Publishing house interns wading through “slush piles” may quip about that Wiccan memoir they just cringe-read or the Guide to DIY Bunkers they’ve turned down. But sometimes important books are also missed. The Diary of Anne Frank was saved from obscurity only because an editor spotted it in a stack of rejected manuscripts. Thus the promise of a new prize for book proposals, sponsored by Penguin Random House Canada and Westwood Creative Artists.
Digital mistakes are recorded history, even when deleted or corrected. If personal data is stored, spread, leaked or misused, it impacts how someone is remembered. At the same time, companies can shutter or forever-delete media with important historical context. In 2017, a Twitter employee deactivated U.S. President Donald Trump’s account for 11 minutes.
Founder Brewster Kahle calls himself a digital librarian but he’s also one of the internet’s earliest trailblazers. In the 1980s, he was a rising star at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before co-founding early search engine Alexa Internet , named after the ancient Library of Alexandria in Egypt. He then founded the Internet Archive, also inspired by the library that burnt to the ground and took with it more than 500 years of books, artifacts and global knowledge.
A student asks about the server in Egypt. Do they worry about a server in a politically unstable country? What if it’s destroyed? Brewster moves the group toward an exit but pauses at pews with colourful clay statues of people, a “riff” on the Terracotta Army sculptures in China. They represent people who have worked for the Archive for three years or more. He points out his own statue near Ted Nelson and late internet activist Aaron Swartz.