Archiving the Internet

bq.Librarians fear that many important records have already been lost. Each day the World Wide Web generates enough information to fill 17 million books. All told, five million gigabytes of data-enough to fill 37,000 buildings the size of the U.S. Library of Congress-are produced each year. “In history, whenever there is a great technology shift, you have great loss,” says Laura Campbell, associate librarian at the Library of Congress. “If we don’t preserve it, we will have lost the history of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.” – Patrick White and Michael Hastings I wonder if the authors of this article are familiar with the goals of Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive. I notice that it is not referenced at all, and it would kind of seem relevant to much of what is being discussed. Personally, I am more concerned at this point about the “countless broken hard drives and corrupted floppy disks and other ephemeral storage media.” Mark Pilgrim recently made a point about his lack of success in maintaing access to his old documents. And he is a technically adept individual who actually had an active interest in making things work. There is a lot of data out there that could prove useful in the future if it survives that long. But I do think that the outlook is brighter.