Job Opportunities

Manual for Civilization - Volunteers

(Please read this in its entirety, there are specific instructions for submission that must be followed carefully if you are to be considered for this position.)

The Long Now Foundation seeks research volunteers to help us seed the collection of the 3500 volume Manual For Civilization for our upcoming Salon space. Volunteers will work with Long Now, our research interns, and its membership to identify and collect the volumes in this library and work with members, archives, and libraries to find donations of these books where possible. The volunteers will also coordinate with the Internet Archive to ensure The Manual is represented correctly in digital form there.

The initial four categories for this collection are:
• The Cultural Canon (ex. Harvard 5 foot shelf, Shakespeare, top 10,000 entries of Wikipedia, encyclopedia and world-book sets)
• Rigorous Science Fiction (ex.Vernor Vinge, Frank Herbert, Neal Stephenson, Asimov etc.)
• Mechanics of Civilization (ex. Gingery and Foxfire Books, Basics of technology etc)
• Long-term Thinking and Futurism (ex.The Art of the Long View, books on long-term science, predictions of the future, long bets)

Skills and background for this internship are broad and fairly open but a passion for the subject, organizational skills, and good interpersonal communication are a must. Skills and understanding of book scanning, organizational schema and other elements of library science are also appreciated.

This work can be done from anywhere, and you should expect to do the bulk of this work at your own location. However we may give preference to a local people to help us with the physical handling of the books.

There is no monetary compensation for this position, but you will be credited as one of the curators of this collection, and be given a complimentary Long Now membership as long as you are an active editor.

Background:
• Original blog post by Alexander Rose on the idea
• Related post by Kevin Kelly
• More on the Salon project
• Note that we understand that by definition we will have a western centric viewpoint of what might be collected. The primary reason we are not targeting the selection of the full 3500 volumes is that we want people from all over the world to make submissions that represent views from as many cultural viewpoints as possible.

To apply: Please email a short write up as to why you think you would be good for this position with a resume or a list of related education and experience in the body of the email. ATTACHMENTS WILL NOT BE OPENED. Please also select a few entries for each of the four categories above and write a few sentences about why you selected each one. (Please be succinct, we do not need paragraphs about each selection.) Please also note that you are not limited books for all your entries. If there is a film, pamphlet, Youtube video, Wikipedia entry, object, small machine, or web page you feel is important for the Manual please feel free to select that and say why.