Digital Amnesia - VPRO documentary - 2014

Our memory is dissipating. Hard drives only last five years, a web page is forever changing and there’s no machine left that reads 15-year old floppy disks. Digital data is vulnerable. Yet entire libraries are shredded and lost to budget cuts, because we assume everything can be found online. But is that really true? For the first time in history, we have the technological means to save our entire past, yet it seems to be going up in smoke. Will we suffer from collective amnesia?

This VPRO Backlight documentary tracks down the amnesiac zeitgeist starting at the Royal Tropical Institute in Amsterdam, whose world-famous 250-year old library was lost to budget cuts. The 400.000 Books were saved from the shredder by Ismail Serageldin, director of the world-famous Library of Alexandria, who is turning the legendary library of classical antiquity into a new knowledge hub for the digital world.

Originally broadcasted by VPRO in 2014.
© VPRO Backlight September 2014

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Credits:
Director Bregtje van der Haak
Research: Gerko Wessel
Producer: Marie Schutgens
Commissioning Editors: Henneke Hagen/ Frank Wiering
English, French and Spanish subtitles: Ericsson.
French and Spanish subtitles are co-funded by European Union.