Background
How do we capture and store digital artifacts such as our blogs, our websites, and our social media accounts? Some time ago, I watched the PBS special series entitled Culture At Risk (http://www.pbs.org/newshour/tag/culture-at-risk/), which outlined attempts to preserve our digital history. Here's what I found interesting -
- Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine
The Internet Archive was started as digital archive project in a church in San Francisco, California. The primary goal is to build a huge digital backup of the content on the World Wide Web. According to their website, https://archive.org/index.php, there are over 279 million archived web pages in the Web archive called the Wayback Machine.
- "The Fragile Web" and Link Rot
Link rot refers to URLs that no longer point to the correct page on the Web. This can be a real problem when trying to link to important information such as legal cases. A 2013 Harvard study focused on the URLs of U.S. Supreme Court cases. It found a really serious problem of link rot in over 70% of the URLs in the Harvard Law Review and over 50% of the URLs linking to U.S. Supreme Court cases. Check out the study here:
Zittrain, Jonathan L. and Albert, Kendra and Lessig, Lawrence, Perma: Scoping and Addressing the Problem of Link and Reference Rot in Legal Citations (October 1, 2013). Harvard Public Law Working Paper No. 13-42. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2329161 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2329161.
As a response to this study, the Harvard Library Innovation Lab (http://lil.law.harvard.edu/) was started for law libraries to store legal cases and materials permanently at a project called Perma.cc. Permalinks are reliable because they point to information that will not be moved around. Check out Perma.cc at: https://perma.cc/.
- Book: "When We are No More" by Abby Smith Rumsey
Ms. Rumsey provides an interesting discourse on the notion of human memories in the digital age. She examines common information problems faced by humans throughout time, namely - information overload. The book addresses the question of what will inevitably happen to our collective memories stored in millions upon millions of computer servers when we are no longer here.
Looking towards the future
- Retrieving legacy information
The obstacle of retrieving old digitized information is similar to the problem with the 8-track tape and VCR. Yes, I go back that far!!! The retrieval problem is that basically we still have the media but no longer have the equipment to read it. So, will all of the wonderful web-based media we are creating (i.e. websites, social media accounts, emails, etc.), be wasted when we no longer have the hardware and/or software to retrieve and read them? It's like working rigorously for your drivers' license but not having a car to use it.
Interesting dilemma. This remains to be seen.
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