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"

[Khaed]

People who don't like Bush -- ESPECIALLY people who don't like Bush -- should want all record of him preserved.

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

[Shakrai]

Because George Bush managed to fuck up the great economy Clinton left him with

And even if people accept that premise that relates to biased moderations in what way exactly?

because Obama is a visionary and has a fantastic platform

Get back to me in four years before you start spouting about fantastic his platform is. I'm rooting for his success (because we can't afford for him to fail) but I'm not going to call it a "fantastic platform" six days into his administration and I'm growing weary of the worship that surrounds him. And this is coming from someone who campaigned for him.

If you disagree that Bush is a worse president than Clinton was or Obama will be, then it is probably wiser to keep your mouth shut and let the world think you are intelligent rather than removing all doubt.

Translation: If you disagree with me then it is probably wiser to keep your mouth shut, lest I be exposed to competing points of view that might tax my brain and force me to actually think.

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

[Shakrai]

but it's not suffering PTSD after being violently beaten up by greedy assholes.

So in which administration do you think passed a lot of the deregulation that enabled those 'greedy assholes'? Which administration passed the Telecommunications Act, the Communications Decency Act and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act?

Eventually the wet for Obama crowd is going to wake up and realize that the Democrats are just as big of a threat to our way of life as the Republicans are. Of course by the time that happens everybody will have forgotten about how badly the GOP fucked up and we'll start the whole cycle over again. Wash, rinse, repeat.

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

[daath93]

From wikipedia: "Using the stock market as an unofficial benchmark, a recession would have begun in March 2000 when the NASDAQ crashed following the collapse of the Dot-com bubble. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was relatively unscathed by the NASDAQ's crash until the September 11, 2001 attacks, after which the DJIA suffered its worst one-day point loss and biggest one-week losses in history up to that point."

Also NBER President Martin Feldstein said in 2004:

"It is clear that the revised data have made our original March [2001] date for the start of the recession much too late. We are still waiting for additional monthly data before making a final judgment. Until we have the additional data, we cannot make a decision."

Interesting way of saying "we are clearly wrong, but we aren't going to commit to it".

And Finally, how could someone who hadn't by March even passed his economic policy until June of that year.

Interesting further quote from the article on his economic policy Bush inherited a faltering economy from Clinton, the economy having grown only at a 1.1% annualized rate over the previous three quarters from March 31 of the first year of Bush presidency [15](see Early 2000s recession). Bush had his tax cut plan approved by Congress in June, proposed early as a response to the economic decline and, despite the aftermath of the 2001 9/11 attacks, managed to keep the country out of recession[neutrality disputed] (defined as two consecutive quarters of decline in the size of the economy) during the time he and his economic policies were assuming more control over the economy.

I may not like the man as president, but I refuse to make him the magic bullet for all the problems with this country.

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

[NinthAgendaDotCom]

You're seriously comparing the CDA and the DMCA to the likes of the Iraq War, badly handling Katrina, and staffing every position with hacks and cronies? Repubs are demonstrably worse for our country.

I don't buy this "Oh, they're all bad, Dems are just as bad" meme. It's just not factually true.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

World War II: Rosevelt (D). (more dead americans than any war in history)

Actually, more Americans died in the Civil War.

In World War 2, about 418,500 Americans died. That's a lot, but we got off light compared to the other combatants, whose casualties numbered in the millions.

Meanwhile, about 620,000 Americans died in the U.S. Civil War -- 360,000 Union soldiers, 260,000 Confederates. The Confederates were Americans too, ya know, despite their best efforts to split off.

Like the Copyright Black Hole?

[QuantumG]

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.

Re:Like the Copyright Black Hole?

[AKAImBatman]

Mod this up to +11. It's insane how much material has to be archived illegally to keep it intact. Case in point: When Legacy Engineering developed the Atari Flashback 2 for the modern Atari, they had to pull all the ROMs, documents, schematics, and everything else from their own archives. Atari had absolutely none of it.

Similarly, all kinds of software is being lost due to the draconian copyright laws. In fact, two of the titles I remember from my childhood (a Q-Bert ripoff with ice cubes and a lunar lander clone that gained you fuel from answering math problems) are, as far as I can tell, simply lost to history. No one has even documented their existence, much less made a backup for posterity!

Unfortunately, the problem is only getting worse. Movies, television, software, digital texts, and other forms of useful information and cultural entertainment are being lost to time permanently. All because these items fall out of circulation and copyright law prevents enough copies from being kept around to prevent their untimely demise.

That being said, I do realize that not everything can be kept. Hell, I know more than enough historians wish we had even simple documents like tax assessments and census results from the ancient world. Even seemingly stupid stuff like that can be incredibly useful. Never the less, some of this information is simply going to be lost in time. But let's at least make an effort to preserve the works that define our history and culture. You never know. 2000 years from now our descendants may want to piece together what happened to us. ;-)

Bush White House Site Preserved in Full

[Derling Whirvish]

The National Archives has preserved the whole final state of the Bush White House site here: http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/

Re:who needs archive.org for the white house?

[Derling Whirvish]

The National Archives has versions up of all the Clinton White House pages. Here's one [nara.gov]. I'm sure they'll get around to doing the same for Bush eventually.

They're already ahead of you.

http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/

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: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:Too much memory == no memory

[grcumb]

We don't need to save every teenager's text message.

Don't be so sure. One of an archaeologist's favourite places to dig is in the village rubbish tip. It's important because it tells us more about day-to-day life in a society than what people wrote down on papyrus, carved into stone, or otherwise saved for posterity.

In virtually every case, the stuff that rulers deem important doesn't bear much relation to the way everyday people live. Often enough, it's an outright lie. So if we want to understand a society with any depth of detail, we need to know the trivial and mundane as well as the monumental.

Re:Just do it.

[MichaelSmith]

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 ;)

You sir are a great humanitarian.

Re:tv, radio, newspaper, official documents, memoi

[afidel]

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.