This is messy now and unfinished and will stay that way for a little while because I’m going to the library to check out a book that i’ve been trying to read for a long time now about the Voyager missions by carl sagan who is a hero

“The Future belongs to those who prepare for it.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

“You have to be somebody before you can share yourself.” - Jaron Lanier

“What gives humans access to the symbolic domain of value and meaning is the fact that we die.” - Regis Debray

“The very distinction between original and copy becomes meaningless in a digital world, there the work exists only as a copy.” - Daniel Pierehbech

An Ounce of Preservation: A guide to the care of papers and photographs

The Singularity is Near

“…missing an essential quality of the original, which in this case is the superb visual characteristics of paper and ink.”

“Historically, the only means for humans to outlive a limited biological lifespan has been to pass on values, beliefs, and knowledge to future generations.”

“The longevity of information depends on its relevance, utility, and accessibility.”

“Ironically the ease of approaching this information is inversely proportional to the level of advancement of the technology used to create it.”

“Of course my own archival needs are only a microcosm of the exponentially expanding knowledge base that human civilization is accumulating. It is this shared species wide knowledge that distinguishes us from other animals. Other animals communicate but they don’t accumulate an evolving and growing base of knowledge to pass down to the next generation.”

“Our memories and skills, although they may appear to be fleeting, do represent information, coded in vast patterns of neurotransmitter concentrations, interneuronal connections, and other relevant neural details. This information is the most precious of all, which is one reason death is so tragic.”

“Information lasts only so long as someone cares about it.”

Library, An Unquiet History

Battles, Matthew

“Of course, the experience of the physicality of the book is strongest in the large libraries, where all accumulated weight of the written words seems to exert a gravity all its own.”

the idea of libraries breathing - at the beginning of the semester when books are checked out, and then later when they’re returned

The World Without Us

Critical Issues on the History of Spaceflight

“Museum collections… show you not what there was but what was collected.” - Jim Bennett, “Scientific Instruments”

“The biography of a thing, therefore, is not only contained in its production, but in its use and treatment as a commodity, and if that thing is somehow removed from the world of commerce and deified as a sacred object, its biography needs somehow to be preserved and made accessible in order for it to illuminate the culture involved.” author

“Reflecting issues raised by Warner and others, he also sees a problem with collecting “black boxes” if it is not possible to “turn them on” and examine their behaviour.”

A Splendor of Letters

“For a good number of people around the world, ‘ruin-questing’ provides an enthralling intellectual exercise of ‘once upon a time’ and ‘what if.’ but for all the majesty and wonder of scattered artifacts, what what remains behind is still the result of happenstance, and any meaningful message that is passed on from ancient relics must be divined by the beholder through intuition or perception - unless, of course, there is the added availability of a text.”

“We were the first to receive this message from the past. Suddenly, we felt that we had made direct contact with the ancient world.” - Goddio upon dicovering granite slab declaring tax on all green ships

“Truth once lost in the annals of mankind leaves a chasm never to be filled.” - Isaac Disraeli

“Eco is inspired to produce his most insightful commentary when he is able to handle authentic documents, not surrogate copies on facsimile or on microfilm.”

“The more adroit we are at carbon copies, the more confused we are about the unique, the original, the Real McCoy.” - Schwartz

“Words on a screen have visual qualities that darkly limn their shape, but they have no materiality, they are only shadows, and when the light shifts they’ll be gone.” - William H. Gass

“We must remember that what is precious is not the physical ‘artifact’ of a system of writing but the ‘metafacts,’ the human communications they contain.”

“Think of hypermedia as a collection of elastic messages that can stretch and shrink in accordance with the reader’s actions.” - negroponte

“What distinguishes our project is that we are attempting to preserve the tactile experience of turning the pages.” - Joseph Jacobson on the MIT Ebook

“While it is impossible to travel to the past, a measure of dialogue with the dead is possible. Reading texts over the shoulders of the dead, as it were, is among the most immediate ways of entering such a dialogue.” - Richard Parkinson

Special Collections 2.0, Thomas Whittaker

“Digital materials have no intrinsic physical form; the cost of keeping digital materials may indeed exceed their inherent value in many cases, and digital creators, keepers, and users are not necessarily communicating well enough with one another to mutually ensure the long-term preservation of digital works.”

Digitizing your family history

“Unfortunately, it has been my experience that genealogists think differently from the geeks who create the gadgets and gizmos. We often must take what is there and manipulate it to our own interest. There are some wonderful contraptions out there that, when they were invented, were never conceived for genealogical purposes, but that when used correctly can aid us greatly.”

“One of the most important articles to preserve is the family bible.”

amen.

The Digital Print: Identification and Preservation

Speaking through the Aspens: Basque Tree carvings in California and Nevada

Permanence / Durability of the Book