Today the Internet Archive issued a really important and valuable report titled "Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record" which takes a deep look at the disturbing state of the cultural record in the digital age; this resonates deeply with and further illuminates developments that CNI has been tracking since the turn of the century.

The report can be downloaded at

https://blog.archive.org/2024/10/30/vanishing-culture-a-report-on-our-fragile-cultural-record/

This is a long and complex report, and I haven't read the whole thing yet. The first section, which is around 30 pages, deals with Media Preservation and the Production of Public Memory, and highlights the horrible implications of the structural move away from media ownership to cloud based streaming platforms and licensing. The primary author on this part is Luca Messarra, a Public Humanities Fellow at the Internet Archive. The remaining roughly 100 pages of the report are an extensive series of case studies titled "Narratives of Cultural Preservation and Loss" that examine specific areas like books, news, moving images and born-digital materials.

My thanks to the Internet Archive for developing and sharing this extremely timely and helpful resource.

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI