Meet the 1,300 librarians racing to back up Ukraine’s digital archives; The Washington Post, April 8, 2022

Pranshu Verma, The Washington Post; Meet the 1,300 librarians racing to back up Ukraine’s digital archives

"Buildings, bridges, and monuments aren’t the only cultural landmarks vulnerable to war. With the violence well into its second month, the country’s digital history — its poems, archives, and pictures — are at risk of being erased as cyberattacks and bombs erode the nation’s servers.

Over the past month, a motley group of more than 1,300 librarians, historians, teachers and young children have banded together to save Ukraine’s Internet archives, using technology to back up everything from census data to children’s poems and Ukrainian basket weaving techniques.

The efforts, dubbed Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online, have resulted in over 2,500 of the country’s museums, libraries, and archives being preserved on servers they’ve rented, eliminating the risk they’ll be lost forever. Now, an all-volunteer effort has become a lifeline for cultural officials in Ukraine, who are working with the group to digitize their collections in the event their facilities get destroyed in the war.""

Why ‘Fahrenheit 451’ Is the Book for Our Social Media Age; The New York Times, May 10, 2018

Ramin Bahrani, The New York Times;  

Why ‘Fahrenheit 451’ Is the Book for Our Social Media Age

[Kip Currier: Looking forward to seeing this May 19th-debuting HBO adaptation of Ray Bradbury's ever-timely Fahrenheit 451 cautionary intellectual freedom tale, starring Michael B. Jordan as a book-burning-fireman-turned-book-preserver.]

"Bradbury believed that we wanted the world to become this way. That we asked for the firemen to burn books. That we wanted entertainment to replace reading and thinking. That we voted for political and economic systems to keep us happy rather than thoughtfully informed. He would say that we chose to give up our privacy and freedom to tech companies. That we decided to entrust our cultural heritage and knowledge to digital archives. The greatest army of firemen will be irrelevant in the digital world. They will be as powerless as spitting babies next to whoever controls a consolidated internet. How could they stop one person, hiding in his parents’ basement with a laptop, from hacking into thousands of years of humanity’s collective history, literature and culture, and then rewriting all of it … or just hitting delete?

And who would notice?"