Ultimate library challenge: taming the internet by Jill Lawless.
From the post:
Capturing the unruly, ever-changing internet is like trying to pin down a raging river. But the British Library is going to try.
For centuries, the library has kept a copy of every book, pamphlet, magazine and newspaper published in Britain. Starting on Saturday, it will also be bound to record every British website, e-book, online newsletter and blog in a bid to preserve the nation’s ”digital memory”.
As if that’s not a big enough task, the library also has to make this digital archive available to future researchers – come time, tide or technological change.
The library says the work is urgent. Ever since people began switching from paper and ink to computers and mobile phones, material that would fascinate future historians has been disappearing into a digital black hole. The library says firsthand accounts of everything from the 2005 London transit bombings to Britain’s 2010 election campaign have already vanished.
”Stuff out there on the web is ephemeral,” said Lucie Burgess the library’s head of content strategy. ”The average life of a web page is only 75 days, because websites change, the contents get taken down.
”If we don’t capture this material, a critical piece of the jigsaw puzzle of our understanding of the 21st century will be lost.”
For more details, see Jill’s post or, Click to save the nations digital memory (British Library press release), or 100 websites: Capturing the digital universe (sample of results of archiving with only 100 sites).
The content gathered by the project will be made available to the public.
A welcome venture, particularly since the results will be made available to the public.
An unanswerable question but I do wonder how we would view Greek drama if all of it had been preserved?
Hundreds if not thousands of plays were written and performed every year.
The Complete Greek Drama lists only forty-seven (47) that have survived to this day.
If whole scale preservation is the first step, how do we preserve paths to what’s worth reading in a data labyrinth as a second step?
I first saw this in a tweet by Jason Ronallo.