Various disciplinary “archival turns” over the course of the past few decades have resulted in a tendency towards the over-casual use of the word “archive” as a shorthand to refer to, well, just about anything.

To address our unprecedented global and immediate need for access to reading and research materials, as of today, March 24, 2020, the Internet Archive will suspend waitlists for the 1.

Libraries tend to occupy a sacred space in modern culture. People adore them. (Perhaps even more than that, people love the idea of them.

Only a tiny fraction of the world's knowledge. (Photo: David Iliff/CC-BY-SA-3.0) All around the world, shadow libraries keep growing, filled with banned materials.

The total archive is already here, Balázs Bodó finds it hidden in the shadows and run by pirates. As I write this in August 2015, we are in the middle of one of the worst refugee crises in modern Western history.

SPIEGEL: Mr. Eco, you are considered one of the world's great scholars, and now you are opening an exhibition at the Louvre, one of the world's most important museums.

The universe (which others call The Twitter) is composed of every word in the English language; Shakespeare's folios, line-by-line-by-line; the Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, exploded; Constantine XI, in 140 character chunks; Sun Tzu's Art of War, in its entirety; the chapter headings of JG Ballard, in abundance; and definitive discographies of Every. Artist. Ever...

All this, I repeat, is true, but one hundred forty characters of inalterable wwwtext cannot correspond to any language, no matter how dialectical or rudimentary it may be.

For a long time, it was the folks who downloaded music or movies illegally that faced the wrath of government prosecutors. So the unsealing of an indictment today against Aaron Swartz, former Reddit-er and founder of Demand Progress, for the illegal download of some 4 million-odd academic journal articles may sound a bit unusual. Demand Progress has issued a statement suggesting Swartz's actions were akin to "checking too many books out of the library." But the government clearly disagrees as the charges include wire fraud, computer fraud, and unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer. Schwartz now faces up to 35 years in prison and up to $1 million in fines.

Philip Dodd goes to one of Britain's largest second hand bookshops and is joined by a panel of publishers, authors and an audience of readers for a public debate that tackles the vexed question: Is the book dead? As e-books outsell hardbacks for the first time is reading itself facing a future that is empowered or impoverished?

The venue is Barter Books in Alnwick, Northumberland, which famously occupies a former railway station. Onstage with Philip will be guests writer David Almond, author of the prize-winning novel Skellig, Chris Meade of the Institute for the Future of the Book, thriller writer Louise Welsh and the historian Sheila Hingley.

Just recently, yet another device to read books electronically has just been launched - experts predict it will make this a mainstream activity. So Philip asks: why we are once again hearing concerns that innovations like e-readers and the iPad impede our imagination, shorten our attention span and make us intellectually shallow. Others argue

Books have long been the object of desire, a desire that in intensity (among the susceptible) is stronger than for sex. Bibliomania, the obsession to possess books, was first recognised as a disease by doctors at the end of the Eighteenth Century, and many learned tomes - themselves now the object of bibliomanes’ desires - have been written on it.

Not long ago I bought a small volume, Book-lovers and Book-thieves, that suggested that the two types of person were very similar, and often one and the same, covetousness easily defeating honesty. Everyone knows that to lend a book, even to someone whom you know well, is to risk losing it. People who are scrupulously honest in all their other dealings don’t think that failure to return a book to its owner is theft in the usual sense of the term. Perhaps it is the cultural importance of books that allows us to think this and to exculpate ourselves: that by appropriating a book that is not ours we are somehow serving the cause of culture, ou

One of my favorite websites is the semi-obscure digital library known as AAAARG (don’t even try googling. You just get pirate-themed sites). The site is a sundry collection of critical documents – many of them highly treasured theoretical classics, others obscure anarchic tomes and legal texts – presented in a simple, sleek alphabetized index of .pdfs.

The idea from the beginning was that AAAARG’s collection would grow organically, since anyone can upload a text to the site. But what takes this beyond basic p2p sharing is the way the index relates to the site’s other peer features: first, a discussion page mostly featuring book requests and text uploads, and second, a page of user-made issues that cluster books around a general theme. So not only the text index, but also the classifications that organize them grow collaboratively.

Even more interesting about all this is the high quality of useful content. Which also makes it fragile (just read on).

The Sorted Books project began in 1993 years ago and is ongoing. The project has taken place in many different places over the years, ranging form private homes to specialized public book collections. The process is the same in every case: culling through a collection of books, pulling particular titles, and eventually grouping the books into clusters so that the titles can be read in sequence, from top to bottom. The final results are shown either as photographs of the book clusters or as the actual stacks themselves, shown on the shelves of the library they were drawn from. Taken as a whole, the clusters from each sorting aim to examine that particular library's focus, idiosyncrasies, and inconsistencies — a cross-section of that library's holdings. At present, the Sorted Books project comprises more than 130 book clusters.

Otlet was the first to imagine all the world’s knowledge as one vast “web,” connected by “links” and accessed remotely through desktop screens, and because of this he can be seen as the kooky grandfather of the Internet. From the beginning of his career as a lawyer and bibliographer, Otlet wrote prolifically and prophetically about how information could be organized and transmitted. He developed the Universal Decimal Classification system (UDC), an expanded form of the Dewey Decimal Classification system that assigned individual numerical subject codes to documents, allowing them to be searched and cross-referenced in a standardized manner. His later writings on information science examined the technological advancements of his time that he regarded as potential substitutes for the book: the radio, television, telephone, and telegraph, sound recordings, cinema, and microfilm (which he developed alongside Robert Goldschmidt). In doing so, Otlet prefigured the work of computer-science pi

In early 2002, the filmmaker Grace Guggenheim--the daughter of the late Charles Guggenheim, one of America’s greatest documentarians, and the sister of the filmmaker Davis Guggenheim, who made An Inconvenient Truth-decided to do something that might strike most of us as common sense. Her father had directed or produced more than a hundred documentaries. Some of these were quite famous (Nine from Little Rock). Some were well-known even if not known to be by him (Monument to a Dream, the film that plays at the St. Louis arch). Some were forgotten but incredibly important for understanding American history in the twentieth century (A Time for Justice). And some were just remarkably beautiful (D-Day Remembered). So, as curator of his work, Grace Guggenheim decided to remaster the collection and make it all available on DVD, which was then the emerging platform for film.

The future of reading is very much in doubt. In this century, reading could soar to new heights or crash and burn. Some educators and librarians fear that sustained reading for learning, for work, and for pleasure may be slowly dying out as a widespread social practice. Only at living history farms will we see people reading. For decades the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has been studying the reading habits of adult Americans, issuing a series of reports with rousingly alliterative titles such as “Reading at Risk” (July 2004) and “Reading on the Rise” (January 2009). Sometime in the 21st century, the NEA may need to issue the sobering final report in the series, “Reading, Rest in Peace.”

Several social and technological developments of the 20th century, such as television, electronic games, and even comic books, have been generally perceived as threats to literacy and the practice of reading. For some reading purists, even the growing popularity of ebooks and audiobooks is a s

Information is exploding so furiously around us and information technology is changing at such bewildering speed that we face a fundamental problem: How to orient ourselves in the new landscape? What, for example, will become of research libraries in the

Whether the Google books settlement passes muster with the U.S. District Court and the Justice Department, Google's book search is clearly on track to becoming the world's largest digital library. No less important, it is also almost certain to be the last one. Google's five-year head start and its relationships with libraries and publishers give it an effective monopoly: No competitor will be able to come after it on the same scale. Nor is technology going to lower the cost of entry. Scanning will always be an expensive, labor-intensive project. Of course, 50 or 100 years from now control of the collection may pass from Google to somebody else—Elsevier, Unesco, Wal-Mart. But it's safe to assume that the digitized books that scholars will be working with then will be the very same ones that are sitting on Google's servers today, augmented by the millions of titles published in the interim.

That realization lends a particular urgency to the concerns that people have voiced about the se

Directed by Philippe Molins - Although honors came late in life to Jorge Luis Borges, his unique worldview had begun to emerge even as a child. This program examines the life and literary career of the charismatic Argentine writer, as well as the thematic, symbolic, and mythological underpinnings of his works. Archival interviews with Borges; his mother, Leonor Acevedo de Borges; his second wife, Maria Kodama; and collaborator Adolfo Bioy Casares provide insights into the private Borges, while readings from “The Mirrors,” “Dreamtigers,” “The Plot,” “The South,” “The Aleph,” and other landmarks of Latin American fiction demonstrate his virtuosity as a transformer of experiences.

Books that redefine reality - or - How to redefine the book...