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The 10,000 Year Library Conference was held on June 30th to July 2nd 02000.

Press coverage from the event and projects...

Article Name	Author	Publication	Date
Saatchi Innovation Finalist	Saatchi & Saatchi	Saatchi & Saatchi	Sept. 25th, 02000
Archiving Today's Digital Culture	Stephanie Izarek	Fox News.com	July 27th, 02000
Tiny disk to record posterity	Helen Sewell	BBC News	July 2nd, 02000
Preserving our history for future	Dan Gillmor	San Jose Mercury News	July 1st, 02000
Whirlwind of Modern Life	Christian Tyler	Financial Times	June, 3rd 02000

Margaret MacLean Conference Manager

'10,000-year Library' Conference

The Long Now Foundation and Stanford University Libraries held an invitational conference, "The 10,000-year Library," June 30 - July 2, 02000 on the Stanford campus sponsored by the Lazy Eight Foundation. Two dozen participants - including Elizabeth Niggeman head of the German National Library; cuneiform expert William Hallo of Yale University; leading innovators in high-tech, such as Brewster Kahle the creator of the Internet Archive, Council on Library and Information Resources director Deanna Marcum; and others - joined the Long Now board (Michael A. Keller, Danny Hillis, Stewart Brand, Paul Saffo, Kevin Kelly, Peter Schwartz, and Doug Carlston) and librarians to deliberate on the permanence of information and the nature and need for long-term thinking about it. (See complete list of current attendees at the bottom of this page.)

In a time of accelerating technology, accelerating history, and a dangerous shortening of civilization's attention span, the role of libraries becomes deeper than ever. Libraries need to be rethought in the new context and in the light of civilization's now-global and very long term responsibilities. Some new initiatives need to be set in motion. The conference participants will address needed directions for such initiatives. According to Stewart Brand, co-chairman of the Long Now board, "We want to jump-start some serious, collaborative thinking about how to see information - the real narrative of civilization - in very long-term ways. We're talking in part about technology, but it goes much deeper, right to the root of why we are here, what we're doing, and what kind of legacy do we want to leave to our descendents and to their successors."

"Stewardship of cultural content is the essential role of research libraries," says Stanford University Librarian Michael A. Keller. "Serious players in this field have always collected, organized, and preserved information - OK, books, mostly - on behalf of future generations, but up to now, we haven't really thought seriously about how many such generations, or how to think about the mission in terms of thousands of years. Digital information technologies, with their notorious instability, force us to reassess how we go about fulfilling this mission hereafter. So we are an interested party. But nobody knows what the important questions are, to say nothing of solutions. This conference has been tremendously valuable in helping to pose the right questions." Adds Brand, "The issues are pan-disciplinary, so the group we're bringing together is as broad as we can make it with a small group."

The format was similar to what Long Now used successfully in 1998 at the Getty Center in Los Angeles with a related conference called "Time & Bits: Managing Digital Continuity." The participants met for dinner and introductions Friday evening; scheme and probe all day Saturday; spell out next steps Sunday morning, and sum up and for a public audience Sunday afternoon. The public event - for invited press, scholars, technologists, and others - also included a question & answer session. Delivered at the conference was be the first prototype of the 'Rosetta Disk' also being produced under the Lazy Eight Foundation Grant. This modern Rosetta is a micro-etched nickel two inch disk which includes all the worlds translations of the book of Genesis written at a scale to be read by microscopes.

The Long Now Foundation was officially established in 01996 to develop the 10,000-Year Clock and 10,000-Year Library projects as well as to become the seed of a very long term cultural institution. It has been nearly 10,000 years since the end of the last ice age and the beginnings of civilization. Progress during that time was often measured on a "faster/cheaper" scale. The Long Now Foundation seeks to promote "slower/better" thinking and to focus our collective creativity on the next 10,000 years. One of its related projects is development of the Rosetta Disk, a long-term linguistic archive and translation engine that allows for the recovery of "lost" languages in the deep future, the storage technology for which is a 2" nickel disk which records analog text and images at densities up to 350,000 pages per disk, with a life expectancy of 2,000-10,000 years. For more information about the Long Now Foundation: http://www.longnow.org/

Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources (SUL/AIR) develops and implements resources and services within the University libraries and academic technology units that support research and instruction. With collections containing over seven million volumes and numerous of archival, manuscript, map, media, government document, database and serial materials among its fourteen libraries, SUL/AIR coordinates with Stanford's Business, Law, Medical, and SLAC libraries and the Hoover Institution to provide comprehensive information resources to the Stanford Community. The Academic Information Resources division provides information-technology support and instruction and network services to the entire campus community, whether in the library or in the dorm. SUL/AIR's HighWire Press division provides advanced online publication and access services to over 170 of the world's leading peer-reviewed scholarly journals in science, technology, and medicine, and thus is significantly involved in the provision of information to the world's research and academic communities. For more information about the Stanford Libraries: http://www-sul.stanford.edu

The Lazy Eight Foundation is a non-profit, charitable organization dedicated to promoting research and development in the sciences and education. It supports efforts to bring together scientists, artists, and educators across disciplines, with a focus on projects that offer creative solutions to educational, social and environmental problems. The Lazy Eight Foundation works with its "Lazers," individuals from a broad range of disciplines who advise the Foundation on various projects. For more information about the Lazy Eight Foundation: http://www.lazy8.org

Library Conference 02000 Attendies

Mary Catherine Bateson - Professor in Anthropology and English at George Mason University
Had Beatty- President, The Lazy Eight Foundation
Dan Berkovitz - DOE Long Term Stewardship (10,000 year nuclear waste depository)
Stewart Brand - President, The Long Now Foundation
Charles Butcher - Founder, The Lazy Eight Foundation
Doug Carlston - Founder, IC Planet
William Durham - Professor of Anthropological Sciences and Human Biology, Stanford University
Brian Eno - musician, writer, lecturer
Alan Ganek - Vice President, Technical Strategy & Worldwide Operations, IBM
William Hallow - Professor of Assyriology and Babylonian Literature, Yale University
Mike Hawley - Assistant Professor of Media Technology, MIT Media Lab
Margaret Hedstrom - Associate Professor, School of Information, University of Michigan
Danny Hillis - Co-Chairman of the board, The Long Now Foundation
Brewster Kahle - Founder, Tbe Internet Archive
Michael A. Keller - Stanford University Librarian, Director of Acedemic Information Resources
Kevin Kelly - Editor at Large, Wired Magazine
Roger Kennedy - former director of the U.S. National Park Service
Margaret MacLean - anthroplogist, serving as conference manager
Deanna Marcum - President of the Council on Library and Information Resources
Jim Mason - Project Director, the Rosetta Project
Philip & Phillis Morrison - physics professor, authors
Elisabeth Niggemann - Director Gernal of Die Deutsche Bibliothek (The National Library of Germany)
Ambrogio M. Piazzoni - Scriptor Latinus and Vice Prefect of the Vatican Library
Alexander Rose - Executive Director, The Long Now Foundation
Jeff Rothenberg - advises on digital longevity with the Dutch National Archives, and the Dutch Royal Library
Paul Saffo - Director, Institute For the Future
Diantha D. Schull - Executive Director of Libraries for the Future
Peter Schwartz - Cofounder and Chairman of Global Business Network
Bruce Sterling - author
Jim Werner - Director of the Office of Long-Term Stewardship for DOE