acid in the wood pulp paper left as part of the manufacturing process. The Internet Archive is specifically using acid-free paper to avoid that problem. Yes they use acid free paper for the cataloging process but the books themselves are still acid paper. However that is why they must place them in a place with tightly controled temprature and humidity to help prevent the paper from breaking down.

Internet Archive to preserve print. Internet Archive becomes archive of physical books, too Barwo Blog. I wonder if any of what he discusses could have a bearing on a physical preservation project of this scale. As someone else mentioned, having one copy of all items is a single point of failure. Have you considered having 2 or 3 copies assuming the items are not so rare as to be unique, or at least not have too many unique items?

And making sure the copies are distributed across, say, continents? I hope the building is earthquake proof. Though having them in cargo containers would go a long way to protect them. I would think you would do this in a more stable place than San Fransico. Librarians recognize that the commercial companies ie. Google books could at any time simply turn off access to their books. Google is not a public organization working for the public good, they are a private company with the goal of growth and profits. Libraries are not archives — they provide the information resources that are useful and used by their patrons.

They are also perpetually short on funds, space, collection budgets, and staff. It is too bad that this project is not more closely tied to libraries — organizations that have been storing, cataloging and providing access to information in all formats, for free to all comers for decades. And which are dedicated to public access — not profits. And what, if any, their access policies for libraries and the public will be in the future.

Scanning books but keeping them, too Records. Brewster — two things: Au contraire, mon frere — microfilm is, primarily, a preservation format, and much more stable than any digital format available. As with books, considerations of climate control need to be addressed for long-term stability of the film. And, like the book original, it cannot be altered easily. That is why many archives microfilm their holdings for preservation, then scan the film to make the documents digitally accessible. It would take a major effort to burn the books in your storage trailers.

Plus the oxygen in the trailers would be exhausted pretty quickly, so any fire would be short-lived. I wish there was a similar project to collect and preserve film content. Nitrate and celluloid film deteriorates very quickly compared to paper, and we are losing our original cultural, social and historical resources daily. In a few decades, a digital copy may be the only access we have to those resources. Are you going to scan all these books, too, or are you just going to seal them up? The idea is to scan the books as funding and opportunities arise. So far, we are able to mostly keep up with the inflow.

And, uh, donations are always welcome. I donate whenever I can! I hope you do as well as the Library of Congress! Your stated long-range criteria include: How do the cost projections under your chosen plan compare? Is it possible that salt mine storage would address most of the security concerns expressed by your other writers?

Thank you for sharing your costs. Are they for renting space or do you own the salt mine? As for our costs, we do not know yet. We are spending on the upfront design and build in order to try to decrease the ongoing costs, but this is still just hypothetical. I agree with magscanner though—you need 2 copies of each! All the best to you and your project-you have restored a bit of my faith in the so-called human race. The facility where we have our dark archive is also where Hollywood stores the bulk of it past films. If you know of people that are de-accessioning collections abroad, please let us know.

Mostly very good condition considering publication dates back to I would like to submit these to your physical archive. Can you give me an address to which to ship? Hi, Thanks so much for thinking of us to preserve and share these texts.

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Contributions can be sent to: Excuse me while I go offline to read a book, from my library. Everyone should build themselves a library, a worthwhile endeavor. I also have too many books! How does one donate? Do you take VHS at all? Archive books, seeds, animals and people. As a retired librarian from a National Library National Library of Scotland I believe libraries deserve thanks for their efforts to digitise collections thereby making them available to the wider public.

However, some libraries have passed the task to commercial organisations who then require payment for access to the databases — this defeats the whole purpose of widening access and is to be deplored. In the long term hard-copy must be retained to avoid losing our cultural heritage. Think of the many books of the classical writers, Aristotle, Euripides, Aeschylus and the like, which are known to have existed but no-one thought to preserve a copy. I have a fascination with archival and shipping containers and loved this post.

Given your statement around 40 books per box, 24 boxes per pallet — I get around 20, books. Did I miss something? Apologies for an off-topic note, but a few days ago Brewster and I chatted after my panel on data journalism at the SemTech conference. I somehow lost his card, despite promising to contact him. Moving in-house inventory to an offsite location or removing it from the collection altogether has been a popular topic for academic libraries, as you probably know. For the libraries contemplating mass withdrawal, I imagine that knowing that the materials were going to the Internet Archive would reduce much their anxiety and many of the political fights with their faculties.

Here in the heart of Europe, in Charpatian Mountains there be a few old salt-mines. The mines usually used to sanitarium or mining-museum. I think the poor countries like Ukranien or Poland, Romaina, Slovakia, Hungary can make more money with rent the mines, than use it as costly hospital or museum. Be worth a try! What the archive ought to be doing is working to improve and use digital storage and backup systems.

Want to be safer? Paper is far from the perfect storage medium, as your shipping containers ably illustrate. Internet Archive archives digital texts… on paper. But your article makes it sound haphazard and possibly irresponsible. The vast majority of libraries are extremely careful with those decisions. In the US, we have good systems that tell us whether we have the last copy or almost-last copy of anything.

Things in those categories are never thrown out — they are put in special collections where we can keep an eye on them. Whenever a library removes books, they check them one by one. So, yes, if every library removes its copy, we have a serious problem. But this is not corporate America where if one person outsources, everyone has to follow.

We can afford for there to be 99 copies instead of copies. When you start getting into smaller numbers worldwide, the red flags start waving. That said, there is no conflict between a light archive and a dark archive — they serve different purposes. Print and microfilm are good formats. They will easily last hundreds of years and are more stable and easier to maintain than digital formats. There is no reason not to preserve those formats in archives, even if we stop using them day to day. Just be sure to talk to a few preservation librarians rather than reading a few articles online … we have been doing this for a really long time and we can probably help you out.

You never know what is going to be meaningful to the future. But someday, it may matter whether there was an ink smudge at the top of page We have the technology to create very exact copies and we should do so. You can even imagine a future fad, where people read mid-century American pulp novels or comics on the same paper they were originally printed on. This Archive sounds like a great idea.

I have wondered what would happen if we only had digital copies of everything and suddenly could not access them. The more ways we can store our precious books data, the more possibility that they will survive longer. Thank you for your great work. Shaunna Raycraft and her husband live in the remote town of Pike Lake, Saskatchewan, southwest of Saskatoon. The Raycrafts, both book lovers, told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. Archiving the internet… on paper…. I am getting ready to let go of 20 years of computer gaming magazines.

As I bemoaned the thought of that extensive collection lost, a neighbor mentioned your group. Would you be interested in having these? Hi Elena, We glady accept donations and would love to archive and share them. You can drop them off during normal working hours or contact us at infoATarchve. Jeff Kaplan Internet Archive. Contacting you at info at archive. I tried again today, perhaps this email will be responded to.

So many are quick to judge on this, but, like the Global Seed Vault, all I can say is lucky for us and our children that someone has the foresight to protect these items from whatever calamities may be in store for our planet. Living authors should be grateful that someone is looking out for the future existence of their works.

My only concern is that the archive is in Richmond. I think this physical archive of printed books is an essential project as we complete our transition into the digital age. I wonder if the concept could be taken a step further by creating a globally-distributed archive that is run by a network of volunteers. The latter would avoid a possible Library of Alexandria outcome. In that vein, I am envisioning a network of volunteers who could register the contents and location of their own personal collections, checking-in and updating the registry every few years.

Such a registry would formalize the informal system of impassioned book collectors that already exists throughout the world. Volunteers could also take on the responsibility of acquiring books that are rare or missing from the registry, in an effort to make sure the collection remains complete over the centuries ahead. I think combining this informal, distributed collection with a the centralized archives like the Internet Archive and major libraries would be a great combination for keeping our written culture safe and sound for posterity.

Omeka, E-Book Lending and Google. I like the seed bank analogy, but am queased out at putting the book equivalent on top of a major earthquake zone. Note that the Svalbard Global Seed Vault was very careful about their choice of locations, wanting to protect against such a thing. Most of the ones I scan and upload was resurrected from dumpsters, recycling bins and other places.

I am currently scanning the entire set of the Encyclopedia Britannica edition. I had also taken old pictures from glass plates and I will be uploading these later. Internet Archive one step ahead: WFU wake the herald meanwhile, back at the internet archive…. You only get the information that the processors think is important. This is more of a problem with older books like the ones on EEBO Early English Books Online covering , which often rely on old, black-and-white microfilms.

In a digital copy, everything is the same size. The same follows for the quality of the paper cheap woodpulp or acid-free or handmade and the binding. Basically, there are limitations to what digital imaging can do, and I am delighted to see that you are working to acquire and maintain as many original copies as possible. Also, it is encouraging to see that you are working with Gutenberg.

Where can we see the catalog of physical books you already have? Link Irresponsibly — July edition Read Irresponsibly. As Director of the History of Art Visual Resources Collection at UC Berkeley, I fought for many years to retain our analog collection of still images from which we were building our digital collection. Time, budget, and space constraints made this an increasingly unpopular argument and during my tenure there I witnessed the de-accessioning of thousands of 35 mm slides and mounted photographs.

Because most of these materials were copy rather than original photography, the justification for liberating the space these materials occupied for faculty office space was that the print materials from which these images were made mostly from materials housed in the library could easily be recalled and re-photographed if necessary. I shudder to think how many of these print sources may now be unavailable.

Now I hear that a more aggressive campaign of de-accessioning is currently underway to make way for more classroom space and that the entire research collection of black and white photographic prints, each one cataloged, labelled, and mounted on archival board, is about to be discarded. These photographs represent decades of scholarly research and document, in some cases, works of art and architecture that are not published in any print source. I am 80 and have been collecting books for over 60 years. I have over 50, mostly pre, never seen by anyone.

Obviously I cannot afford to give them away nor pay for the shipping. Please reply if interested. I am disabled and unable to travel. I started out trying to collect first editions of any book I purchased. I have almost 5, books all boxed up weeded a high school library that has never been weeded.

Do you pick up? How can I arrange for shipping?

I hate to just donate this collection to the Salvation Army. We are located in San Francisco. If you are in the area you can drop them off at Funston. If you are out of the area please send an email to infoATarchive. Plotting a Middle Course R00td. I have been a collector for over 60 of my 80 yrs. I began collecting first editions of every book I purchased. This collection of over 60, books has never been seen by anyone. What with my age I feel I need to dispose of them. What do you suggest? As I am indigent, I cannot afford to give them away and shipping and handling would be buyers expense.

Most of these volumes are pre and many are in specialized categories. I have been told the Library of Congress does buy missing books to fill the gaps in its collection. Words are too frail to express my appreciation and thankfulness for the great work you are doing. We are, as we follow technology, slowly taking a different approach to written words.

Books should be archived in some sort of electronic form and saved for eternity. From Scroll to Screen and Back: The article says you are soliciting books from collectors and individuals. Where can I mail them? Thanks for the offer. Internet Archive Funston Ave. San Francisco, CA This is an incredible project. You might be aware but there are now highspeed cameras which can photograph a book in minutes.

Please see this link. Volunteer — Help us get , books on Sunday! Tre milioni di libri su Internet Archive wiBlog. Bibliotheken en het Digitale Leven in September toepassingen voor mobiele apparaten. Either way they have access to any book available. I disagree unfortunately with keeping the old copies.

As a CEO, what I would tell you is this.

Scan in the books then resell them on amazon. Then use the money you would have spend warehousing and the money you made on amazon to purchase book rights from the authors and publishing companies. Just like open source software revolutionized the software industry… by buying out the rights to authors then making it digital an open source. Then you dont have to warehouse anything and can focus on your data center and really help even more people with information.

I also have ensuing years events books from through published by Grolier Inc. I no longer have room to store them and would like to donate them to your Archive collection.

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I feel it is not right to dispose of them, as they record an important part of History. If you cannot accept them, can you give me some information as to whom or where I can donate these precious books. I discovered your weblog the use of msn. That is an extremely smartly written article.

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