Documentary Explores Digital Information Crisis

Texts still exist today that were created hundreds of years ago, and yet a plethora of information produced within just the last decade has been lost forever, a victim of the rapid-fire advances of technology. The Friends of the UCSC Library and the Friends of the Santa Cruz Public Library will cohost a screening of a documentary on this topic. The program is entitled Into the Future: A Film and Discussion on the Preservation of Knowledge in the Electronic Age.

The film, produced by the American Film Foundation, screens at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, March 12, in the Santa Cruz Central Library, 224 Church St. A discussion will follow, moderated by Alan Ritch, head of collection planning at the UCSC Library. Ritch is a member of the planning team for the California Digital Library and has lectured frequently on the challenges posed by electronic information resources.

Academy Award-winner Terry Sanders directed the film, which is narrated by PBS journalist Robert MacNeil. The film addresses a major challenge of the Information Age–the preservation of our essential records and greatest works on fragile, ephemeral, and complex digital electronic systems.

The 30-minute film is a sequel to Sanders’s award-winning Slow Fires: On the Preservation of the Human Record. It features interviews with such leading figures as Norton Utilities founder Peter Norton, father of the World Wide Web Tim Berners-Lee, Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Susan McMahon, and New York Public Library president Paul LeClerc.

For more information, call (408) 459-5870.