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Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Teh Internets Future Generations Will Never Know Ms. Dewey

Posted by Paul Constant on Tue, Jan 27, 2009 at 1:52 PM

Historians and librarians are claiming that we need to preserve old websites for historical context:

Historians face a "black hole" of lost material unless urgent action is taken to preserve websites and other digital records, the head of the British Library has warned.

Just as families store digital photos on computers which might never be passed on to their descendants, so Britain's cultural heritage is at risk as the internet evolves and technologies become obsolete, says Lynne Brindley, the library's chief executive.
...
"Too many of us suffer from a condition that is going to leave our grandchildren bereft," Brindley states. "I call it personal digital disorder. Think of those thousands of digital photographs that lie hidden on our computers. Few store them, so those who come after us will not be able to look at them. It's tragic."

She believes similar gaps could appear in the national memory, pointing out that, contrary to popular assumption, internet companies such as Google are not collecting and archiving material of this type. It is left instead to the libraries and archives which have been gathering books, periodicals, newspapers and recordings for centuries.

This actually is a huge problem, and the real mess is that we're never going to be able to convince people to put more money into libraries to sustain and preserve the websites.

Comments (15) RSS

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Does MOHAI's "exhibit" for the Washington software industry still consist of the box that Windows 3.1 came in tacked to a wall?

Posted by elenchos on January 27, 2009 at 2:00 PM

archive.org has been around forever.

Posted by Smell The Coffee on January 27, 2009 at 2:05 PM

...i mean, look at the crap it saved:

http://web.archive.org/web/1998062818331…

Posted by Smell The Coffee on January 27, 2009 at 2:06 PM

90% of the internet is NOT WORTH PRESERVING to begin with. Does anyone keep every used condom for "historical purposes"? The internet is 90% used condoms.

Posted by Could be lowballing it on January 27, 2009 at 2:08 PM

I know it can never cover everything always, but surely The Way Back Machine at archive.org deserves mention. It has been preserving and archiving websites since the mid-1990s.

Posted by Matthew Stadler on January 27, 2009 at 2:09 PM

...ah, even as I composed it got mention!

Posted by Matthew Stadler on January 27, 2009 at 2:10 PM

ZOMG!

Every last Slog comment must be preserved forever for posterity. To lose even a single Slog comment to the electronic ether would be a tragedy.

Posted by Reverse Polarity on January 27, 2009 at 2:20 PM

Several years ago, I had dinner with a co-founder of the World Wide Web History center, webhistory.org, in San Francisco who told me they were working with Google.

Posted by Amelia on January 27, 2009 at 2:24 PM

@4: do you know how many archaeologists would love to get their hands on a used condom?

OK, bad choice of words. But things we think of as garbage now will be important to future historians.

Posted by guy on January 27, 2009 at 2:26 PM

The more content is produced, the harder it is to hold onto.

The first written documents were carved in stone, animal bone, or clay. Their lifespan (if out of the weather) is in the tens of thousands of years.

Now we can record an audio/visual record of our entire life, and incredibly rich and dense information set. And it can all be wiped out by an errant click. The best data preservation material has a lifespan of a couple decades, you have to keep refreshing your storage media if you want your digital records to last for your own lifetime.

We live in a rich web of information, yet it is more ephemeral than ever.

Posted by dwight moody on January 27, 2009 at 2:47 PM

But... How is putting more money into libraries going to create jobs and stimulate the economy? I simply cannot support such a measure!

Posted by Republican Senator on January 27, 2009 at 2:53 PM

You have no earthly idea what's going to be interesting to future historians. The most interesting stuff from the past is more often the garbage than not.

Posted by Fnarf on January 27, 2009 at 2:54 PM

Whatevs. Go look in any antique or thrift store and check out the piles of family photographs that get dumped when the descendents don't care. They're interesting for people who dig that kind of stuff, but they're not of historical interest, and you don't see these historians begging museums to snatch them up.

Posted by EmilyP on January 27, 2009 at 2:54 PM

What, exactly, do we owe future historians? Shouldn't we be spending our lives trying to do the things we want to do, rather than waste money and energy on some bizarre and likely futile effort to make their jobs easier?

Posted by Greg on January 27, 2009 at 3:03 PM

Miss Dewey was hot. Fucking Microsoft.

Posted by Lola, Now in Ms Dewey City, Iowa on January 27, 2009 at 8:41 PM