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Pickling Australia's Online Past, Present, Future

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the aging-it-like-country-ham dept.

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?

3 of 38 comments (clear)

  1. And the irony is... by Spurious+George · · Score: 3
    This seems to be one of the few projects funded by any government that does not merit the name "Pandora"...

    (Hehe... did Pandora's box run Linux?)

    --
    while ( !universe->perfect() ) {
    hack (reality);

    --

    --
    while ( !universe->perfect() ) {
    hack (reality);
    }
  2. Better done elsewhere by w00ly_mammoth · · Score: 4

    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

  3. I think "significant" sites only is a mistake by iktos · · Score: 3

    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.