Rick Prelinger writes, “Early this morning a fire whose origin is still unknown destroyed the book, film and microfilm scanning center located next door to Internet Archive’s office in San Francisco’s Richmond District.”
Thankfully, no one was hurt. While power interruptions caused some sporadic outages on archive.org, no data has been lost. Eight workers who staffed the scanning center will temporarily relocate to our Physical Archive facility across the Bay. The current estimated value of scanning equipment lost in the fire is $600,000.
Brewster Kahle, the Archive’s founder, has posted more detail about the fire on the Archive’s blog. A call is out for donations to help rebuild the scanning facility, and for new digitization work to keep employees affected by the fire busy at our alternate location.