What Will We Archive in the Future?

For a Glimpse of Library Collections to Come, Check Out the Fascinating Project to Document Born-Digital Material on Global Health Events

Colorful AIDS education posters from the 1980s. Black-and-white photos of mid-20th-century anatomy lessons for midwives. Eighteenth-century instructions for the administration of patent medicines. While a paper archival collection in the U.S. National Library of Medicine might contain items like these—handwritten or typed journals, correspondence, educational materials, and official reports, some digitized many years after their creation—the next generation of health information lives online.

That’s why the NLM’s two-year-old Global Health Events collection archives born-digital material—webpages, blog posts, social media streams—published during outbreaks and other health crises. The archive includes items like …

By Rebecca Onion | September 29, 2016

Archiving the Civil War’s Text Messages

A Massive Crowdsourcing Project Is Digitizing Thousands of Coded Union Telegrams, and Unearthing Astonishing “Emails”

By Daniel Lewis | September 29, 2016

The Thomas T. Eckert Papers—consisting of records, ledgers, and cipher books kept by the head of the War Department’s military telegraph office—came to us at the Huntington Library four years …

I’ll Vote, But First, Let Me Take A Selfie

Snapping and Sharing a Photo of Your Ballot Is Good for Democracy

By Mark Joseph Stern | September 27, 2016

Voting, James Madison once wrote, is fundamental in a constitutional republic like America. Yet “at the same time,” he noted, its “regulation” is “a task of peculiar delicacy.”

Madison was talking …

Why We Need to Define “Nanomaterial”

Ambiguity Makes It Difficult to Regulate the Technology’s Potential Benefits and Harm to Our Bodies and Environment

By Gary Marchant | September 23, 2016

How do you regulate something you cannot define? It’s a dilemma that policymakers around the world are struggling with as they try to enact regulations for nanomaterials—that loosely defined group …

Apple and the Demise of Cyberpunk

Without Cords and Jacks to Unplug, How Will Our Fictional Heroes Rebel Now?

By Joseph Brogan | September 12, 2016

Rightly or wrongly, we tend to speak of science fiction authors as prophets: We’re delighted to find that Philip K. Dick inveighed against the internet of things half a century …

Who Should Be Our Alien Liaison?

If Extraterrestrials Make Contact, Science Fiction Has Some Advice for Selecting Humanity’s Spokesperson

By Joelle Renstrom | September 9, 2016

On May 25, 2015, a radio telescope in Zelenchukskaya, Russia, picked up a signal coming from star HD164595 in the Hercules constellation. We don’t know much about this star located …

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