I was perusing amongst the digital stacks in Module 6 for an adventure of my own choosing when my daughter walked through the back door, excited to tell me that inside Minecraft is an endangered library of banned articles, books, and reports. Then, most serendipitously, I saw at the bottom of the resource list a link to an archived post from a former Hyperlinked Library student, Martin Martinez: “The Metaverse, Minecraft, and the Uncensored Library.” This meta-library is such a profoundly beautiful and egalitarian idea that it chose me.
Minecraft is not just an environment for building with virtual blocks and minerals or for game play alone. Inside of the virtual world is also a protected archive, The Uncensored Library, created in 2020 by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) with the virtual architecture group BlockWorks. The library’s virtual books contain reportage censored by illiberal and authoritarian governments, in wings of the library curated by RSF for Mexico, Russia, Belarus, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Brazil, Iran, Eritrea, and — added in 2026 — the United States. The books are read-only, to protect their content from tampering. At first flush it seems in line with the spirit of the Hyperlinked Library model: meeting the users where they are, the gamification of learning, and a humanitarian focus on preservation. But the very restrictions that are necessary for user access and protection — one-way reading, top-down curation, and no librarians at hand — would seem to disqualify it as truly a Hyperlinked Library.
Virtual spaces could also preserve, as digital objects, institutions closed for political reasons, as with the Kennedy Center ; exhibitions under forced revision, as at the Smithsonian; or historic buildings we have lost to war, terrorism, or unrestrained capitalism. These virtual objects cannot just conquer space; through metaverse archiving, the fleetfooted librarian can also defeat time and the violence of entropy, and move out, toward an allotropic Hyperlibrarianship — one core communal truth manifest in a multitude of forms.
