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Pickling Australia's Online Past, Present, Future
stylewagon writes "The Australian has an article about a project undertaken by the National Library of Australia's Electronic Unit.
The project is called PANDORA [Preserving and Accessing Networked DOcumentary Resources of Australia]. In a nutshell, they've been archiving important local Web sites since 1997 at regular intervals, with the aim of preserving Australia's online history. Everything from old political campaign sites to online journals long gone are there for public viewing." This is a cool project; seems like a handy application of Doing Stuff over the temptation of Grander Schemes, which must be tempting indeed with the rash of "archive the Web" projects lately. I just wonder how posterity will view the selection process that determines which sites are considered "important" enough to archive. Remind anyone of Foundation?
Try coming to the UK sometime. We're paying about six times that (again due to taxation -- something like 80% of the price at the pump goes directly to the government). People here can't help but watch in amusement when others around the world complain about petrol prices. Americans are apparently up in arms at the moment over their $1/gallon prices. I can't remember when it last cost that little over here...
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
I'm starting to wonder where they stand on copyright here. Don't the sites, images, text and design belong to someone? Someone most likely paid for each of them along the way, isn't this, in essence, just ripping them off directly?
I guess you can just ask for them to be taken off. I wonder if they keep a secret mirror of the mirror.
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PROUD to be GEEK
I wonder what future Australians will think when they discover that Australian e-tailer Harvey-Norman STOPPED TAKING CREDIT CARDS as a payment instrument... at a time when e-commerce was quickly taking market share from traditional points of sale.
It's an all too common pattern here...
Why trust technology? Why try to solve a business problem (like misuse of others' credit card details) with technology? "Too hard" (etc.)
Just limit your would-be clientele to whatever works for -you- ... and make believe they don't -really- want to -use- credit cards!
In short, send your customers to [overseas] competitors who go the extra kilometer... even when there is some risk involved for the parties.
It's happening now... as the world begins to turn its eyes to the big Island continent down under, i.e. with the coming of Olympics 2K, too.
...which reminds me: the official Olympics 2K web site is said (in the same newspaper) to be in violation of Equal Opportunities Legislation because it is -inaccessible- to people with visual impairments.
Dr. Louis Leaky MMDLLXIIV will unearth a fossilized monitor with a web page burned into its phosphors and people will draw conclusions about the late 20th century. History can be so cruel.
Vote Naked 2000
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Too bad you didnt put the uptime stats in there.
If you did then I could say "Pandora's box love you long time."
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
(Hehe... did Pandora's box run Linux?)
--
while ( !universe->perfect() ) {
hack (reality);
--
while ( !universe->perfect() ) {
hack (reality);
}
The Internet Archive has been doing this for several years now. There was a scientific amer. article on this.
This is a very good idea, but frankly, I've found the Useless pages to be the best chronicle of the web. Everything, from the ate my balls pages, to the first spam sites, to the first annoying business pages, are listed in their raw earnest early form.
As for the aussie site, it suffers from the same disease as any govt. funded site - official seriousness. The most interesting and popular stuff on the net is not the crap put on the web by govt. commissions, but the output of real people. But this is all explained right on Pandora's site:
"At the beginning of 1996, before the PANDORA Project was formally set up, the Selection Committee on Online Australian Publications (SCOAP) developed selection guidelines"
The incredibly long and boring selection guidelines reveal that the SCOAP is out of touch with what the net's all about.
"4.1.1 To be selected for national preservation, a significant proportion of a work should
be written by an Australian(11) of recognised authority and constitute a contribution to international knowledge"
Yeah, that takes a realistic snapshot of what the web is like.
That says a lot - 4 yrs of committee work, and not much to show for it. Just goes to prove the govt. should stay out of anything to do with the net, including archiving it for historic reasons.
w/m
Anyway, what would be nice to see is an archive of the various BBS's that were floating around in the 80s/90s in .au, before the internet killed them off. I guess that they wouldn't take up too much HDD if the old programs were dropped, just have fidonet(etc), local messages and the designs of the BBS (welcome page etc). It would be great to go back and read the older stuff. Similar to the story about early usenet posts from a few days ago.
How many SysOps trashed thier BBSes when they shut down? Would it be feasable (sp?) to mirror them on a free web provider? Just wrap them up with "pre" tags and "href" links instead of the old key-combos that you had to memorize under 2400 baud :)
How much work do you think would be involved in a project like this? I think that I'd like to try it, just for larks :)
The corresponding Swedish project gathers everything they can, and not only Swedish sites but foreign sites which are about Sweden or by Swedes -- provided they can be found. (This is the same institution which keeps a copy of everything which is printed in more than 20 copies in Sweden.)
Throwing stuff away because "it's not interesting" is a bad strategy, as we've found out 100 years later. Is there an Australian institution which keeps everything which is printed in Australia for posterity? If not, that might explain why the strategy is like it is.
These archive the web projects are great in principle, and would constitute a valuable historical resource for future researchers, but they do have a major drawback - they are only ever going to cover a small portion of the available online content.
Even search engines like Google and Lycos, with all of their resources dedicated to searching and indexing new sites, only cover less than 10% of available web pages, and the growth of the net is expanding faster than the ability of these sites to keep up. And if search engines cannot keep up with the Internet's growth, how the hell is an archiving project going to? It's just not possible.
So at best this is only going to get a small number of pages, and which pages they get will be related to their choices of spidering techniques. It's kind of hard to get a truly random sample of pages from the entire selection of content - you're either forced to use what the search engines have indexed or just attempt tor randomly follow links. You'll always miss sites.
Anyway, my point is nice idea, but not really worth as much as they promise.
The contents downloaded will be saved as a "cultural heritage", and will most likely be held private by the researchers until copyright has expired. Yes, in the future, people will look at your crummy homepage and see what people thought at that time!
You can find out more at http://kulturarw3.kb.se/html/projectdescription.ht ml.
"The good die first." "Most of us are morally ambiguous, which explains our random dying patterns." --- MST3K