Yves here. Lambert would sometimes opine that librarians were more formidable than they were given credit for, and were unsung members of the vanguard fighting censorship. I would assume they play important roles in the design and maintenance of various archives designed to preserve information integrity and combat censorship via editing and removal of important texts and records.
By Damon Orion, a writer, journalist, musician, artist, and teacher in Santa Cruz, California whose work has appeared in Revolver, Guitar World, Spirituality + Health, Classic Rock, and other publications. Read more of his publications at DamonOrion.com. Produced by Local Peace Economy
Despite Donald Trump’s disavowal of Project 2025, his administration began enforcing that initiative’s agenda immediately after his second inauguration. This includes efforts to erase historythrough education cuts, classroom and book censorship, website scrubbing, and the silencing of media outlets and institutions like PBS, NPR, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
One week after Trump’s inauguration on January 20, 2025, in a post on the online platform Free Government Information, data services librarian emeritus from the University of California, San Diego, James A. Jacobs wrote, “There is a difference between the government changing a policy and the government erasing information, but the line between those two has blurred in the digital age… In the digital age, government publishing has shifted from the distribution of unalterable printed books to digital posts on government websites. Such digital publications can be moved, altered, and withdrawn at the flick of a switch. Publishing agencies are not required to preserve their own information, nor to provide free access to it.”
While noting that “digital government information was being lost before President Trump,” Jacobs stressed that “[t]he scale of loss and alteration of information under Trump may prove to be unprecedented” and that “librarians, archivists, and citizens” must create a “new distributed digital preservation infrastructure.”
Organizations like the Freedom Archives in Berkeley, California, have been working for decades to preserve online information on history, social issues, and activism. Established in 1999, this nonprofit educational facility houses audio, video, and print materials that “chronicle the progressive history of the Bay Area, the United States, and international movements for liberation and social justice,” according to the organization’s website. Its digital collection of content on progressive movements, culture, and activism includes materials on subjects like Black liberation, gender and sexuality, and Indigenous struggles.
The Freedom Archives’ co-director and co-founder, Claude Marks, notes that conservative extremists “are purposefully rewriting history to eliminate references to slavery of Blacks from Africa and genocide against Indigenous people, and the purpose of that is to reify and reinforce white supremacy. Oftentimes, the truth lies more with the resisters who may have been defeated in various struggles with their colonizers. If that’s your shared point of view, you want to protect access to material that gives voice to those people who were engaged in liberatory struggles and were fighting for justice and human rights.”
For instance, nearly 37 states in the U.S. have measures in place “that limit how America’s undeniable history of racism—from chattel slavery to Jim Crow—can be discussed in public school classrooms,” according to a 2023 article in the Conversation.
Many fear this attempt to rewrite history, especially under the Trump administration, might have far-reaching consequences. “The danger isn’t just that they’ll purge accurate data from the past but that if and when that data is ever reposted that some of it will be modified with false information,” saidCharles Gaba, a health care policy data analyst and web developer, according to a February 2025 Salon article.
As an independent organization, the Freedom Archives is largely funded through grassroots efforts. “We’re not vulnerable to: ‘Oh, we didn’t get that big grant through the Department of Education,’ which will no longer exist [soon],” Marks says.
The Freedom Archives’ staff has collaborated with archives and organizations like the Manilatown Heritage Foundation, the Bay Area Lesbian Archives, and the Los Angeles-based Southern California Library, which “documents and makes accessible histories of struggles that challenge racism and other systems of oppression so we can all imagine and sustain possibilities for freedom.”
It has also worked with Interference Archive, a Brooklyn, New York-based organization that curates in-person and online exhibits of “cultural ephemera” such as posters, books, zines, and flyers created by activists and participants in social movements. Interference Archive uses these materials “to animate histories of people mobilizing for social transformation” and to preserve and honor “histories and material culture that is often marginalized in mainstream institutions,” its website states.
Highlighting the importance of these efforts to archive information, the New England Archivists state, “Archives are the foundation of a democratic society. They exist to safeguard the rights of individuals, ensure transparency, and hold public servants accountable.”
Another notable online library is the Internet Archive, whose Wayback Machine contains “more than 928 billion web pages saved over time,” the site explains. In March 2025, the Wayback Machine’s director, Mark Graham, told NPR that the Internet Archive was the only place to find an “interactive timeline” of the January 6, 2021, attack on the United States Capitol and that “it’s in the public’s interest to save such records.” More people have been referring to the information on the Internet Archive website since Trump took office.
In April 2025, the San Francisco Standard reported that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) had cut funding for the Internet Archive while the organization “was halfway through an NEH [National Endowment for the Humanities] grant of $345,960.” Jefferson Bailey, the Internet Archive’s director of archiving and data services, said that funding from other sources would help the organization stay afloat, but he worried about the impact of the cuts on smaller nonprofits.
One such nonprofit is the HathiTrust Digital Library, which contains digital copies of more than 18 million items from research libraries. The universities of the Big Ten Academic Alliance (formerly known as the Committee on Institutional Cooperation) and the 11 libraries of the University of California launched the archive in 2008 “to ensure that those digitized collections—and the libraries that steward them—remain strong and serve scholarship into the future,” the website explains. “Our reach now includes members outside of the United States. Over 18 million digitized library items are currently available, and our mission to expand the collective record of human knowledge is always evolving.”
Meanwhile, the Zinn Education Project (ZEP) provides educational materials for middle and high school teachers. “Based on the approach to history highlighted in Howard Zinn’s best-selling book A People’s History of the United States, our teaching materials emphasize the role of working people, women, people of color, and organized social movements in shaping history,” the site states. Free downloadable lessons and articles are categorized by theme, time period, and reading level.
A worldwide network of volunteers curates the Marxist Internet Archive, a storehouse of writings by nearly 1,000 authors “representing a complete spectrum of political, philosophical, and scientific thought.” The site’s content comprises more than 180,000 documents published in 83 languages. Its founders’ primary motivation for starting this archive was to dispel misinformation and misconceptions about Marxism, the site explains.
Open Culture consolidates, curates, and provides free access to culture and educational media, including history, politics, education, life, and current affairs. “Web 2.0 has given us great amounts of intelligent audio and video,” the archive’s website states. “It’s all free. It’s all enriching. But it’s also scattered across the web, and not easy to find. Our whole mission is to centralize this content… and give you access to this high-quality content whenever and wherever you want it.”
The Public Domain Review’s archives cover subjects like culture, history, politics, and war. “It’s our belief that the public domain is an invaluable and indispensable good, which—like our natural environment and our physical heritage—deserves to be explicitly recognized, protected, and appreciated,” the nonprofit’s website notes.
Many of these organizations’ ties to progressive movements extend far beyond archiving. For example, Marks says that “as participants in a broader struggle for liberation, justice, and global values that are liberatory instead of oppressive and colonial,” the Freedom Archives’ staff participates in local and national activism and stays conscious of “the importance of causes like international solidarity—defending the right for Cuba to exist without an embargo, the right of the Palestinians to survive the genocide, and the right to their own identity and state. As long as we’re doing that, I have faith that all these movements will survive the brutality and the willingness of the powers of the empire to try to destroy them and snuff them o
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Fittingly, the very end of the article is cut off:
“[…] the willingness of the powers of the empire to try to destroy them and snuff them o”
This is a place where everyone can help. The availability of enormous data storage capacity to individuals allows the possible compilation of large personal data libraries. Become a data hoarder! (Within healthy limits, of course ;-) ) Share files with friends and others in your communities. Buy music and video/movies on tangible media. Keep archives of news items and cultural events as much as you can. Save and disseminate. Remember that redundancy is the antidote to oblivion.
This. And if you’re curious about the state of the art, check out r/DataHoarder on Reddit.
my sense is that data collection, storage, and subsequent reporting is a fundamental obligation of government. such información transparency and availability has been a hallmark of democracy and underpins free markets. census data, business ownership data, birth and death records, property records and much more has historically been kept – and available to the public.
imagine a world where real estate transactions were not collected and freely available – how would sellers and buyers know how to price their properties and what they are valued?
free markets are more responsive with more publicly available data. lack of data transparency results in market friction. the speed of data availability can warp markets and make those who can access data quicker an advantage over those for whom the data availability is slower.
is not data the “weights and measures” of our society today?
this is a role that government is uniquely equipped to perform and advantages a healthy and just society. the “evidence” of what is and what was, and of the facts – seems undervalued.
All archives are good including my collection of hard drives and optical media. Certainly one can’t depend our good local library to act as an archive because these days the trend among libraries seems to be to throw away all those musty paper books taking up space if they aren’t demonstrably popular and used.
So it’s not just about Trump or censorship. Plus the assumption that new movements like Critical Race Theory–the theory being that US history is only about racism–are strictly factual and not ideological can be open to question.
The good news is that we do have digital storage now and an internet unless the “fake news” crowd–heavily populated by Democrats–manages to bring this under their control. I think it’s a legitimate point that not everything should be taught in schools when there are so many other ways now for people to educate themselves. That said, making actual laws to prevent this smacks of the Big Brotherism that the right are complaining about. The libertarian movement is always prey to being coopted by the fake libertarians.
You still believe in the Ds and Rs, and US democracy? I guess faith and hope helps some people remain optimistic.
I may not believe that America is “great,” whatever that means, but I do believe that it is greater than Trump or Pelosi. Guess we’ll see.
I like this one, from Religion News Service, 3-7-25:
“I’m sure most kids have the bible app on their phones” — Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt, who, amazingly, did not support Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters’ plan to spend $3 million of public tax money on bibles for public schools.
(As reported in “Freethought Today,” April 2025 p. 12)
Well, exactly. Some of us are old enough to remember Madeleine Murray O’Hare and the 60s controversies over prayer in the schools–something “liberals” used to be against. Then there was the row over Creationism in the schools.
Here’s suggesting that social peace not to mention commonsense suggests that those with education degrees should not be telling kids about subjects as complex as “gender dysphoria.” Of course back in the day parental rights became fuzzy when it came to scientific consensus on matters like evolution. And also of course public education has always had a role in promoting authority friendly concepts like showing up on time, being graded and judged, obedience and punishment.
But the Dems have given us Trump by defying commonsense and promoting their pet causes. We need a new ruling class.
I would say we need public servants, not a ruling class. Remember that concept of elected officials dedicating themselves to serving the public? Seems quaint, don’t it?
At the major university library (in Canada) for which I used to work, the management seemed to be embarrassed by what they referred to as, “the legacy collection.” They were in a panting hurry to rid themselves of books, except for a few choice boutique collections, which they would boast about for fundraising purposes. The under-30 librarians were keen to keep with the new orthodoxy.
Most “old” books (pre-1990 meant “old” !) got dumped in a repository that was a bus ride away from campus. The repository had limited operating hours, and was not browsable–by specific request only. Further, if digitized editions were available elsewhere, our own copies often got discarded. We made little effort of our own to digitize unique holdings that were free of copyright.
The “advanced preservation facility” is, in my view, an internment camp for books, prior to their liquidation. Vicious circle: books hard to reach go unused; long unused, they get thrown away.
Libraries that fear to get dusty, cannot endure.
As I saw this happen in front of me, I was reminded of Toynbee’s argument that it’s not barbarians who destroy civilizations. The guardians are often most at fault.
Let me add that my university library did not suffer from lack of funds. Indeed we had spent many millions on new facilities over the previous decades. We built hectares of interior space, but at the end of the construction orgy, the books got relegated. But what splendid offices, and what lounges!
We spent heavily on digital, but found ourselves so entangled in licensing issues that we had to create a dedicated administrative department, complete with in-house legal counsel, just to keep it sorted. It beggars Kafka!
This is consistent with my experience of librarians today. Very eager to get rid of books and replace them with studio space to teach the kids how to make tiktok videos. Somewhat understandable, since tiktok influencer and militarized cop are going to be the only jobs in the new economy the kids are facing.
As I pick away at my post-retirement “Swedish death cleaning”, I’ve eventually got to deal with 2 bookshelves (7′ tall) filled with back-issues of various scholarly journals, with some runs going back to 1980. I’ve checked, and am pretty sure that all of the academic and some public libraries in my Canadian province have them, increasingly via digital subscriptions.
So these will likely end up in a recycling bin in the next year or two. And I was pretty comfortable with that outcome, until recently.
After watching the way in which academic institutions are under attack in the U.S., and elsewhere, by an emboldened RW, I wonder if relying on digital archives is wise. Is any centralized repository that depends on the Internet really secure? Where are the equivalents of the monasteries that preserved learning and manuscripts through an earlier Dark Age? Are we actually more vulnerable to the extinction of knowledge than was the case in medieval times?
I have no glib answers, but time and advancing age are going to force my hand.
And In the so-called Dark Ages and early middle-ages, much knowledge from classical antiquity was preserved and advanced in the eastern empire (Byzantium), and especially (historical irony?) by Islamic scholars who translated many works from the Greek, and Latin (Toledo, Cordoba etc.). In a crude comparison: will the “west” go through another dark age?
Fair question. So the more the redundancy, the better.
Digital is convenient and with the internet is highly shareable, however with any archiving one needs to take steps to protect whatever you are storing from destruction, digital assets are no exception!
I don’t know if this is still the case, but as someone who’s lived in the Rochester, NY area for 20 years now, as I understand it when movies started to be 100% digitally produced the preferred archival approach was to split the movie into the 3 primary colors and to save each color of the movie onto archival quality Kodak movie film that had a life expectancy with almost no degradation of something like 500 years. If the digital was ever lost, the 3 films of the 3 primary colors could be remastered into a new digital movie format.
All that said, at least at one point in time Hollywood agreed with you that digital is not necessarily the safest or most permanent form of keeping something.
Sub-boreal, maybe instead of throwing your journals into ghe recycling bin you can donate them to a local thrift store or Goodwill, or St. Vincent de Paul. I often find old journals and magazines in thrift stores and buy them to read at home. Also, almost all the books I buy are used and often come from a Goodwill, somewhere in the country. I do this because I love depriving Jeffy boy of my money, and I love used books anyway. Many are old library copies. Sometimes I find an old letter or a shopping list in them, pure gold to reflect on someone’s life. One of my daughters is a librarian and she echos what you say, about throwing out older books. I think it’s terrible!! I am 71 and I have my grandmother’s old home ec book from high school, 1915. Inside the front cover she has practiced writing her new married name, over and over. She graduated from high school after she was already married. But I love the insight into seeing how happy she was to be married. I wonder if people even care about such things anymore?
I am happy to give glib answers on this issue: Yes, we are more vulnerable to the extinction of knowledge than any time when knowledge was recorded physically, and no, internet repositories are not in any way secure.
I am very much in favor of the internet archive, but it is its own thing. Digital academic journals being hidden in online databases that the public does not have access to are a completely different thing, and very bad.
Before we even broach the topic of “extinction of knowledge” I have two examples which frame the topic. The first is about unknown knowledge about how a fundamental aspect of finance works for some and not the many and how it effects social outcomes …
Billionaires and taxes – https://youtube.com/shorts/_A727a6bMpo?si=I8g7bunxRMpIEr9B
The second is about how factual information vs the ideological funded agenda works in real life – https://youtube.com/shorts/K1SPOsj6KPI?si=amud8C3PRoKQ4Acl
So before one even ponders what is going extinct one has to evaluate why and how its occurring, agendas to make it so.