The Library at the End of the World

Svalbard, Bellsund, Tundra by Jerzy Strzelecki, Wikimedia Commons, 2003.

People like to prepare for end of the world, and sometimes they use libraries to do it.

There is, of course, the Survivor Library, a digital collection of over 7,000 freely available PDFs intended to help humanity rebuild after a cataclysm. It contains information about “[h]ow to make water safe to drink. How to build a weather proof shelter from available materials. How to build a fire….[And how] to build a new infrastructure which can eventually replace what was lost.”

It all sounds a bit melodramatic, but the Library Index with its sections on accounting, livestock, and welding is interesting to peruse if nothing else.

However, I am more of a romantic about the end of the world. (Or perhaps just more of a historian.) I worry about preserving books that I love. Luckily folks in Norway share similar concerns.