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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.
First po
Wait, what were we talking abo
First Post!
and nothing of value was lost.
Archive.org has been doing this forever. Why is it taking other folks so long to do the same?
The Internet archive is (or was) meant to help ease this problem.
We also have sites like Furl that allow users to save a page for later.
The Google cache retains the contents of a site for a short time (that is, if it doesn't include noarchive tags)
Visitors to a site always have the option of saving a copy.
The issue isn't necessarily that copies don't exist, it's that there's no structured way that will ensure some copy of everything gets saved.
And when individuals "save" a copy of a website, there's no way that they make their saved copy available for historians to look at later.
The problem of personal archiving, declaring certain archives public, and making such snippets available has not been generally solved.
I wholeheartedly agree that there should be some mechanism for archiving millions, if not billions, of web pages. Someone should get right on that.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
Well, for starters, I keep my memories in my head.. but if you're talking about records and history then I think copyright is a bigger culprit than digitization any day. Most of the culture of the 20th century is unavailable because the copyright holders have carte blanche to suppress it so it doesn't compete with their latest offerings.
How we know is more important than what we know.
The National Archives has versions up of all the Clinton White House pages. Here's one. I'm sure they'll get around to doing the same for Bush eventually. I seriously doubt the Obama team came in and pulled an 'rm -rf' on the old webpage.....
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
The National Archives has preserved the whole final state of the Bush White House site here: http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/
You have to cut down the noise somehow.
We don't need to save every teenager's text message.
I'm not willing to spend a lot of money to preserve my *own* memories. If they think it is so important, then they can kick in some money and free time to do it.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
> Yeah, but who's archiving archive.org???
The turtles, of course. It's turtles all the way down.
Pretty much. A Novel in Nine Letters, one of Dostoyevski's famous shorter works, used the newly established postal service as a framing device.
Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy that hinges on the lack of reliable postal services. A courier is late arriving with a note for Romeo, so he never finds out that Juliet has merely faked her own death.
Some of the stock humour in the Italian Commedia dell'Arte hinges on letters getting mis-delivered.
In short: Yes, we are defined by our communications capacity, and that's been a subject of commentary for as long as we've been keeping records.
That more or less makes your point - but to conclude that it's no longer topical because we've been talking about it for a while... I can't agree with you there.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Well, paper was good, as long as we're talking long fibers for paper. As we've moved to shorter fibers via more destructive pulping, the potential life of paper has been reduced.
You find one Smith from Australia with no relationship to the Smith in Wales, who in turn has no relationship to the Smith in Zimbabwe.
That's because one was a blacksmith, another a silversmith, the third a pewtersmith.
It's not perfect by any means but the WayBack machine on Archive.Org can find some pretty old stuff. Scary stuff too. Like that time I was into...... er forget it...
Plus if the Whitehouse doesn't get your fancy... there is tons of Grateful Dead Music there as well.
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Exactly, the idea that there will be LESS information surviving from our current torrent (hehe) of data is simply stupid. The fact is we have a limited view of history in the form of first person accounts because it was so expensive (both in terms of time and resources) to create a personal account of an event. Today we have say 10M blog entries about Obama's inauguration. Even if 1/10th of 1% of those are preserved that means we still have 10K accounts, how many surviving accounts of say FDR's inauguration do we have? My father has a handful of 8mm films from his childhood, my wife has boxes of VHS tapes and my kids will have hundreds of gigs of photos and movies of their childhood, each generation has more chances to save significant amounts of data because storing it is ever cheaper.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
These archives always neglect the porn sites. Our knowledge of Rome would have been much diminished without the preserved brothels of Herculaneum and Pompei.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Bandwidth, disk space, servers required, I suppose. The Wayback Machine alone has 85 billion pages, occupying 2 PB, growing at 20TB/month.
Anyone knows how many LoCs is that?
Really, does anyone want to remember that eight-year nightmare?
There's a social benefit, stupid. You just demonstrated the behavior I described. The social benefit incurs an economic cost. There might be some very, very long-term economic benefit, but it's harder to prove. The social benefit is obvious, at least to some of us.
"Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it." - George Santayana
Like those of us who voted for President Bush the first time to reverse the previous administration's policies (but really didn't), when will the Obama guys get frustrated when he fails to end the so-called "Patriot" Act and warrantless wiretapping which he supposedly opposed?
He will not, because the "Patriot" Act was composed in pieces by the Bush I/Clinton administrations. He already caved on the warrantless wiretapping so that's already a done deal.
Hmm, VHS vs 8mm I think VHS wins. Celluloid film tends to break down after 40-60 years if not stored in exactly the right conditions, the plastic tape that VHS tapes are made of should last forever in not exposed to extremes of heat, light, or moisture and the binding agent for the magnetic material should last quite a while. I know of plenty of VHS tapes that are older than I am (I'm 30).
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Because when someone implements a thing poorly, others usually just say "that's been done" or "see? I knew it was a stupid idea." Few will actually spend the time to do it better, certain that they can convince the public their system is superior to the flawed one. Free Software is an exception here, which has been able to keep going, trying to convince people of an alternative, because it's largely independent of individual companies' profit margins.
... when Barack Obama was inaugurated as US president last week, all traces of George W. Bush disappeared from the White House website.
Ah, hmm... we're in danger of forgetting George W. Bush?
I can't quite figure out the downside.
My bicyles