Yesterday, a huge fire destroyed the Internet Archive’s San Francisco scanning center, which digitally preserves all manner of books, films and microfilms for future use.
Most importantly, nobody was harmed. And, while the Archive lost some physical materials which were in the process of being digitized, the bulk were in a separate physical archive. There are some big headaches, though:
While power interruptions caused some sporadic outages on archive.org, no data has been lost. Eight workers who staffed the scanning center will temporarily relocate to our Physical Archive facility across the Bay. The current estimated value of scanning equipment lost in the fire is $600,000.
As a result, the Internet Archive has put out a call for support, both in terms of funding and scanning time. It’s a great cause, if you see fit to help out. [Archive.org via Boing Boing]
