In the archives

From doomsday seed catalogues to everything on the ’net, these libraries have nothing to do with musty old books.

NORWAY: SEEDS // So, let's say the world has fallen on hard times. Thanks to climate change/nuclear war/meteor strike, our civilisation has been decimated and our ecosystem is an ashy mess. How do we rebuild? Well, first stop would be the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, where an international team of plant biologists has been assembling the world's largest collection of seeds since 2008. Located deep inside a glacial mountain, on a tiny Norwegian island high in the Arctic Circle, the vault has been designed to withstand the kind of catastrophe they warn you about in science fiction – even without any human intervention, most of the seeds stored there could survive for hundreds, if not thousands of years. Currently home to more than 980,000 different types of seed, sourced from essentially every country on Earth, Svalbard is the world's largest source of crop diversity, and potentially the only thing standing between us and future civilisational collapse. UNITED STATES: SCENTS // Perfumiers are a strange breed. They spend years hunting the world for unique and never-beforecatalogued smells, each to be extracted, distilled and mixed in never-before-smelled combinations. It requires a level of arcane craft that may as well come from Hogwarts for all the sense it makes to us mere mortals. Although try telling that to independent perfumier Mandy Aftel, who has converted the garage behind her Berkley home into a self-described ‘Archive of Curious Scents’. A hand-built repository of more than 300 unique smells, at the Aftel Archive of Curious Scents, you can inhale an apothecary's worth of flower, grass and tree essences, or, if you're feeling particularly bold, you can huff a chunk of ambergris (a waxy substance secreted from a sperm whale’s intestines) and get your nostrils into an African civet's glandular emissions. But the true purpose of the archive is to celebrate the power of smell, and the way this often overlooked sense is one of our most intimate and evocative assets. ...................

BELGIUM: SOURDOUGH // Sourdough starter is an incredible thing. Mix together some flour and water, leave it to ferment for a few days, and voilà: you’ve created a living, not-quite-breathing organism that can later be added to bread dough to help it rise. As long as you keep feeding your starter flour and water at regular intervals, it can survive for centuries, if not millennia. Sourdough cultures are artefacts of their place and time – a combination of wild yeasts, ambient conditions and even the baker's own microbial colonies that operates like a gastronomic time machine. Enter the Puratos Sourdough Library. Located in the town of St. Vith, Belgium, Puratos is currently home to over 100 different sourdough starters, from places as far flung as Mexico, Japan, Canada and Greece. They’re all kept (and fed) in rigorously controlled conditions to ensure they retain their original character. It's a yeasty testament to one of humanity's oldest traditions, whose 8000 years of accumulated knowledge is at risk from the forces of industrial baking. ...................

ANTARCTICA: ICE // To the trained eye, ice is far more than a chunk of frozen water. Look into its heart – into its web of interlocking crystals and caged impurities – and you can detect long-term changes in climate and atmosphere, as if the glacial chunks were tree rings for the planet. But, as global warming accelerates, these museums of the past are melting before our eyes, literally taking with them one of our most important insights into the global impact of a changing climate. Go figure. To ensure we don't lose the information encoded in the world's glaciers, mountains and permafrosts, a team

of French and Italian glaciologists has created the Protecting Ice Memory project. A work in progress, the finished ice library will be located in a giant ice cave (with an ambient temperature of -54ºc) near the Concordia Station in Antarctica, where a series of 140-metre ice cores, taken from the world's most at-risk glaciers, will live in perpetuity – an ongoing reminder of where we've come from, and what we're already losing. ...................

CANADA: UNWANTED MANUSCRIPTS // In 1971, the cult novelist

Richard Brautigan wrote a book called The Abortion: An Historical

Romance. The story centred around a library that only accepted unpublished manuscripts – "the unwanted, the lyrical and haunted volumes of American writing". Anyone could drop in any work of any size and style and the librarian would mark down a few details, then put it on a shelf, never to be read again. Cut to two decades later, and a Brautigan enthusiast by the name of Todd Lockwood decides his purpose for being on this Earth is to make the library a reality. Opening in 1990, the Brautigan Library started its life in Burlington, Vermont, before relocating to Vancouver in 2010. It now contains over 300 works. If you make the journey, you'll be able to spend the afternoon browsing such titles as 365 Bits of Wisdom to Enrich Your Daily Life, Autobiography About a Nobody and A Great Big Ugly Man Tied His Horse to Me. And, yes, submissions are still being accepted. ...................

FRANCE: WINE // If you're a winemaker, there's one place you know you have to visit before you die: the Centre of Biological Resources of the Vine of Vassal-montpellier. Unwieldy name notwithstanding, the Crb-vigne, as it's also known, is a 27-hectare vineyard where you’ll find some 8200 different varieties of wine grape, sourced from 52 countries and catalogued by features such as native region, genetic profile and historical use. It's a living, growing encyclopaedia of wine varietals that covers everything from garden variety merlot to grapes that haven't been seriously grown since the Middle Ages. The Crb-vigne has its origins in the Great French Wine Blight of the mid-1800s, when a particularly aggressive aphid almost entirely destroyed France's vineyards. With that existential shock in mind, wine merchants took as many cuttings as they could find and transplanted them to the sandy, aphid-resistant soil of Marseillan, where the collection has been expanding ever since. Essentially, the centre's accumulated knowledge represents everything that we as a species know about growing grapes. (And yes, they do wine tasting.)

ONLINE: THE INTERNET // Brewster Kahle is a man on a mission. And that mission is to preserve the internet in its entirety. You know how the best part about the internet is how you can delete things you want gone forever? Well, Brewster disagrees, and he has more than 349,000,000,000 (that’s 349 billion) archived webpages to prove it. Brewster started the project – then known as the Wayback Machine – in 1996, when the internet only consisted of a few hundred thousand pages. The purpose: to provide the general public with Universal Access to All Knowledge. If you’ve published anything on the web in the intervening 23 years, you can probably find it there, indexed over time in bi-monthly sweeps. The now much bigger Internet Archive has also catalogued more than four million movies, TV shows and videos; 20 million books and texts; five million audio recordings; almost 200,000 concerts; and a whole lot more besides, which, taken together, fill more than 30 petabytes of server space and represent the single greatest cultural collection in human history. And isn't it great the Livejournal you kept when you were 14 is part of that?