Losing Knowledge: Yep and No One Does Much Except Sue to Prevent Archiving
September 23, 2024
Archives are bastions of history. What’s great about archives is that they physically store items for historical perseveration and researchers can visit them. When the Internet popped up, there wasn’t a digital archive to persevere everything on the World Wide Web. True, there’s the Internet Archive and other independent organizations, but according to the BBC there’s trouble brewing: “We’re Losing Our Digital History. Can The Internet Archive Save It?”
The Internet Archive has been around since 1996 and has done a phenomenal job archiving defunct Web sites, but external threats such as financial issues, technical challenges, legal battles with IP owners, and cyberattacks are big problems. There’s an even bigger problem for the Internet Archive. Most organizations and individuals keep their content in digital environments and those are fragile. WIth a single button or a solar flare, the can disappear forever.
The Internet should be archive so we understand its evolution and its also the most widely used resource in the world. Information on the Internet is a reflection of humanity like newspapers, magazines, radio, television, and movies. Despite all the backups and servers, its fragility is worse than past mediums. Persevering the Internet is an up hill battle and individuals are usually better at it than organizations:
“ ‘If you have to keep everything, it becomes very expensive,’ says Jackson of the Digital Preservation Coalition. ‘There’s often older content or less compelling content [that] gets lost by the wayside,’ he says. ‘We’re not capturing the non-Western world well,’ admits Jackson. ‘There are gaps now around incompleteness in different cultural domains.’ And while many of those organisations work to fight against their biases and prejudices, they’re often left to carry the weight of the task while governments and the companies that run the platforms and websites sit by. ‘Independent groups of people, who are just caring about it and are willing to spend their free time doing it, are better resourced and more highly skilled than the institutions which are formally responsible,’ says Jackson.”
Are they doomed? Maybe.
Who will the heroes be? The digital hoarders. They’re like physical hoarders who have OCD, except they keep digital records. I’m sensing the foundation of an Internet Archive Museum if lawyers permit such an activity.
Whitney Grace, September 23, 2024
Comments
Got something to say?
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
