“WHAT BOOKS would you want to restart civilization from scratch?”

The Long Now Foundation has been involved in and inspired by projects centered on that question since launching in 01996. (See, for example, The Rosetta Project, Westinghouse Time Capsules, The Human Document Project, The Survivor Library, The Toaster Project, The Crypt of Civilization, and the. . .   Read More

If we want to achieve the miracle of translation from any language into any other language, it would be enormously helpful to have a machine that can translate any word, or word-like phrase, from any language into any other language. The PanLex project aims to build exactly that machine. It is documenting all known. . .   Read More

“The Near and Far Future of Libraries”, an article in the new publication “Hopes & Fears”, includes an interview with Long Now’s Dr. Laura Welcher on the dangers of the “digital dark age”.
Laura Welcher is Director of the Rosetta Project, The Long Now Foundation’s language-preservation effort that explores storage mediums that. . .   Read More

In November 02011 Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive, spoke for Long Now. “We are really striving to build The Library of Alexandria version 2,” says Brewster, near the start of his talk, “So that everyone anywhere who is curious to want access can access the world’s knowledge.” He proceeds to assess. . .   Read More

February 24, 02015
Jason Scott (archivist, historian, filmmaker)
The Web in an Eyeblink at The Interval
Tickets are now on sale: space is limited and we expect this talk to sell out
If you are reading this then Jason Scott has probably backed up bits that matter to you–whether you are an ex-SysOp. . .   Read More

In 01985, Andy Warhol used an Amiga 1000 personal computer and the GraphiCraft software to create a series of digital works. Warhol’s early computer artworks are now viewable after 30 years of dormancy.
Commodore International commissioned Warhol to appear at the product launch and produce a few public pieces showing off the Amiga’s. . .   Read More

How do public archives, as collections of cultural artifacts, shape our collective memory? And how is this changing as new digital tools make it ever easier for scholars and artists to access these repositories?
This Sunday, Long Now’s Laura Welcher joins a group of archivists and artists to discuss these questions and more at. . .   Read More

In 02008 Kevin Kelly called for movage (as opposed to storage) as the only way to archive digital information:

“Proper movage means transferring the material to current platforms on a regular basis— that is, before the old platform completely dies, and it becomes hard to do. This movic rythym of refreshing content should be as. . .   Read More

“The Internet echoes with the empty spaces where data used to be.”
– Alexis Rossi from the Wayback Machine

The Internet Archive recently unveiled a new plan to fix broken links utilizing the Wayback Machine.
The Wayback Machine provides digital captures of URLs to create stable access to websites that otherwise might vanish. The service initially. . .   Read More

Books connect our future and our past, teaching us about what came before and encouraging us to imagine what might yet be. Because of this, reading and libraries remain essential even in our technological and multimedia future, Neil Gaiman recently insisted in a lecture for London’s The Reading Agency:
Fiction can show you a. . .   Read More