Internet Archive's San Francisco Home Badly Damaged By Fire

Rambo Tribble writes "The San Francisco building housing the Internet Archive, and its popular Wayback Machine, has suffered a serious fire. While no archived data was destroyed, materials awaiting archival were. Rebuilding will be a major undertaking, and the group is soliciting donations."

Comments

almost could have been like 48 B.C.

[rubycodez]

the modern day Library of Alexandra burning

Re:almost could have been like 48 B.C.

[i kan reed]

I forgot that the library of Alexandria had a big pile of archived cat photos.

Re:almost could have been like 48 B.C.

[ibwolf]

Unlike the ancient library of Alexandria, IA has offsite backups of everything. So, no, this is nothing at all like that.

Re:almost could have been like 48 B.C.

[Anonymous Coward]

It isn't that simple. The items that burned could have been originals -- that had not yet been digitized.

Re:almost could have been like 48 B.C.

[Culture20]

It was in Egypt.

Re:almost could have been like 48 B.C.

[Warbothong]

the modern day Library of Alexandra burning

That's precisely why the Library of Alexandra hosts a mirror of the Internet Archive http://archive.bibalex.org/

Re:almost could have been like 48 B.C.

[rubycodez]

I have sad news for you, in the real world having offsite backups does not mean you can quickly recover from a disaster, or even recover at all, or that even all the data really is there and recoverable.

Re:almost could have been like 48 B.C.

[morgauxo]

yes. archive.org archives a lot more than just the internet.

NSA?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

I bet it was a jealous neighbor. ;-)

Re:Arson!

[Joining Yet Again]

This sounds more likely to me. Fire doesn't spread quickly in a building built specifically to protect property from fire damage (the most immediate threat to any library).

Re:Arson!

[rubycodez]

healthcare.gov is self-immolating

Why is the archive worth preserving?

[kaputtfurleben]

Aside from the chuckle I get from visiting geocities pages once a decade, what reasons are there for helping to preserve it? Is the preservation of old internet sites anything more than a curiousity that will end up in museums? Is it useful to the human race in some way?

Re:Why is the archive worth preserving?

[fustakrakich]

Because.
Yes.
Yes.

Re:Why is the archive worth preserving?

[ibwolf]

Aside from the chuckle I get from visiting geocities pages once a decade, what reasons are there for helping to preserve it?

Is the preservation of old internet sites anything more than a curiousity that will end up in museums? Is it useful to the human race in some way?

Is the preservation of old manuscripts anything more than a curiousity that will end up in museums?

Is the preservation of old books anything more than a curiousity that will end up in museums?

Is the preservation of old newspapers anything more than a curiousity that will end up in museums?

Is the preservation of old films anything more than a curiousity that will end up in museums?

The internet is just the latest evolution of information sharing. We've found (often the hard way) that information is generally worth preserving. While a lot of what is on the Internet today will never be of interest to anyone, it is impossible to guess very accurately at what will be of interest. Often the things no one thought had any long term value at the time of their creation, wind up being the most valuable to future generations of researchers.

Re:Why is the archive worth preserving?

[vux984]

Is the preservation of old internet sites anything more than a curiousity that will end up in museums? Is it useful to the human race in some way?

Most of its not. Someone's blog or twitter feed today will be the future's Diary of Anne Frank. Its hard to know now what is or will be important 50, 100, or 1000 years from now.

Its also useful in the shorter term for everything from investigating crime ( a new lead in a cold case brings to light a new suspect, and suddenly some chatter on geocities or other long defunct page is relevant evidence), to fighting bogus patents (groklaw used to reference the archive to cite prior art), to looking at documentation for older things... where the manufacturer has removed the documentation pages / gone of out business, the support forums removed, end user hosted fansites/discussion etc have gone dormant, abandoned and eventually disappears. Much of it still searchable & recoverable in the archive.

Re:Why is the archive worth preserving?

[Hatta]

Are you fucking kidding me? Archaeologists get excited digging through ancient garbage. How can there be any doubt that relics from the birth of the internet won't be incredibly informative to future civilizations?

It's attitudes like yours that caused so many silent films or early episodes of Doctor Who to be lost to time.

Re:Why is the archive worth preserving?

[Anrego]

Somewhat off topic, but unfortunately the fact that a current domain owner can use robots.txt to prevent the display of information from previous owners of the domain is a frustrating hindrance to it's use by fan/community sites.

The classic go to example is jumptheshark.com. TV guide bought it, destroyed it, and put up a robots.txt that prevents using archive.org to view the old (and interesting) community provided content.

Re:Why is the archive worth preserving?

[Opportunist]

Talk to the average archaeologist. And then let him lament for a moment or two on how little we know of the life of the "common man" of old. We know everything of the life of kings and emperors, and even of them we often only hear the important parts of their life. The everyday life of most of human history is in the dark, simply because nobody bothered to record it. What for, it's so common, so ordinary, why should we note down how we live our life?

Today we're often puzzled how certain things were done. We found games in the tombs of pharaohs and have no idea how to play them because nobody bothered to write down the rules to it, simply because they were so common knowledge that nobody bothered to write them down. And the same applies to a lot of other ancient knowledge that is lost simply because we do not have any records of it, either because nobody bothered to note it down, considering the information not important and so common knowledge that it's moot to write it down, or because the records were few and all of them lost in time.

Yes, that's not going to teach us any new and exciting technology. But it would teach us how our ancestors lived and we would learn about the past. It would be interesting. You may disagree, you may think it is not, but then again, who are we to say what people find interesting?

Personally, I think learning about our past is interesting. How people lived. How they thought. What they feared. What they hoped for. I'd consider the life of the average person in old times interesting. How much would you know of the US of today if you only knew about the life of presidents and some celebrities? How much of its culture, its problems and its aspirations would you understand if that's the only information you had?

Re:Why is the archive worth preserving?

[kaputtfurleben]

It's attitudes like yours that caused so many silent films or early episodes of Doctor Who to be lost to time.

My attitude of asking a question? I didn't say the answer was "nothing," I just wasn't sure what it was. Thankfully ibwolf gave a pretty good answer.

Re:Why is the archive worth preserving?

[odie5533]

A lot of great documents have been found at the ancient Oxyrhynchus garbage dump.

Re:Why is the archive worth preserving?

[cffrost]

It's not just sites -= it preserves warez collections too. Unfortunately.

What's unfortunate about it?

Currently, the only means by which these cultural works are preserved (in a form unencumbered by DRM, and thus easily usable by current and future generations) are a) peoples' personal collections, with distribution and redundancy provided by file-sharing networks, b) web sites that host them, which are ephemeral in nature due to low funding and persistent legal attacks, and c) copies of those sites maintained by archive.org.

For-profit copyright holders that create these works have a perverse incentive to ensure their works do not survive beyond the period during which they hold a work's copyright, nor beyond the time during which the work is netting them sufficient profit. In other words, it is in the interest of a for-profit entity to have all copies of their works wiped out as soon as copyright or sufficient profitability ends — whichever comes first. I believe that this is contrary to the interests of society as a whole, and I do what I can to help perpetuate the preservation and availability of works that would otherwise be destroyed due to legal or financial incentives.

To provide just one example of the custodial role of file-sharers: I find it very unlikely that the file-sharing community would ever collectively "lose" some portion of old Doctor Who episodes — as, for the segment of society that participates in file-sharing, those episodes are artifacts of cultural significance, while for the copyright holder(s) they are mere consumer products, destined to be replaced (as opposed to added to) by other products at their whim.

Did my small part

[RobertM1968]

Realizing just how much some of us geeks use this service, whether to search for lost content, or via using places like Wikipedia that link to original/unmodified versions of a web page, I figured I should do my part to help out - and I did. Hope others step up to the plate too. It would be a shame to have their operations hobbled because of this fire.

Fire insurance

[sanjosanjo]

Not that they don't deserve donations, but why do they need to solicit for funds for this purpose? Wouldn't fire insurance cover the losses?

Re:Fire insurance

[SJHillman]

Fire insurance might cover the physical materials that were damaged, but they probably won't cover the time and associated costs of rebuilding the information, not to mention lost time.

Re:Fire insurance

[sandytaru]

Fire insurance is usually inadequate to cover the total losses. It'll cover the value of the building as-is, and the loss of the hardware and physical items things were stored on. If they want to rebuild on the same site, it will often cost a lot more depending on the condition of the building.

In Athens, GA, the Georgia Theater burned down a few years back. They opted to rebuild on-site and use as much of the shell of the old building as possible, but fire insurance covered maybe half of the final cost because the old building was about fifty years out of code and needed major work anyway. They're still accepting donations to help out with the cost of the rebuild, and probably will owe on the new mortgage for a long, long time.

Two words: historical revisionism

[pr0t0]

It helps to prevent history from being rewritten by the history writers, the liars, and the pretenders. I'd say its utility is beyond measure.

Why San Francisco?

[Spy Handler]

If you want to archive and preserve data long term, wouldn't you want a stable location, someplace that doesn't suffer from 9+ magnitude earthquakes every century or so? And btw SF is overdue for one of these big ones.

I'd pick a small city in the Rocky mountains, far from earthquakes, floods and riots.

Re:Why San Francisco?

[geekoid]

overdue as in, past the statistical average point.
It's not like a clock.

And they back up out of state.

The Rocky Mountains have storms, floods, and a lack of talent.

Re:Why San Francisco?

[Swave An deBwoner]

Not so. Their rent was extremely low due to the clever use of their Wayback Machine which permitted them to sign a 1000-year lease in 1906 when nobody else wanted to rent there anymore. You should check the Archive.

Re:Donations?

[geekoid]

Insurance doesn't cover the man time to get everything working again, as well as other ancillary costs.

Donations

[ArcadeMan]

FYI, they also accept donations in Bitcoins.

Re:Arson!

[techsimian]

The building wasn't built specifically for the internet archive...it was a Christian science reading room (and church if memory serves)