1/ 2021 - Cape Town Library: Today's tragic fire at the @UCTLibrary has destroyed its Special Collections in African Studies, including some of the oldest & rarest materials about Africa.
2/ 2018 - Nat'l Museum of Brazil in #Rio: fire destroyed much of this 200-year-old institution's collections, including its scientific library. theguardian.com/world/2018/sep…
3/ 1992 - National Library of Bosnia & Herzegovina was completely destroyed by bombing during the Siege of Sarajevo en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_…
4/ 2001 - University of Houston Law Library, flooded during Tropical Storm Allison.
5/ 1976-79 - National Library of Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge destroyed most of the books & records. Less than 20% of Cambodia's National library survived. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_…
6/ 1865 - University of Alabama Library -- destroyed by Union troops during America's Civil War. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universit…
7 & 8/ 1851 & 1814 - US Library of Congress. The @librarycongress was first destroyed by British troops during the War of 1812 during the sack of Washington DC. Then fire ravaged it again in 1851, burning 2/3 of the Thomas Jefferson collection--an est.35,000 books in total
9/ 262 AD - Library of Celsus, in Ephesus, Anatolia, now part of Turkey. Destroyed by an earthquake, the Library of Celsus was the third-largest library in the Roman world, believed to have held around twelve thousand scrolls. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_o…
10/ 48 BC - Library of Alexandria, perhaps the largest library of the ancient world was accidentally burned by Julius Caesar during a civil war in 48 BC. But historians say it had suffered centuries of decline before that, beginning in 145 BC. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_o…
11/ 🔥Whether by fire, flood, quake, war, or neglect, the knowledge housed in our #libraries is at risk.
Disappearing titles are bad for libraries & the patrons we serve. Libraries want to #OwnBooks.
With VHS & DVD, libraries could buy sets, lend to patrons & safeguard copies for cultural posterity. With streaming, the shows just vanish 👻 We don’t want books to suffer the same fate! We want a digital future for libraries where they can own & preserve digital books. #OwnBooks
A group of intellectual property law professors lead by @rtushnet submitted a “friend of the court” brief in support of @internetarchive and controlled digital lending today in our case against Hachette, PRH, HarperCollins and Wiley. 🧵eff.org/document/hache…
@rtushnet 2/ The law professors’ brief notes that nonprofit libraries “serve important democratic interests” and “enable a richer, more democratic culture.”
3/ They explain that, in contrast to @internetarchive’s CDL, the publisher’s “putative licensing alternatives regularly come with policies that harm the larger mission of libraries to preserve information and make it available to citizens on a nondiscriminatory basis.”
Did you know that the Internet Archive has a physical archive that houses millions of books (as in: actual, physical, paper books)? For every book that we lend to users online, we have a physical copy that is preserved in our archive. A 🧵
We get our books the same way as other libraries: we buy books and we receive donated books. Some of those donations come from libraries that are reevaluating their physical collections, like Hamilton Public Library: blog.archive.org/2021/05/26/beh…
And some books come to us from libraries that are shutting down forever, like Marygrove College. The school closed in 2019 & rather than sell off the collection, the Board donated the entire library to us for preservation & digitization: blog.archive.org/2020/10/20/dig…