Wednesday morning at about 3:30 a.m., a fire got started at the Internet Archive’s San Francisco scanning center. No data was lost, but about $600,000 in high end digitization equipment was destroyed. The scanning building was also badly damaged. According to their blog, no one was hurt. The main building wasn’t affected except for damage to one electrical run. They did lose power to some servers for a while.
Some materials that were being digitized were lost, but they saved about half of the items in their current project because the items were in a separate locked room.
They are looking for monetary donations to help get things back on track.
Read more about the Internet Archive Fire at their blog.
