#endangeredarchives — Public Fediverse posts

SwissInfo: Battle is on to preserve legacy of dying Swiss shoe brand Bally. “The dedicated archivist is not allowed to give the media more information. The valuable collection and extensive archive are company property. But the future of the heavily indebted shoe store is uncertain. In the 1970s, Bally experienced countless identity crises. CEOs came and went, and the company alternately […]

Municipal Dreams: A Good Home Needed Urgently for One of the Most Significant Libraries of Housing and Planning in the Country. “The trustees of the Octavia Hill Birthplace Museum are disposing of its Harry Simpson Memorial Library in September, next month. The collection comprises the largest discrete library dedicated to housing and planning. The museum is located in Wisbech in the north of […]

Mission Local: Can this treasured S.F. photography institution cheat death again?. “Hal Fischer says he’s twice rescued SF Camerawork, the nonprofit gallery that has supported the work of experimental photographers for over 50 years, and he’s ready to do it again.”

Museums Association: National Library of Wales launches Culture and Climate Cymru resource. “The National Library of Wales has launched Culture and Climate Cymru, a new website and networking platform to help Wales’s culture and heritage sector respond to the climate crisis.”

Tom’s Hardware: Judge clears Nine PBS to retrieve 70 years of archival TV data — court rules station owns 50TB of data in Iron Mountain servers after host went under. “There’s light at the end of the tunnel for Nine PBS. We reported last week that the station lost access to 50TB of data representing 70 years of TV history. The issue was that its cloud storage provider went out of business […]

St. Louis Public Radio: Online database of Riverfront Times articles gets more stories and redesign. “Hundreds of Riverfront Times articles that had disappeared after the alternatively weekly newspaper shut down are being added to a database started by St. Louis archivists. Riverfront Times Database includes articles from 2014 to 2024. The database now includes cover stories, cover galleries […]

AsAmNews: Op-Ed: Closure of 2 National Archive offices will hurt families. “Were my sister not able to retrieve these records of our father and hold them in her hands our families would not know nor understand the scope of his journey nor the depth of his courage in grasping the American Dream. He achieved much of it. And may we build upon it and upon his shoulders. We can do so by keeping […]

Fast Company: AI crawlers from Meta and Alibaba almost destroyed a volunteer-run LGBT history archive. “…the LGBT History Project… recently passed 50 million views since its launch in 2011 and has been archived by the British Library for posterity. But an onslaught of AI bots seeking to scrape its content nearly took it offline, bringing the site to a crawl while also making it more […]

Council on Library and Information Resources: CLIR Awards Nearly $1 Million in Recordings at Risk Grant Funds. “The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) is pleased to announce the thirteenth cohort of projects for Recordings at Risk, CLIR’s program that funds the digitization of rare and unique audio and audiovisual materials. An independent review panel selected 24 projects […]

The Walrus: Google Search Is Dying. What Comes Next Is Worse. “The corpus is collapsing in real time. This degraded digital space should force a broader understanding of cultural sovereignty. Right now, the debate is framed largely as a fight over whether foreign mega platforms like Netflix, YouTube, or Spotify should support Canadian content. That charged conversation sidesteps the deeper […]

Radio Nepal Online: Ancient Newa manuscripts maintained online with Japanese support. ” In partnership with UNESCO, Archive Nepal has digitized more than 30 rare and endangered manuscripts dating back 200 to 800 years with the support of the Japanese government.”

Data Rescue Project: Urgent: Oppose NARA Facility Closures. “We recently learned that some regional facilities of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) are being targeted for closures, including the ones in San Francisco/San Bruno, CA and Chicago. These facilities hold important records especially to people in those areas.”

The Herald (Scotland): Future of Glasgow CCA and Third Eye Centre archive decided. “The Scottish Government has provided an update on the future of a vast cultural collection spanning half a century, which charts the history of two of Glasgow’s best-known arts institutions. The archive was feared to be among the listings on the open market being sold on behalf of the liquidators of the Centre […]

Denver Post: 70 years of St. Louis history is stuck in a Denver data center, PBS station claims. “A St. Louis PBS station says its 70-year archive of programming is stuck in a Denver data center after a cloud storage company cut off the TV station’s access to the 50 terabytes of data this spring. Nine PBS filed a lawsuit Tuesday in Denver District Court seeking the safe return of the data, […]

Luxembourg Times: National Library steps up fight against book-eating pests. “When people say that someone is devouring literature, they usually mean it in a figurative sense. Unless, that is, we’re talking about a Ctenolepisma longicaudatum, also known as a paper silverfish. You could look up exactly what that is in one of the many encyclopaedias at the Luxembourg National Library (BNL) – […]

The Herald (Scotland): Glasgow Life and Creative Scotland join forces on arts centre archive. “Last-ditch talks are underway to secure the future of a vast cultural collection spanning half a century which charts the history of two of Glasgow’s best-known arts institutions. The Scottish Government’s arts agency is in talks with Glasgow Life, which runs museums, galleries and cultural venues […]

Ohio History Connection: Listen, Watch and Connect with LGBTQ+ History. “In 2025, the Ohio History Connection (OHC) was awarded a Recordings at Risk grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) to preserve fragile magnetic media – U-Matic, VHS, audio cassettes and 3/4” audiotape – that were reaching the end of their lifespan. The grant made it possible to work with […]

ABC News (Australia): Archivists race to save Papua New Guinea’s film collection from climate damage. “Work is underway to preserve Papua New Guinea’s collection of more than 1,300 film reels and tapes, stored at its small National Film Institute in Goroka, before climate change causes permanent damage. Humid conditions and a history of flooding have created a far-from-ideal environment for […]

Stephen Follows: What just happened to TheNumbers.com should worry us all. “Its hand-researched data is the highest quality, tracking box office grosses, budgets, home video and streaming across more than 78,000 films and 236,000 people. It gets north of eight million visitors a year, and is treated as THE definitive authority by journalists, academics, filmmakers, prediction markets, and even […]

UC Santa Barbara: Preserving Historic Aerial Photos to Improve Public Health. “Turning a preservation crisis into innovation, the Library collaborated across campus to build a custom, in-house digitization lab for aerial photos. Staff from the Library’s Digital Library Development Department and SRC partnered with the UCSB Physics Machine Shop and UCSB Environmental Health & Safety to […]

Current Affairs: Who Will Save the Internet From Disappearing?. “From deleted government records to disappearing music, our digital culture can be erased overnight. The Internet Archive’s Mark Graham and Chris Freeland explain what it will take to save it.”

NM.news: We’re working to save the Roswell Daily Record, an American journalism institution. Here’s how.. “The newspaper that told the world about a ‘flying saucer’ crash near Roswell in 1947 nearly became history itself this week — but just two days after announcing it would shut down, it has found a new owner and will keep publishing. The Roswell Daily Record’s ownership announced […]

DanQ: Today I Rescued 7,234 Old GIFs. “This week, GlitchyZorua brought to my attention the Ibiblio Icon Browser, a collection of many thousands of GIF icons curated in the 1990s by Gioacchino La Vecchia. Glitchy’s goal was to archive a copy of all of the icons, which was turning out to be… challenging.”

Mint: How a few restorers are preserving and cementing Bollywood’s cinematic legacy. “Alam Ara is gone, so is Balidaan. With old film reels rapidly deteriorating and streaming platforms prioritizing the new over the old, India’s cinematic legacy has been left hanging in the balance. A few entities, however, are working hard to preserve the country’s rich film heritage.”

The Conversation: From maternal health to influenza rates, gaps in CDC’s public health data are creating dangerous blind spots for disease tracking and prevention. “I am an infectious disease epidemiologist who studies how respiratory pathogens affect communities around the world and how data is used to monitors these impacts. Every day, health departments, practitioners and researchers have […]

Hackaday: It’s Now Imperative That You Copy That Floppy. “Copy That Floppy! only briefly touches on the most ideal situation — that is, buying a USB floppy drive and making copies of the bog standard 3.5 inch disks you might come across. It then moves right on into more advanced topics, such as interfacing with less common drive types, how to safely clean floppies, and the use of advanced […]

Block Club Chicago: Chicago National Archives Closure Will Be Loss For Historians, Researchers, Even Deep-Sea Divers. “The National Archives and Records Administration plans to close its Chicago facility, a sprawling building on the Southwest Side that houses transcripts from the Trial of the Chicago 7, maritime records for the Great Lakes region and documents on tribal nations.”

Shropshire Council: Sound archive to be safeguarded thanks to university funding. “The collections include local radio archives, oral history interviews, and music recordings. The recordings frequently capture the memories and experiences of people and communities who are underrepresented in the archival record. They include memories of local industries, rural life, the natural world, and the […]

Tom’s Hardware: Germany’s massive 60,000-game preservation project collapses after €1.5 million funding dries up — world’s largest game archive was entirely publicly available, now abandoned just as Sony kills physical media. “The Internationale Computerspielesammlung (ICS), a German effort to assemble the world’s largest publicly accessible video game archive, is being wound down after […]