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Building a library on the moon When the spacecraft Beresheet crashed into the surface of the moon in April, it scattered debris that included a small nickel disc bearing a huge trove of information. This Lunar Library was the latest effort by the Arch (pronounced Ark) Mission Foundation to preserve and disseminate humanity’s knowledge across time and space. SILS Professor Paul Jones is an advisor to the founders of the Arch Mission Foundation (AMF) and helped curate the contents of the Lunar Library. Because of Jones’ involvement, SILS is listed as a named partner on the foundation’s website. One of the AMF’s co-founders, Nova Spivack, came to Carolina on September 13 to deliver the 2019 Lucille Kelling Henderson Lecture, “Building a Library on the Moon.” “The idea is to create a permanent record of all human knowledge that lasts for at least a billion years,” Spivack explained in his talk. “And it’s in so many places that somebody someday will find it, at least some of these will get through. We’re building the billion-year archive, which treats the solar system as a library where the buildings and stacks are the planets and moons.”
To ensure their archives can survive harsh conditions and endure for billions of years, the AMF is recording information using new technologies and materials, Nova Spivack including quartz, nickel, and DNA. The Lunar Library was recorded on nickel-based Nanofiche, which is 4,800 times more space efficient than microfiche. With Nanofiche’s capacity and durability, Spivack said organizations like the Library of Congress could convert their microfiche to a non-degradable format that would take only a fraction of the space and energy to maintain. “With Nanofiche, you can turn buildings into shelves,” he said. Watch a recording of Nova Spivak’s talk at go.unc.edu/lunar-library to learn more about the Arch Mission Foundation and how it placed a quartz disc with Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy in the glove compartment of a Tesla Roadster that is now orbiting the sun.
Nova Spivack (far left) shows storage devices used by the Arch Mission Foundation to students, faculty, and other audience members who attendend the 2019 Henderson Lecture .
SILS PROFESSOR PAUL JONES discusses his contributions to the Lunar Library and his 40 years of information science and journalism instruction in a “Newsmaker” profile by American Libraries. Read the Q&A at http://bit.ly/jones-newsmaker. Popular Mechanics tapped Jones for a November article exploring how the internet will evolve in the next 50 years. Read the predictions at http://bit.ly/pop-mech-jones. Carolina’s Well Said podcast interviewed Jones about the first radio broadcast streamed over the internet in 1994. Listen at go.unc.edu/wxyc-simulcast. 22
UNC School of Information and Library Science (SILS)
STORYTELLING WITH TECH-INFUSED BOOKS Students from Assistant Professor Maggie Melo’s Information Professionals in the Makerspace course used laser cutting, 3D printing, augmented reality, circuitry, and other makerspace skills to transform old books into new, techinfused stories. They showcased their creations on Oct. 16 in Wilson Library. Melo and several of the students have been documenting their progress and work on other projects for the class on Twitter using #INLSMakes. Top right photo:
