 Thank you very much Tommy, and just in case anyone's wondering the answer to that last question is no Libraries and history centers don't face obsolescence. In fact, they're more important than ever Especially regional and city libraries like this. So I'll get to that good news But first I want to just thank you all for coming out on what is an unusually wonderful evening I very much appreciate your being here. I Began this book. I began thinking about this book at least 20 years ago when I was working at the Library of Congress and those of us inside the library and archives and the National Archives began to see That everything digital was going to change the way we did our business and it was going to be like a tsunami I think that was the metaphor of the time certainly a dated deluge I wanted to know what happened what was going to happen to our cultural memory our collective memory as a Species the thing that made us so dominant on the planet all the knowledge that we've been leveraging all these years What would happen when it existed on this? Default mode and not in books This actually has more than just books and it's a telephone. It's also got all my music It's got a lot of personal data a lot of data that are owned by other companies that I'm licensing It's got a whole world in it And yet there's no secure way that we have a preserving this data into the future Whereas we're now in a public library a very large city library that actually is the infrastructure of the print era Publishers would publish their books, but they don't keep their own print around for long Publishing companies would go out of business and yet their stock would persist because they had been acquired by libraries The actual publishers often got rid of their own stock or overstock long before they realized that it they would Actually be like most companies that go away So it's important to remember that libraries and I'll talk about this libraries preserve Institutions preserve because they have a long time horizon and how do they fit into a time when we actually give a premium to very short-term? rewards Quarterly reports and the latest app that's going to get superseded by something else So yes as Tommy said this is a little book about a big idea What is the future of our collective memory in the digital age? Now in my view we The genius of information technology or memory technology is really when we It kicked in the need for it when we discovered that in fact we were going to die and We appear to be the only species that actually recognizes our own mortality while we're alive and actually think about it I'd say brood about it plan for it and imagine what's going to happen to us when we are no more This Garden of Eden moment came Probably well in the old age in the old era we thought it was 2004 BC, but it certainly came by by the time this was done This is a cave painting in show bay in France It's at least 40,000 years old and you have to believe that the people who did this a were human and be they were well aware Of their mortality no, we don't know what it is. They're trying to tell us We can't read their code, but we certainly know that they're human We also know that they were among the first to figure out how to cheat death by actually taking the content of their minds Their spirits their memories and their imaginations and putting it on to these very permanent forms It turns out that cave rock is very permanent and so were the pigments that they used So the genius of our memory technologies are basically outsourcing our memories our knowledge to durable physical objects The real challenge is that every time we've invented a new technology It's been able to store more information But it's significantly less durable and now we've arrived at the age of the computer chip Which is the most ephemeral kind of storage there is at all Besides answering the question to what's going to happen to memory in the digital age I had two other questions or two other points that I wanted to make by writing this book One is to let people know the average person know not the specialist about this paradox that in the digital age The age of abundance is actually harder not easier to secure the historical record and our own personal memories and again anyone who's lost data when they When they've had a computer crash and they realize they need to back up their stuff in the future Understand how fragile some of our own information is in our own lifetime But I think the real Powerful motivation for me was in fact The fatigue the anger I felt over time when people would refer to preservation as a kind of technical issue Is if somehow the people who took care of our books and our and our papers and computer technology We're mere technicians when in fact few things are more important than the preservation of the human spirit and the human record I think of what preservation is as a profoundly moral activity. Yes, it's very technical And it's gotten far more technical over time But I think the things that drive those of us who think about memory. It is about access to information about the past As Tommy said I did work in the Soviet archives And I realized then when there was a concerted effort to control access to knowledge of the past I was actually working in 16th century archives and I was denied access to materials that I had seen in America because I was from a capitalist country that the knowledge we have of the past isn't just about the past It's about who we are today and what our possibilities in the future are we how we imagine what we can become over time So why is this record at risk? Well, it's not just that the technology itself is very ephemeral although it is in fact I think it's an imaginative leap that we haven't yet made We are used to thinking about an economy of information which is relatively scarce That is the information that we get in the library for example, although it's a voluminous library It's been through innumerable filters already. Not everybody gets to publish a book Not every book gets acquired by the library and not every library book persists over time now with Anyone who has an act who has access to the internet which is actually about half the world after all half You know it's the developed world, but everybody mostly in America many people All they have to do is go online and they can write whatever they want and not only that they can read whatever they want but they can also take something they found and Hit like and forward it again So you have this ballooning universe of information which is not filtered and redundantly Duplicated over time so the core of memory which is to select meaningful things becomes very challenging very challenging indeed And so we know how to manage objects Manage knowledge by managing objects, but we don't know how to manage our knowledge when it's as unstable as digital formats. I Think that we can learn and I'm confident that we will In a relatively short period of time We will learn how to manage and rebuild our memory systems But only if we deal with two major misperceptions which are obstacles the first commonly shared among non-historians shall we say is that this information overload this kind of digital vertigo that we live in It's caused by computers and it's the first time we've ever experienced this in history. In fact, the opposite is true It's not caused by computers. It's caused by an idea and I'll tell you about that And it certainly is not new every innovation in information technology actually produces a temporary Welter of information which gives people a kind of information Vertigo for example This information technology the cuneiform which was invented over 5,000 years ago. This example is 2700 years old It also produced this sense of too much information when the scribes found that they were able to Inscribe many things. There were many things they wanted to inscribe account mostly inventories in fact and transactions They were witnesses to trades and transactions that they actually had these big bulky things they had to put somewhere and they had to put them in order and so we see over time the Describes in Mesopotamia developing systems of inventorying and sorting things that we would know as libraries and archives The thing about the cuneiform is as I said it was invented it was invented by accountants For the for the very simple reason that they needed to keep account of goods and services That were valuable But it wasn't long before people Co-opted the accountants tool and made it into something much more humane. I'd say much more powerful than just keeping track of cattle and and oil vats of oil This cuneiform as I said 2700 years old is in fact a tablet that allows people to understand the omens of animal and Human birth defects. So this is actually a tablet of divinations similar tablets from this time had prayers That had spirits attached of them that would go into the future And in fact had many poems the first poem that we have in full is in fact written on a cuneiform And it is Gilgamesh it is about a man who aspired to become immortal So you see from the beginning it was always about cheating death and becoming somehow immortal Another thing about technology is that it's often not invented because People are looking for cool cool new tools despite what people think now It's actually invented to do something that people like only cheaper and faster So cutting ahead to the print revolution on this is the Gutenberg Bible It was done in Germany in 1453. They're about the first book using movable type It wasn't invented to be a cool new technology. It was actually invented to look exactly like this This is a book that was done by hand the giant Bible of Mainz in Fort in the 1450s in the same town What Gutenberg wanted to do was to meet the demand for more things like this There was a boom in appetite for reading at that time on the cusp of the Renaissance and Reformation So Gutenberg built this thing to look just like this thing and that's the way most technologies arise In fact, it's curious and I go into some detail in my book that this information technology Wasn't really understood for the power that it had because in fact it lacked the prestige and the beauty of The scribal hand and the scribal artifact and it was not picked up by the church readily enough You will see with every new information technology the two groups who are the earliest adopters invariably our first pornographers and Second ideologues and fanatics So the people who really picked up on how to use this besides pornographers were the people we now know in retrospect as Protestants who did a lot of propaganda Protestants, you know, they they used propaganda and in fact Reading some of the earliest tracks and leaflets using this cheap printing technique. It got cheaper over time We see the same kind of advocacy for apocalyptic utopian societies that demand huge Sacrifices of normal human behaviors that you see nowadays On the internet with religious fanatics and ideologues Trying to build utopian societies and seizing the new technology to actually build a community. They're very adept at this Authorities tend to ignore on the tools that are at hand. Unfortunately One of the first things we notice in any information Innovation is that it takes a while for people to glom on to the potentials And we don't know what the potentials of the new technology are for several generations So today it will take several generations of print natives maybe two or three before Sorry of digital natives before we begin to see the real behaviors people will have When they use their phones or actually phones these these portable things will probably be obsolete will probably be Embedded with these kinds of devices But it in the world of print it took several generations This is a picture of Michel de Montaigne a man who was among the first of the print natives and he's famous now Partly because the book that he wrote his essays is still in print. It was published in the 1600s and it is still in print this day He was someone who was able to write in a new form and address new readers because of this technology So again all these memory innovations and memory technology innovations produce new writers Entirely new sets of readers and new genres in his case. It was the it was the it was the essay Now with every technology innovation you see people embracing this technology with optimism and Seeing this as disruptive and creative the sort of techno optimists You also see a set of people who are techno Nostalgia, let's say they look at this as disruptive and negative and I talk about quite a few in the book And because they make very touching stories about how Difficult it is for people to adjust to change when it first appears threatening and some people always adapt to change But actually end up abusing it these changes more than they are aware of because they don't know the potentials But I just want to cite my favorite of the technology Kermudgeans the granddaddy of all techno Nostalgia and that is Socrates Socrates famously warned that the invention of writing would lead to ignorance and ultimately to the death of Memory itself and here I quote Socrates For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it because they will not practice their memory Their trust in writing produced by external characters, which are no part of themselves Will discourage the use of their own memory within them you have invented an elixir not of memory But of reminding and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom not true wisdom For they will read many things without instruction and will therefore Seem to know many things when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with since they are not wise But only appear wise Now I'm quoting Socrates But how do we know Socrates said this well because Plato wrote down everything he said You know the thing that I love about this quote is that from the beginning the Greeks have understood That these technologies we create Implicate us morally in their use This is the first time we hear someone directly addressing the moral hazard of a technology in which something that is Inside of us a part of us our memories or the words we of poetry or moral literature that we memorize When we no longer incorporated physically into our mind and our body that we become Alienated from it and we take that much less responsibility for the way that it's used This is an issue that comes up over and again with all tools and we see Interestingly enough a lot of the scientists who were involved in inventing the atomic bomb read a lot about How Socrates and Plato and others viewed the moral implications of their technology? So I've always liked this quote from from the Kermutch and socrates Now I want to I I move ahead through the enlightenment in the book and talk about how knowledge actually becomes a tool of progress it becomes a moral force in the enlightenment of Democratic citizens and talk a lot about Thomas Jefferson and the founding of the Library of Congress But I'm going to skip now to a moment in the in the 1800s This is from a book published in the 1840s a physical atlas That is a kind of data visualization all the new knowledge about the natural world that that was known and discovered within the early decades of the 1800s Because the important thing to realize is that the current information inflation did not begin in the 1990s when the internet was open to Commerce it didn't begin in the 1940s when computers were built by the military It actually began in the early 1800s in the 1830s in my view And it was not a technical innovation that set us on the present course But an idea and that idea is materialism The idea that the universe and all that exists is no more and no less than the material effect of a material cause That is the world itself writes its own autobiography in material evidence And that's what this image from the 1840s shows it shows that before geologists at the end of the At the end of the 19 at the end of the 1800s thought of the world as static Created, you know one day or during a week. Yeah one day and Then it was static over time and nothing would change until the second coming of Christ but in fact by then they learned that the earth was highly dynamic and that in fact they discovered through Explorations and looking at the dynamism of the planet which you can see that there were in fact That not only did things change but actually things came and went in time There was they discovered that there were extinct species This is a dodo and that the notation says that it was the last observed in 1691 That was actually a revolutionary finding that there were extinctions Thomas Jefferson had had fossils all around from extinct animals But he didn't believe that they were extinct actually so the paradoxical But what you see is the discovery that rocks are clocks that that through the physical world We can tell time so we had the discovery of deep time The dinas dynamism of the planet and extinctions and of course People began to think about whether humans to come and go on the planet So in this decade of the 1830s when we really embrace this philosophical notion That was the decade that Darwin boarded the HMS Beagle and went on his voyage around the globe with his principles of geology Under his arm by Charles Lyle telling him that the world was actually millions of years old and he began to formulate his theory of natural selection In the same decade in 1833 the word scientist was invented. There was no such word before There were natural philosophers and there were natural historians But now there was this thing called scientist and that was the one who based their knowledge on evidence and the testing of evidence This was the decade in 1838 when the first imaging technology from life was invented the daguerreotype It was the decade when that when the telegraph was invented and railroads began to crisscross England So anyone who thinks the telecommunications isn't kind of a memory spread I I want you to think again because it was really the railroads that began to shuttle a lot of Information or back and forth through print in this case That by the end of the century Sound recordings had been invented the first one was in the 1860s and by the 1890s you actually had x-rays Which was quite remarkable. There's a famous picture of the hand of the inventor's Wife Runken her hand and you can see bones in it and you can see her ring And it was quite shocking at the time that people could image through human flesh And this was all in the name of science, of course This was the birth of what I call in the book and explain as a forensic imagination That is the the ability to look at the present and see in it traces of the past And this is a very powerful idea that is still actually we're still in the grip of this today I mean it certainly fueled Darwin's understanding of time and how we could understand the history of life It certainly gave us Sigmund Freud's theories about how the history of an individual could be read in the present state of their psyche through Their dreams and psychosomatic Evidence it certainly was behind Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's invention of the ultimate forensic hero Sherlock Holmes and it also fuels the imagination of people who invented the Large Hadron Collider and And love big data more evidence more evidence and more evidence. Please give us more big data. I Will note before I move on that in 1840 the very first detective story was printed. This is by Edgar Allen Poe the The murders in Rue Morgue. It seems to me that ever since that time the great narrative of our of our scientific and engineering age Is in fact the detective story. It's a kind of who done it and how what do we know about the world? We first turn to physical evidence and that is my in my opinion is why we have the data deluge of today We do it very efficient the data deluge of today Science and engineering really began to become the major way that we not only understood the world But more importantly used it to change the world and to build the world as we wanted and that's also a major shift And and it's as impetus for the growth of a lot of the technologies that we have for this to happen Though there need to be four factors and I talk about this at some length in the book There needed to be first the embrace of empirical methods and materialist theories of interpretation which we have We also had to have the harnessing of those findings by economic systems Just to apply the knowledge and create ever finer instruments to accumulate ever greater amounts of data Which we have we have businesses and governments Funding more and more investigation finer and finer tools like the large Hadron collider The third thing we need is a dedicated resources to educate expert workforce The big boom in education that started in the 1800s and resulted in the growth of land grant institutions for example, and the growth of public libraries was this this investment in educating the expert workforce and Finally the fourth and certainly the most important Is political regimes that actually keep the pursuit of knowledge both well resourced and also protected from ideological interference Now if you take any one of those away You actually Imparal not just science and engineering, but the entire data-rich Techno technologically advanced world that we live in so think about it All of those things need to be in play and all of them are always Something that we as citizens decide on with every election in this country in fact So here we are in 2016 on St. Patrick's Day Um Uniquely dominant over the earth through this accumulation of knowledge. In fact, I would say we are dangerously dominant at this point So what can we go wrong if we have this much knowledge? Well, this is where I moved from history because history doesn't tell us too much about the future to Memory which actually is about how we understand the future and I did a lot of work in Understanding neuroscience which fortunately in the 20 years I was thinking about this has learned a huge amount of huge amount about memory in all forms Including our collective memory So the brain has an immensely large job to do as as neuroscience tells us it lives in a data deluge Effectively 24-7 even when we're sleeping. It's processing huge amounts of information From our body and also from the external environment Now it has mechanisms for acquiring new information Consolidating that information into previous stores of information in our mind and most importantly converting short-term new information Into long-term memories that we can call upon later if the brain and our emotions decide that it's actually worthy of keeping around But how do we decide how does the brain decide what information has a long-term value? And this is where I think brain science has so much to tell us about what we can do with the data deluge in the digital age The only criterion that's used by an animal including a human being is that it keeps information That is judged to be valuable because it has the potential for reuse So when an animal moves from one environment to another it has to acquire a lot of new information To adjust to that new environment. That's what learning is about. That's why it memorizes its environment And the old information about the old environment actually fades away So lest you forget or doubt yourself because you've moved a lot and you can't remember everything about where you've moved Your brain is actually optimized To put those other memories into deep storage because the job today is to get through the end of the day That's what your brain thinks its job is so I wouldn't worry too much about Losing the ripeness and the vividness of certain memories as you move into new environments Your brain is designed to do that But the brain has has a lot of Sorry, this is I just wanted to point out that this this period of the 1830s also was a time when when libraries like this were being built Let me just step back a little and say this is one of the first and most famous of the large libraries it was built in France open in 1850 right after the revolutions of 1848 and it had I Know it looks very Sort of old-fashioned to us like it's the ideal of the old-fashioned library But in fact it was quite radical at the time and the architect la bruce was very proud of it He was using this amazing new tech this amazing new material called cast iron So that he could open the ceiling up several stories put in glass and actually built something which he could tell Everybody deterred fire because it had so much cast iron in it But most importantly it was actually a place that students could go Students before had to take books from the library and take them back to their Dormitories to read now they could actually work in this space consecrated to learning as a temple to progress and Not only that it's highly Well, I'd say it's he aestheticized knowledge He built a building which basically idealized everything about knowledge that they believed at the time And I think we haven't yet figured out how to build spaces in which people understand digital technology and Immortalize it in this aesthetic beautiful way yet. It's one of the tasks that we have to do still So I want to go back to the issue of what can go wrong with memory many of you will recognize iris Murdoch Who died at the beginning of this century? She was a prolific philosopher and writer and later in her life She succumbed to Alzheimer's and and her story is very beautifully told by her husband John Bailey Also a great writer in his memoir about her called iris He reports that his wife his iris began to lose her personality with Alzheimer's It wasn't just that she lost her memories or that she became spatially disoriented This is something that also happens in Alzheimer's Spatial organization orientation and memory are very intimately tied It's one of the really hot areas in neuroscience now is how space and memory Operate as two sides of the coin But she also lost her ability to imagine the future because she had no past She would wake up every day and not be able to anticipate what was supposed to happen that day So this is what's so important about Understanding why the past matters for the future because it is actually the raw stuff of the future And in fact, what is imagination other than memory in the future tense when she lost her memory? She lost her imagination That's why I say that memory is not about the past. It is about the future The other thing that can go wrong besides not holding on to our memories And this is as true for collective memory as amnesia is is if we remember too much Because if we remember too much it means we haven't sorted through what really is significant Thank you. It didn't remember where it wanted to be So I also tell the story a memory case study that's well known to people Many people of a man who lived in Soviet Russia who had a prodigious memory He was a memory artist. In fact, it was like he had Photographic memory. It wasn't quite that it was actually a memory defect He had he was he could acquire a lot of information But he was unable to actually convert any of it from short-term memory to long-term memory the man who studied him and wrote about him is Dr. Laurier Alexander Laurier one of the great psychologists of the last century and He describes in one of his books the case of s that was the man's name His initial he warranted anonymity as a patient. He said that art that Never developed the art of forgetting that he remembered too much and that that was actually the thing that led him to lead a very distressing life And here I'm going to quote from the book and also from read from the book and also from The two men involved So s was able to make a good living as a mnemonist as a memory artist committing vast amounts of detailed information to memory and Recalling them on demand in performance But everyday living was quite distressing to him when s processed new information Everything went into save and nothing into delete So his mind really operated like this He would go into his memory palace and he would see the very first thing on the floor everything was unsorted and he would just have This ping of association and he would go he would start to think about other things and he would forget what it was He was trying to remember. I want to say this is it's unfair to represent good memory with this picture It's one of my favorites though This is actually a picture of the Library of Congress moving from the Capitol into its new building the Jefferson building And they were in the process of bringing over on Uncatalogged copyright deposits yet. They actually built this massive building on Capitol Hill to accommodate such things as a copyright office Deposits and they did but this is a very lovely picture that illustrates that for so long management of knowledge Actually is just managing physical objects, and it's a huge burden in libraries Lest you forget most people don't see that this is what goes on behind the reference desk Anyway, you know he was asked was unable to sort of consolidate the contents of his memory and to build Association that that lead to pattern recognition. This is what long-term memory is about It's the ability to recognize patterns over time and association To him he actually had no idea of how things happened Everything literally was just one damned thing after another. He didn't understand cause and effect and Here I quote him as saying Quote at one point I studied the stock market and when I showed that I had good memory for prices on the exchange I became a broker, but it was just something I did for a while to make a living as for real life That's something else again. It all took place in a dream not in reality Now Luria poignantly adds and here I quote Luria He had a family a fine wife and his son who was a success, but this too he perceived as through a haze Indeed one would be hard put to say which was more real for him the world of imagination in which he lived or the world of reality In which he was but a temporary guest so I think you can see that Good memory is something that we need to cultivate. It's like packing for a trip for that We're going away for a week, but someone gives us an overnight bag. What do we do? Well that actually is how the brain works It's got to be very mobile So you pack things that you know you're going to use again and you figure well when I get on the road I can just buy the toothpaste because I'm going to go through the toothpaste I can just buy it again So you pick up things you need as you go through life and then set them aside But you really only need a few things to take with you So you don't want to clutter up your mind with things that turn out to be not usable again like toothpaste empty toothpaste So how do we avoid both? Collective amnesia and remembering too many things and lacking a kind of narrative in our lives And how can our libraries and archives and in fact whoever our family archivist is Help us sort through this both as a culture and individually Well, I think there are three things we need to do and I highlight them in the book The first is to make sure that we rescue all the information that we've inherited That's on analog formats and here I want to talk about a couple of local heroes who are showing us how to do this This is Carl Haber. He's an experimental physicist who works at the Lawrence Berkeley laboratory He actually started he was working on the imaging technology at the very core of the large Hadron collider The thing that detected the sub sub sub sub atomic particle called the Higgs boson He was some made aware through actually listening to the radio one day stuck in traffic that There were some recorded sound that Objects in the Library of Congress in the Smithsonian that were unplayable You couldn't play them either because they were so fragile when you actually played them back with a needle They would degrade so much they would lose sound or they were actually shattered into pieces or on formats that were kind of Too delicate to even handle and Carl said well gee I know how to image that I'll just turn sound into a picture and that's what he does and you can see In the background those are actually grooves he's imaged the grooves and those are sound waves So he basically turns it into digital information and then into digital form and then he can play it back He's been able to recover the earliest recorded sound It's a song like Mary had a little lamb or something and also the earliest recording of Alexander Graham Bell It's quite phenomenal but there are many other formats in which very valuable information is trapped and Accessible only if we rescue it digitally or at least share it digitally Something here at the San Francisco Public Library This is the Sandborn maps that Tommy mentioned from 1905 They are they survived the earthquake or the fire you can see they're charred and what's really valuable about these maps is that They because they were in bad shape Sandborn fire insurance company note the irony of course that this maps fire insurance Claims what they did was they they stopped updating the the city with changes every year Sandborn would would paste in would send things to paste into the maps In order to update the information about the buildings because in fact unlike online information You had to actually republish the entire thing in order to update it So it would send little stickies that you could put in Like these you know it would update information. So this actually is an image of the city frozen in time It's it's a record of historical moment that is simply irreplaceable and now that it's been digitized Through a collaboration of the library and David Rumsey It's available online for free and people do not have to travel here in order to view it And we know that there'll always be a couple of digital copies So that when the object itself becomes very fragile then people who want to consult it don't need to come and use the fragile object Which will continue to deteriorate? there are other Things that we can do by digitizing objects that yield what is literally new knowledge knowledge We never could have had before because when you digitize lots of things You will make a database that allows a machine to read at scale So we know that there are naval ships logs that exist in naval museums all over The world they are massive and they are very repetitive They're in very crabbed hands and they report a lot of information about About specific sea voyages and there's a kind of information very detailed information about the sun and the clouds and the birds that fly by and the waves the climate scientists would die to know Because we need to build a longitudinal history of the oceans and once they were digitized which they have been We now have a database that can be read by machines for this very valuable information They never could have been read by any number of human beings no matter how much time they and And energy they put to reading them We also have information that can be Composited so these are also from the San Francisco Public Library the riker maps that Tommy mentioned We did not collude on this incidentally before the talk. I'm glad to mention these but this is also available online and at the David Ramsey site This is a picture taken in 1938 probably 38 or 39 of the Of the Bay Bridge Look at how different the city was But the one thing is it's nice that we can get this online now But then something magical happened when they were every one of these sheets was digitized and that is through The the so-called digital knitting digital knitting is is my husband's Hobby actually knitting digital images together you actually get a composite of images that never could really exist in real life So you're able to see how they relate to each other So this is an example of what I mean by new knowledge old sources yielding new knowledge and it's just through this technology I want to talk next about the next task which is to save the present for the future And here's another local hero Brewster Kale who many of you will recognize at the Internet Archive. You'll see these machines hold multiple formats It says books audio video That was a day when he had just a few machines He's got massive machines now But this technology of the Internet this platform of the Internet allows everyone to actually curate their own memories And because of the Internet Archive they can upload the information that they judged to be valuable To be preserved on this site and shared On the site so in fact each of us can curate our own history at this moment in time and put it up online And share it or not share it but secure it into the future There's something very magical at this moment for people who like to collect things It's always been the case that it's only collectors people who discover value in existing materials and set it aside for the future that we have such things as libraries and archives, but we will not be able to Assess now what is so fleeting a website that lasts a hundred days We won't be able to secure it and assess its value for the long term unless we grab it now And that's way too much for people to understand the massive amount of information That's being captured now through such things as web crawling at the Internet Archive But individuals can still curate their own world their own universe Collectors are among the most important heroes of time we have and there'll be just as critical Now as they were in Thomas Jefferson's day when Jefferson put together a personal library of 6,300 books What he thought every American needed to know about the world and how to be an American citizen What they need to know about democracy good and bad and when the library when the library in the capital was burnt in 1814 he sold his books and receded the library of Congress and set it on its course as a universal library It was of course something that was to him a great Patriotic opportunity wedding his private passion to a public purpose But the truth is that he basically spent all of his money on books and Monticello, and he was heavily in debt And so when the opportunity to sell his books came he was able to fulfill both His his desire to build a library for American citizens and settle some debts And he actually had about I don't know a couple hundred dollars left over he started another library Here she had three libraries in his time So how thinking ahead, how do we actually imagine a digital universe which is as orderly and as enlightened and as spiritually inspiring as this La bruce room and everything that it represents when in fact what we have is this How do we make that a compelling human story? So that people understand that the things that live on these machines are human memories and the memory of Species that are going extinct for example the memories of everything that we're going to miss in the future and our children will miss How do we actually humanize that? So let me leave you with the words of another local hero a favorite poet of mine Some words written in Berkeley in 1986 when he was thinking about what would be what would happen when he was no longer alive And I quote the last stanza I imagine the earth when I am no more Nothing happens no loss. It's still a strange pageant Women's dresses do we lilacs a song in the valley and yet the books will be there on the shelves well-born Drived from people but also from radiance from heights So this the words of Chesoff Miwos who lived in Berkeley for many many years Lived in exile from his native Poland and in exile from his native Polish And as I look ahead at the world that we live in now I think of how different the world that my grandchild is growing up in how she will live to be not 80 But well probably well past 100 that the landscapes she knows now as a child in San Francisco will be long gone I don't know what they'll be like but her landscapes her and the culture she grows up and with the technology Will change more rapidly than anything that we have experienced in our time So I have this instinct that everyone will have a kind of nostalgia for the past Very soon in their life digital natives will start to become nostalgic about their own Already antiquated technologies such as Instagram And their children and grandchildren will make fun of them for the technologies they grew up with these are just you know This is the human condition So I think that we have a unique opportunity as adults to teach our children about memory these machines that keep our memories alive And also to teach them how to be responsible the way we were taught how to be responsible with information in books How to be skeptical skeptical about what we read and how to how to understand and respect the privacy of others This is the unique role. I think that public libraries play when people go online They actually think of the space the internet as a library and we know now that it's not a library But why is it that they go online and imagine that in fact it's both a space for sharing and it's a private space It's a space where in fact no one is allowed to know what we've checked out of the library because that's how it is in a public library How do we actually formulate those policies that we take for granted in public libraries and move them on to this internet space And I'd be happy to talk about that when we go to questions because there are a lot of exciting things going on Both here and across this country about new policies for this digital age But I want to leave you with this last Image it's a selfie from this from 12,000 years ago Patagonia to show you how widespread The desire to leave an imprint. We don't know whether they're waving goodbye or saying hello But I like to think of them as beckoning us to make our mark on the world and make sure that it's as durable as Their hands are in this on this wall 12,000 years old So with that I thank you very much for your attention, and I'm very happy to take questions And of course to sell books and sign books. Thank you very much