We're In Danger of Losing Our Memories

Hugh Pickens writes "The chief executive of the British Library, Lynne Brindley, says that our cultural heritage is at risk as the Internet evolves and technologies become obsolete, and that historians and citizens face a 'black hole' in the knowledge base of the 21st century unless urgent action is taken to preserve websites and other digital records. For example, when Barack Obama was inaugurated as US president last week, all traces of George W. Bush disappeared from the White House website. There were more than 150 websites relating to the 2000 Olympics in Sydney that vanished instantly at the end of the games and are now stored only by the National Library of Australia. 'If websites continue to disappear in the same way as those on President Bush and the Sydney Olympics... the memory of the nation disappears too,' says Brindley. The library plans to create a comprehensive archive of material from the 8M .uk domain websites, and also is organizing a collecting and archiving project for the London 2012 Olympics. 'The task of capturing our online intellectual heritage and preserving it for the long term falls, quite rightly, to the same libraries and archives that have over centuries systematically collected books, periodicals, newspapers, and recordings...'" Over the years we've discussed various aspects of this archiving problem.

Comments

"All traces of George W. Bush disappeared"

[Caboosian]

and nothing of value was lost.

Re:"All traces of George W. Bush disappeared"

[ColdWetDog]

You do recall the dot-com crash in 2000, right? Bush wasn't in office until 2001.a

It's still his fault. We KNEW he would be elected. That alone crashed the dot-com bubble.

Re:"All traces of George W. Bush disappeared"

[Ethanol-fueled]

Ah, well. Since the PMRC is associated with the name "Gore", I can't say that I'm entirely disappointed. Bush Jr.'s election and re-election weren't about being right, they were about telling the American idiots(and the idiots worldwide who emulate American idiots) to go wild. And what American dosen't like to go wild, even if it means sucking dicks to pay for their overvalued mortgage in a recession economy!

Gore and Kerry's campaigns were "mumble mumble this, mumble mumble that." Americans who want change didn't have a real voice or character(since Howard Dean, anyway) until Obama. Hillary would've also won, but she's too cool with her New York Jew constituency and we have to have a prez who's more low-key about that kinda shit.

People who mod me down: suck my dick.

interesting idea

[corbettw]

I wholeheartedly agree that there should be some mechanism for archiving millions, if not billions, of web pages. Someone should get right on that.

They say they never forget, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

> Yeah, but who's archiving archive.org???

The turtles, of course. It's turtles all the way down.

Re:FP

[dangitman]

Don't worry. After this civilization is destroyed, the only thing of value that will remain intact is Simpsons DVDs. A new civilization will be rebuilt from these remnants, and we'll populate an entire planet for each episode. On some of those planets, Smithers will be black.

Re:Just do it.

[Shakrai]

Archive.org may not be willing to archive important sites (such as pr0n), and it only has a single mirror.

Don't worry I'm working on archiving all that porn locally. Eventually I'll combine every single file into one giant torrent and upload at least 99.9% of it before dropping offline ;)

Re:FP

[genner]

I bet you also forgot that Smithers was black.

So was Michael Jackson at some point, no one cares.

Re:Bush White House Site Preserved in Full

[DrEasy]

Good! Between this and the Monty Python archives now on YouTube, we should have our fill of free comedy for years to come.