The Ebook version of my Bloomsbury book "Ethics, Information, and Technology" will be published on December 11, 2025 and the Hardback, Cloth, and Paperback versions will be available on January 8, 2026. Preorders are available via Amazon and this Bloomsbury webpage: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/ethics-information-and-technology-9781440856662/
"The National Park Service has removed signs at Acadia National Park in Maine that make reference to climate change amid the Trump administration’s wider effort to remove information that it says undermines “the remarkable achievements of the United States.” A sign has also been removed from at least one additional park that referred to slavery, the detention of Japanese Americans during World War II and conflicts with Native Americans.
The removals come after President Donald Trump issuedan executive order in March seeking to remove “improper partisan ideology” from federal institutions, including the Smithsonian museums, that he says was perpetuated by the Biden administration. Park Service officials have broadly interpreted the order to apply to information on racism, sexism, Indigenous persecution, gay rights and climate change."
"The case, UMG Recordings, Inc. v. Internet Archive, targeted the Internet Archive’s Great 78 Project, an initiative to digitize more than 400,000 fragile shellac records from the early 20th century. The collection includes music by artists such as Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday, and has been made available online for free public access.
Record labels including Universal, Sony Music Entertainment and Capitol Records had sought $621 million in damages, arguing the Internet Archive’s streaming of these recordings constituted copyright infringement.
The lawsuit drew widespread attention from musicians and preservationists."
"The practice of saving and safekeeping documents is nearly as old the written word. But lately archiving—choosing what to save, preserving it, and making it sustainably findable and accessible—has also become an act of responsive resistance in a world that may use erasure as a weapon.
Safeguarding endangered material is a widespread concern—but the definition of “endangered” can be a broad one. The Data Rescue Project (DRP) has been in the news this year as it works to collect data sets from government websites before they can be taken down. The DRP has deeper roots, however, such as the Internet Archive (IA), End of Term Web Archive, EDGI (Environmental Data & Governance Initiative), and SUCHO: Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online, which has digitized and preserved Ukrainian cultural heritage sites since 2022. These groups are the Monuments Men of the internet age.
Yet culture and history are threatened by more than war and federal orders. The call to preserve starts with the awareness that memory is fragile, and that forgetting—and the subsequent erasure of stories, languages, culture, and information—can be institutionally driven as often as it is inadvertent.
With the future of the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), Library of Congress, National Archives and Records Administration, and other mainstays of support for preservation uncertain, the question remains: where will the resources and leadership—and the body of knowledge that stems from years of grant-making and collecting—come from? In the absence of concrete answers, a range of initiatives offer inspiration and hope."
[Kip Currier: One can understand, on the one hand, wanting to promote more occasional public access to singular artifacts, like the Bayeux Tapestry. However, the risks in transporting the tapestry from France to the U.K. would seem to far outweigh the benefits of moving this priceless historical and cultural information object. Especially when one reads the assessments of the risks by world class experts.
France 24 reports that a French official asserts that the Bayeux Tapestry is "not too fragile to loan to UK", but offered no verifiable evidence of his claims:
Philippe Belaval, appointed by Macron as his envoy for the loan, said no decision had yet been taken on how to transport the tapestry.
But he said a study dating from early 2025 had made detailed recommendations about handling and transport.
"This study absolutely does not state that this tapestry is untransportable," Belaval said, without revealing the authors of the study or their conclusions."
"“I’m not against the loan of cultural artefacts and I have always liked the UK,” said Didier Rykner, the editorial director of La Tribune de l’Art, an art news website, whose month-old petition against the loan has been signed by nearly 62,000 people.
“But this is a purely political decision. Here is an extraordinary work of art, a wholly unique historical document, an artefact without equivalent anywhere – and which expert opinion agrees, overwhelmingly, cannot travel. It’s not complicated.”...
Some of the most damning arguments against the plan have come from curators and restorers who have worked or are working on the tapestry, five of whom have told Rykner – on condition of anonymity – of their disbelief and concern.
Precisely because the tapestry was considered too fragile to move far, complexplans were already under wayto remove it from display and store it during the museum’s rebuilding work, with a full restoration to follow once it was returned.
“We fell off our chairs when we heard,” said one conservator. “It’s the opposite of all we had prepared for.”
Any movement at all of the canvas, in a state of “absolute fragility”, was “fraught with risk, an incredibly delicate operation”, said another."
"The idea of the Presidential library dates to the late nineteen-thirties, when Roosevelt decided to donate his papers to the federal government and move them to a fireproof building near his family home. According to Anthony Clark, a former congressional staffer who has written a book about Presidential libraries, Roosevelt made room to display memorabilia to the public “almost as an afterthought.” Most Presidential libraries would come to house both the paper trail of a Presidency, for researchers to consult, and also a commemorative museum, which is the bit that most tourists actually visit. Over time, these museums grew more ambitious, and sometimes proved to be of questionable historical value. Richard Nixon’s museum initially presented Watergate as a coup, and accused Woodward and Bernstein of bribery.
Roosevelt was under no legal obligation to make his papers publicly available—but since 1978, thanks to Nixon and Watergate, Presidential records have been considered federal property, and are supposed to be handed over to the National Archives and Records Administration. There has never been a governmental requirement to open an associated museum, but typically these have also been managed by nara. (Nixon’s was unusual in that it was run privately for many years; in 2007, nara took it over and ripped out and replaced the Watergate exhibit.) Before the government gets involved on the museum side, however, the structures must be planned and built using outside funds, making them, in practice, fuzzy mixes of the public and the private. When Presidential libraries are donated to the government, they must also hand over endowments to help defray future maintenance costs.
Barack Obama broke the mold: his Presidential museum, in Chicago, which somehow is still not open, is an entirely private endeavor, run by a foundation; his official records are being digitized and will continue to be supervised by nara. After this effective divorce of library and museum functions was announced, Clark expressed hope about the arrangement. “What were intended to be serious research centers have grown into flashy, partisan temples touting huckster history,” he wrote, in Politico. “Even though they are taxpayer-funded and controlled by a federal agency, the private foundations established by former presidents to build the libraries retain outsize influence.” The Obama model would at least keep the government out of the business of hagiography. Not everyone was supportive, however. Timothy Naftali, who was responsible for overhauling the Nixon facility as its first federal director and who is now a historian at Columbia, has argued that the private nature of Obama’s center is an impediment to nonpartisan public history. “It opens the door,” he said, “to a truly terrible Trump library.”"
[Kip Currier: Every information center (e.g. libraries, archives, museums) and cultural heritage and higher education institution should think hard about the questions raised in this article. Like this glaring one the reporter raises:
"How will experts and their fellow Americans understand what went on during Trump’s term when those charged with setting aside the artifacts documenting history refuse to do so?"]
[Excerpt]
"For generations, official American documents have been meticulously preserved and protected, from the era of quills and parchment to boxes of paper to the cloud, safeguarding snapshots of the government and the nation for posterity.
Now, the Trump administrationis scrubbingthousands of government websites of history, legal records and data it finds disagreeable.
To historians and archivists, it points to the possibility that Trump’s presidency will leave less for the nation’s historical record than nearly any before it and that what is authorized for public release will be sanitized and edited to reinforce a carefully sculpted image the president wants projected, even if the facts don’t back that up.
How will experts and their fellow Americans understand what went on during Trump’s term when those charged with setting aside the artifacts documenting history refuse to do so?"
"The U.S. Department of Agriculture has agreed to restore climate-change-related webpages to its websites after it was sued over the deletions in February.
The lawsuit, brought on behalf of the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Working Group, argued that the deletions violated rules around citizens’ access to government information.
The USDA’s reversal comes ahead of a scheduled May 21 hearing on the plaintiffs’ motion for a preliminary injunction against the agency’s actions in federal court in New York.
The department had removed resources on its websites related to climate-smart farming, conservation practices, rural clean-energy projects and access to federal loans related to those areas after President Donald Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration."
"To say Gina Rome and Ashley Hufford have their dream job would be a little misleading — it wasn't a job they knew they could dream of before they had it.
They're librarians for the Seattle Kraken. More officially speaking, Rome is the team's digital asset librarian, and Hufford is the digital asset manager. Both have master's degrees in library sciences...
That's why some professional sports teams have hired professional librarians to manage their digital media. And it's not just hockey. Recent Super Bowl champions the Philadelphia Eagles have a digital asset librarian, too. That's because librarians have the skills to arrange, archive, and access the team's assets in a more methodical way than your average marketing specialist, media editor, or, yeah, a pile of hard drives.
They're not just managing the assets. They're also sorting through them to pick the best of the best for any given need."
[Kip Currier: Thank you to all information professionals and citizen archivists who are preserving and making government data/information accessible now -- and for the future.]
[Excerpt]
"Librarians carry a professional responsibility to protect the right to non-censored open information, Nellis said. The work being done at the University is a part of a larger effort across the country by those who understand data’s value.
Nellis added that awareness is the first step in preserving data and that everyone can get involved in saving information because the data ecosystem is vast.
“It doesn’t take that much effort to have a high impact and everyone can help,” Nellis said.
Nellis warned that the federal government is cutting citizens out of the processes of democracy by making decisions behind closed doors and by limiting the amount of information people can access.
“We have the right to this information, and to see it being taken down, to see it being lost, should be a moral outrage for every citizen and person living in this country,” Nellis said."
"On Feb. 7, Trump fired Colleen Shogan from her role as Archivist of the United States, the head of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and government official responsible for overseeing the preservation—both physical and digital—and promulgation of government records. Shogan’s dismissal marks the first time that a sitting president has fired the nation’s archivist since the position was established in the 1930s...
The dismissal wasn’t exactly unexpected. TheNew York Timesreports that Trump had grown to “despise” the agency for its role in alerting the Department of Justice (DOJ) in 2022 to his alleged misappropriation and mishandling of classified documents at his Florida estate of Mar-a-Lago following his first term in office—a case a federal judge dismissed in July of last year. (His ire extended to Shogan despite her not assuming the Archivist post until 2023, months after the agency alerted the DOJ.)
And Shogan won’t be the last NARA official to get the axe: The president has reportedly in recent months drawn up a “list” of staff to fire in retaliation for their role in the classified documents investigation, according to Rolling Stone. (Shogan, NARA, and the White House did not respond to Fast Company’s requests for comment.)"
"The National Park Service removed references to transgender people from its Stonewall National Monument web pages on Thursday, as the Trump administration continued its push for federal agencies to recognize only two genders: male and female, as assigned at birth...
Dr. Carla Smith, the chief executive of the L.G.B.T. Community Center, said in a statement that the website changes were “factually inaccurate” and “an affront to our entire community,” and she urged the Park Service to “immediately restore accurate and inclusive language.”...
On Wednesday, according to a version of the Park Service website saved by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, the introductory text on the monument’s main page said: “Before the 1960s, almost everything about living openly as a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer (LGBTQ+) person was illegal.
By Thursday afternoon, the word “transgender” and the letter T in the abbreviationhad been removed from the page. By Thursday evening, the word “queer” and “Q+” had also been removed from the website."
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We may publish any photograph you share in The New York Times. We will never publish your name without permission, but it would help to provide at least one method of contacting you in case we need to reach out about your submission."
"Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who wastapped as the acting directorof the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) just days ago, is taking on another new role in President Donald Trump's new administration.
Rubio is now also serving as the acting director of the U.S. Archives,ABC News reported,citing a high-level official. Fox News Digital reached out to the State Department for comment, but they did not immediately respond.
Trump signaled last month his intention of replacing the now-former national archivist Colleen Shogan, who was appointed by former President Joe Biden, during a brief phone interview with radio host Hugh Hewitt. The National Archives notified the Justice Department in early 2022 over classified documents Trump allegedly took with him to his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida after leaving office. That would later result in an FBI raid, and Trump being indicted by former special counsel Jack Smith. However, Biden nominated Shogan to run the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) later in 2022, and the Senate confirmed her the following year.
The source told ABC News that Rubio has been the acting archivist since shortly after Trump was sworn in as the 47th president last month."
[Kip Currier: Information professionals and centers can be leaders in preserving histories -- like that of influential astronomer Vera Rubin. Right now, too, libraries, archives, and museums can continue to collect books by and about these kinds of trailblazers. They can digitize and make available illuminating records and artifacts, like diaries and photos. They can create interactive exhibits and virtual reality experiences to raise our awareness of their struggles and triumphs.
Once this phase of selective erasure and targeted minimization of historically marginalized persons and groups has inevitably passed, so too can information professionals, historians, reporters, authors, and myriad others work to restore these pioneering people to the historical record.
A larger question is why the current administration is laboring so hard to erase and undervalue the histories and achievements of individuals who have inarguably faced discrimination -- and in countless inspiring instances have surmounted formidable barriers -- as members of disenfranchised communities?
Why do they fear these histories and uplifting achievements?
They work to erase these histories so that others won't be empowered by these stories and lessons. Not knowing these stories enables the erasers to control the narratives and, more importantly, influence how people think. They don't want people to be aware of what boundary breakers have done to break through barriers to equal opportunities. Why?
They benefit from unequal power structures. They fear equality and change. They want to define "truth". So, they stoke fear, apathy, division, and distrust to fortify the inequitable power structures that advantage them and disadvantage everyone else.
The world has seen revisionist campaigns like this many times before, though, and I'm confident that truth and reason will eventually prevail again. But it's going to take hard work and strategy and creativity and resilience and teamwork to achieve.
Media outlets, like ProPublica and others committed to truth telling and accuracy of information, serve inestimable roles in uncovering deception, revealing truths, and reporting the facts. As the renowned lawyer John Adams (and future 2nd President of the United States from 1797-1801) pointed out to a Massachusetts court in 1770, "Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence."
Those of us in the information professions who care about truth and the historical record -- and the stories of everyone, not just the privileged few -- are going to have to do our parts to stand up to the self-appointed revisionists, censors, and erasers. Many information professionals are already stepping up in ways that make a positive difference every day. Like challenging those who want to remove books from our libraries.
Filmmakers, graphic novelists, photographers, screenwriters, faith leaders, investigative reporters, musicologists, grant funders, poets, independent bookstores, lawyers, actors, civil watchdog groups, data analysts, publishers, ethnographers, artisans, and countless others are also working to push back against erasure and disenfranchisement of diverse peoples.
I will share stories about ongoing efforts to counter the silencing of diverse voices in future blog posts throughout this year.]
[Excerpt]
"During his first presidential term, Donald Trump signeda congressional actnaming a federally funded observatory after the late astronomer Vera Rubin. The act celebrated herlandmark research on dark matter— the invisible, mysterious substance that makes up much of the universe — and noted that she was an outspoken advocate for the equal treatment and representation of women in science.
“Vera herself offers an excellent example of what can happen when more minds participate in science,” theobservatory’s website said of Rubin— up until recently.
By Monday morning, a section of her online biography titled, “She advocated for women in science,” was gone. It reappeared in a stripped-down form later that day amid a chaotic federal government response to Trump’scampaign against diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
While there are far more seismic changes afoot in America than the revision of three paragraphs on a website, the page’s edit trail provides an opportunity to peer into how institutions and agencies are navigating the new administration’s intolerance of anything perceived as “woke” and illuminates a calculation officials must make in answering a wide-open question:
How far is too far when it comes to acknowledging inequality and advocating against it?"
[Kip Currier: The late Toni Morrison, 1993 Nobel Prize Winner for Literature, observed that "Access to knowledge is the superb, the supreme act of truly great civilizations.” Fittingly, that inspirational declaration greets visitors at an entrance to New York Public Library, one of the world's greatest repositories of knowledge.
As the Trump administration, in just its first weeks, continues to "disappear" information and impede access to knowledge, as illustrated by this NBC News article, the role of libraries, archives, and museums in preserving information and providing access to knowledge and the full range of human experience has never been greater in the nearly 250 year history of the U.S.
It is incumbent upon those who work in and on behalf of libraries, archives, and museums to prepare themselves for the concerted governmental and oligarchic efforts and pressure that will likely soon manifest against them, as they strive to safeguard the nation's memory, historical record, and collections from censorship, removal, and destruction.]
[Excerpt]
"The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday is scrubbing a swath of HIV-related content from the agency’s website as a part of President Donald Trump’s broader effort to wipe out diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives across the federal government.
The CDC’s main HIV page was down temporarily but has been restored. The CDC began removing all content related to gender identity on Friday, according to one government staffer. HIV-related pages were apparently caught up in that action.
CDC employees were told in a Jan 29. email from Charles Ezell, the acting director of the U.S. office of personnel management, titled “Defending Women,” that they’re not to make references or promote “gender ideology” — a term often used by conservative groups to describe what they consider “woke” views on sex and gender — and that they are to recognize only two sexes, male and female, according to a memo obtained by NBC News.
Employees initially struggled with how to implement the new policy, with a deadline of Friday afternoon, the staffer said. Ultimately, agency staffers began pulling down numerous HIV-related webpages — regardless of whether it included gender — rushing to meet the deadline. It was unclear when the pages might be restored.
“The process is underway,” said the government agency staffer, who requested anonymity for fear of repercussions. “There’s just so much gender content in HIV that we have to take everything down in order to meet the deadline.”
The White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Communications representatives within the CDC’s HIV and STD prevention departments did not return requests for comment; last week, the Trump administration ordered all employees of HHS, which includes the CDC, to stop communicating with external parties.
Trump’s sweeping executive order to wipe out DEI programs across the federal government threatens to upend the CDC’s efforts to combat HIV among Black, Latino and transgender people — groups disproportionately affected by the virus — according to public health experts."
"We're taking part in Copyright Week, a series of actions and discussions supporting key principles that should guide copyright policy. Every day this week, various groups are taking on different elements of copyright law and policy, and addressing what's at stake, and what we need to do to make sure that copyright promotes creativity and innovation
We continue to fight for a version of copyright that does what it is supposed to. And so, every year, EFF and a number of diverse organizations participate in Copyright Week. Each year, we pick five copyright issues to highlight and advocate a set of principles of copyright law. This year’s issues are:
Monday: Copyright Policy Should Be Made in the Open With Input From Everyone:Copyright is not a niche concern. It affects everyone’s experience online, therefore laws and policy should be made in the open and with users’ concerns represented and taken into account.
Tuesday: Copyright Enforcement as a Tool of Censorship:Freedom of expression is a fundamental human right essential to a functioning democracy. Copyright should encourage more speech, not act as a legal cudgel to silence it.
Wednesday: Device and Digital Ownership:As the things we buy increasingly exist either in digital form or as devices with software, we also find ourselves subject to onerous licensing agreements and technological restrictions. If you buy something, you should be able to truly own it – meaning you can learn how it works, repair it, remove unwanted features, or tinker with it to make it work in a new way.
Thursday: The Preservation and Sharing of Information and Culture:Copyright often blocks the preservation and sharing of information and culture, traditionally in the public interest. Copyright law and policy should encourage and not discourage the saving and sharing of information.
Friday: Free Expression and Fair Use:Copyright policy should encourage creativity, not hamper it. Fair use makes it possible for us to comment, criticize, and rework our common culture.
Every day this week, we’ll be sharing links to blog posts on these topics at https://www.eff.org/copyrightweek."
