http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdZxI3nFVJs&feature=youtu.be

It seems this is only for those outside of the Netherlands… I can highly 
recommend it. The content comes very close to the Network Notebook that we at 
INC published in June by Henry Warwick about the philosophy of the offline 
library. /Geert

--

Digital Amnesia by Bregje van der Haak

Our memory is dissipating. Hard drives only last five years, a webpage is 
forever changing and there’s no machine left that reads 15-year old floppy 
disks. Digital data is vulnerable. Yet entire libraries are shredded and lost 
to budget cuts, because we assume everything can be found online. But is that 
really true? For the first time in history, we have the technological means to 
save our entire past, yet it seems to be going up in smoke. Will we suffer from 
collective amnesia? 

This VPRO Backlight documentary tracks down the amnesiac zeitgeist starting at 
the Royal Tropical Institute in Amsterdam, whose world-famous 250-year old 
library was lost to budget cuts. The 400.000 Books were saved from the shredder 
by Ismail Serageldin, director of the world-famous Library of Alexandria, who 
is turning the legendary library of classical antiquity into a new knowledge 
hub for the digital world.

Images as well as texts risk being lost in this ‘Digital Dark Age’. In an old 
McDonald’s restaurant in Mountain View, CA, retired NASA engineer Dennis Wingo 
is trying to retrieve the very first images of the moon. Upstate New York, 
Jason Scott has founded The Archive Team, a network of young activists that 
saves websites that are at risk of disappearing forever. In San Francisco, we 
visit Brewster Kahle’s Internet Archive that’s going against the trend to 
destroy archives, and the Long Now Foundation, which has put the long-term back 
on the agenda by building a clock that only ticks once a year and should last 
10,000 years, in an attempt to reconnect with generations thousands of years 
from now.

Directed by Bregtje van der Haak / produced by VPRO Backlight, The Netherlands

You can watch the Dutch episode here: 
http://tegenlicht.vpro.nl/afleveringen/2014-2015/digitaal-geheugenverlies.html

For broadcast rights: www.nposales.com / i...@nposales.com

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