What would YOU save?

At the end of Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451, the protagonist meets a living library: a community of people who have each memorized a classic book to protect its contents from conflagration. Their mission is similar to the Internet Archive’s goal “to provide Universal Access to All Knowledge”—i.e. to do, in digital form in real life more or less what Bradbury’s “bookmen” do for fictional human culture. Beloved authors have always been committed to the preservation and transmission of ancient, timeless truths: think of how such as J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis revived or created mythologies, believing that such wisdom was also inspirational to the human imagination.

For this inaugural conference at the Internet Archive, we invite proposals for presentations on ideas worth saving. If you were to choose a work of literature, religion, film, or art and ensure that it would still be available in the year 2451, what work would that be? Talks may be wide-ranging, coming from any number of disciplines, talking about the what, why, or how of knowledge preservation and dissemination. In particular, we seek to highlight the Archive’s theological holdings, so projects that draw from those resources will receive special attention.