The World Wide Web describes our times but it’s an incomplete document as sites, pages and posts are lost, deleted or edited. San Francisco’s Internet Archive aims to be the keeper of that history.
As example of how fragile our online records are is illustrated by the tale of Kevin Vaughan’s Pulitzer Prize nominated story describing a 1960s community tragedy for the Rocky Mountain News.
The 34 part piece captivated the newspaper’s readership when it was published in 2007 but two years later, the Rocky Mountain News went broke and the story disappeared along with the rest of the website. The Atlantic Magazine describes Vaughan’s efforts to recover and republish his story.
Vaughan’s efforts to recover his work are not unique, websites are constantly being shut down, accounts censored and social media posts deleted. In the Coweb, The New Yorker’s Jill LaPore describes how the Ukrainian militia leader responsible for shooting down MH17 promptly deleted the message showing the plane’s remains and how the Internet Archive preserved that damming post.
Last week in San Francisco the Internet Archive held their Building Libraries Together event where director Brewster Kahle described their efforts to preserve as much of the web as possible for future generations.
The Internet Archive itself is in a restored church that seems almost custom built for the organisation. In her New Yorker piece, essential reading for those wanting to understand the project, LaPore describes Kahle’s affection for the building.
He loves that the church’s cornerstone was laid in 1923: everything published in the United States before that date lies in the public domain. A temple built in copyright’s year zero seemed fated. Kahle hops, just slightly, in his shoes when he gets excited. He says, showing me the church, “It’s Greek!”
For the Building Libraries Together event, the Internet Archive had spread out a series of exhibits on the organisation’s activities that range from trawling the web through to scanning books, digitising movie reels, saving old video games and collecting TV news broadcasts.
One of the important functions the Archive does is create collections around major events – the capture of the MH17 shoot down was part their Ukrainian War collection – which illustrates the problem of ‘link rot’ as many sites set up around events such as the Occupy movement or the Ferguson protests are now dead or occupied by cybersquatters.
Running a service like the Internet Archive is labor intensive and in an expensive city like San Francisco where almost all the staff could be paid substantially better working in the tech sector and the pay isn’t exactly stellar.
Kahle jokes “because we can’t pay stock options, those who stay three years here get a statue made of themselves.
The statues line one side of the old church hall that also doubles as an event space and the server room. At the back of the auditorium are the computers themselves quietly flashing away each time the archive is being read.
For the presentations, Kahle bubbles away with his thoughts on the importance of preserving the Internet and Kalev Hannes Leetaru‘s presentation on data visualisation raised some important topics on copyright and communications which this blog intends to explore deeper in the future.
The final part of the night’s presentation was an award to the Grateful Dead’s lyricist, John Perry Barlow, for his work in trying to keep intellectual property open and accessible.
At the end of the night, the crowd left with their gifts and t-shirts and the exhibits had packed up.
One of the stand out exhibits was the virtual reality stand where an old lady tried an Oculus Rift headset for the first time, “this is wonderful. I just want to reach out and touch everything,” she cried.
Preserving that wonder and the promised possibilities of our time is possibly the most important thing The Internet Archive can do. In an era where many talk of open information but few genuinely practice it, we run the risk of leaving an information dark ages for future generations.
How we preserve a record of our times for future generations is a pressing concern. The Internet Archive is one step to solving that problem.
