Web Heritage Could Be Lost

Squiff writes "The British Library warns us that 'The UK's online heritage could be lost forever if the government does not grant a "right to archive"' in the UK. Never mind the Wayback Machine, The British Library declares that 'the average life expectancy of a website was just 44 to 75 days, and suggested that at least 10% of all UK websites were either lost or replaced by new material every six months,' with the material within them being amongst the most revealing regarding the state of contemporary culture."

Comments

Sadness

[Pojut]

I really miss the Internet of the mid-90's...back when Netscape was king, an animated .gif was exciting, and Vivo Video was used for streaming. I know things were much more primative then, but there was a certain charm that just isn't present on today's Internet. ::sigh::

Re:Sadness

[Anonymusing]

Bah. I really miss the Internet of the mid-80s, when telnet was king, a UUCP connection was exciting, and animated ASCII was used for streaming.

(waiting for a 70s guy to show up)

Re:Sadness

[xaxa]

You obviously don't remember "Hamster dance". Charm, indeed!

What about the Jesus dance? Copying that onto the school's website in 1999 got me banned from using the computers for the rest of the week!

(Although, it took about 6 months for someone to notice, care and complain.)

Re:Sadness

[mikael]

Humbug, I really miss the Internet of the mid-70's, where line-printer keyboards were king, a computer with a monitor was exciting, and ASCII art printouts were used for decorating the office.

Re:Sadness

[Anonymusing]

Sadly, no, we actually did code animated ASCII by hand for display on terminals (or terminal windows). It was awful... especially at 300 baud, though even at 1200.

why?

[Sir_Lewk]

Why in the world would anyone in the future care about a website that barely even stuck around for a month. Anything of significance will either stick around, or be archived by others who find it significant.

Also, that average seems absurdly low, are they counting in dynamically generated pages that exist only as long as they are viewed or something?

Re:why?

[iluvcapra]

Why would anybody care about Mary Chestnut or Victor Klemperer's diary? If someone were trying to understand something like the Barack Obama campaign or the Tea Partiers 50 years from now, and all we had were official statements and published news reports, the picture of what was actually going on in the country would be significantly warped. Wherever people gather, there needs to be a chronicle, otherwise some authority in the future is going to make some arbitrary guess about what people believed or wanted.

Re:why?

[grumbel]

Anything of significance will either stick around, or be archived by others who find it significant.

The problem is that you can only evaluate the historic value of something years or decades after it happened. That's why plenty of movies and early TV shows got lost or even destroyed. Even the original moon landing footage is gone. All that stuff just wasn't considered valuable enough and the self space or the reusable magnetic tape was considered more important than the data contained in them.

Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it and we seem to be doing exactly that when it comes to archiving the Internet.

Re:why?

[ibwolf]

The funny thing, what we consider junk today sometimes - mind you, only sometimes - turns out to be really interesting a few generations down the line.

Case in point, advertising leaflets from the early part of the 20th century were undoubtedly not held in high regard at the time. Today however researchers regard them as a useful source of information that was not captured in other media at the time, usually because it was something "everyone knew".

The point is that we are ill equipped today to judge what will be "valuable" tomorrow.

Re:why?

[BrokenHalo]

Not every single bit of information is really worth the effort to save

That's what you might think now, but a historian of the future would probably disagree. By way of an example, it's possible to gain an insight into practices of the past by looking into details of regulations: few official records exist, for instance, detailing fraudulent practice in the food industry in 16th or 17th century England, but the fact that there are statutes specifically forbidding stuffing meat with rags to make it look "plumper" tell us a lot about common practice of the time.

History isn't just made up of dates and battles. It is made up of countless little bits, each not in itself very important, but contributing to the whole.

Way Back When

[mcgrew]

I imagine the Wayback Machine is far better than it used to be, but historically it hasn't been that inclusive. Most of my old Quake site is still there, but other sites from the same time period are gone.

One of my favorite sites ate the time was Yello There, a parody of Blue's News that had me laughing out loud almost daily. Harriot updated the site almost daily, yet the only page out of the thousands there were that still exist is one that I'd posted on my own site ("Kneel" and I were unknowingly fans of each others' sites and eventually became good online friends and did a lot of cross-posting and collaboration).

Sadly, "Kneel" had Muscular Dystrophe and the last I heard could no longer write. I think Harriot died a few years ago, and his online work has vanished, except for that one page.