Digital Amnesia

This is what I'm talking about, like, in general. this movie is about both austerity measures and budget cuts in library and archives services around the world (mostly in the netherlands and the united states), as much as the critical mistake of considering that we no longer need printed artifacts as everything is available on the internet. going to library school, I'm familiar with both subjects, and watching a documentary like this made my day. I watched it twice since. It is interesting the way they base the arguments on actual organisations involved in archivism and libraries : the internet archive, the bibliotheca alexandrina (the 21st century library of alexandria, egypt), the problems of archives of NASA, community archivism as done by teenagers and weirdos and the closure of the royal tropical institute of the netherlands and dilapidation of their library collection no one wanted in the netherlands anymore because everything is online anyway. An all too familiar pattern, compensated by some hopeful parts.

This 50 minute VPRO back light documentary radically discusses an unknown issue to the public related to global data and information slippage due to the technological obsolescence and will cover many sustainable solutions from many experts in the field of digital data recovery.

The issues of risk of loosing digital data due to the vulnerability, the drastic changes occurred in the digital world and also with destruction of physical library due to over reliance in online data can be analyzed in the relevant documentary.

It is Jason Scott, a digital historian and a tech savant who also takes part in this documentary to discuss on the "mass information losses" in the web and in the digital media due to it's risk and his solution is as an independent party is to provide an online tool of "Archive Team Warrior", a data protector tool which will compress and and will put in a global database to protect data and any individual can join in as a social service. His image is given above.

Likewise many individuals and teams have joined hands to fight against the "Digital Amnesia" and are appearing in the documentary.

• Mr. Brewster Kahle : Founder of Internet Archive and Physical Archive

This entity will protect all the books and other physical media and archive in the Internet to protect and stop digital amnesia to establish data and information protection.

• Mr. Dennis Wing - McMoon project

This team is trying to protect videos from the earliest moon landing videos from NASA to maintain a digital video library to establish data and information protection without data obsoleting.

• Mr. Ismail Serageldin - Director : Library of Alexandria

He initiated a book purchase from a 250 year old library shredding of a dutch institute to be stopped and maintained in Egypt as a safety measure to implement a Anti-Digital amnesia project.

• The Long now foundation

They have build "The Rosetta Disk" which contains microscopic information inbuilt to the relevant metal to maintain sustainable information for the future historians. And also as a symbol of sustainability "Millennium Clock" is built.

Any way an amazing documentary covering an unknown part of the human aspect of memory and future of information.

Overall - 4/5