Do we really need to save websites for the future?

[SmoochyTX]

Historians face a "black hole" of lost material unless urgent action is taken to preserve websites and other digital records, the head of the British Library has warned.

Just as families store digital photos on computers which might never be passed on to their descendants, so Britain's cultural heritage is at risk as the internet evolves and technologies become obsolete, says Lynne Brindley, the library's chief executive.

Writing in today's Observer, Brindley cites two examples of losses overseas. When Barack Obama was inaugurated as US president last week, all traces of George Bush disappeared from the White House website, including a booklet entitled 100 Things Americans May Not Know About the Bush Administration, which is no longer accessible.

There were more than 150 websites relating to the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, she continues, but these, too, vanished instantly at the end of the games and are now stored only by the National Library of Australia. "If websites continue to disappear in the same way as those on President Bush and the Sydney Olympics - perhaps exacerbated by the current economic climate that is killing companies - the memory of the nation disappears too," Brindley writes. "Historians of the future, citizens of the future, will find a black hole in the knowledge base of the 21st century."

You can read the rest of the article at the link below.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/tech...erving-digital-archive


What are your thoughts on this?

 

[Q]

Google for the backup IMO

 

[ConstipatedVigilante]

Yes, and Google should back it up. Microsoft would fuck it up somehow and it would crash a lot/use too many resources. Apple would make the "i-net" shiny and expensive.

 

[MovingTarget]

Yes, definitely. The digital black-hole is why I also support open formats as opposed to proprietary ones. Try opening a file from a company's program that has been out of business for a decade - it may not go so well. As far as who should do it, I voted for the hampsters. There really wasn't a choice as it would require both the governments of the world and corporate/private entites....

 

[Red Squirrel]

yeah google should do it. Actually would be neat if they had an option to "go back 1 year" in google search results. Or maybe go in like 5 year increments.


I tend to backup stuff for my own use too. Mostly program setup files. Though I'm finding this more complex with linux stuff so I have not bothered to find a way yet, since everything is yum or apt-get.

The reason I do this is because often very good programs/resources are pulled off the internet, so I like having it locally on my network. I recall back in win98 days using Power Archiver 6.0. In it's time it was a GREAT program, but then they pulled it off and turned the next version into shareware so it nagged you like winzip does. For years after that, I still used Power Archiver because I had it on my network. Even when I upgraded to XP I was still using that program, until I decided to switch to 7zip.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Originally posted by: MovingTarget
Yes, definitely. The digital black-hole is why I also support open formats as opposed to proprietary ones. Try opening a file from a company's program that has been out of business for a decade - it may not go so well. As far as who should do it, I voted for the hampsters. There really wasn't a choice as it would require both the governments of the world and corporate/private entites....

That's a good point too. We actually ran into that at a hospital. There was some medical data on this really old novell server. It used it's own propiotory file system and all, and it would not boot up. Never managed to get the data off the drive, and there was pretty much no resources online. I'm not sure what happened that made them take so long to realize they needed this data though. This server was sitting turned off for years in a corner.

 

[SmoochyTX]

Originally posted by: RedSquirrel
yeah google should do it. Actually would be neat if they had an option to "go back 1 year" in google search results. Or maybe go in like 5 year increments.


I tend to backup stuff for my own use too. Mostly program setup files. Though I'm finding this more complex with linux stuff so I have not bothered to find a way yet, since everything is yum or apt-get.

The reason I do this is because often very good programs/resources are pulled off the internet, so I like having it locally on my network. I recall back in win98 days using Power Archiver 6.0. In it's time it was a GREAT program, but then they pulled it off and turned the next version into shareware so it nagged you like winzip does. For years after that, I still used Power Archiver because I had it on my network. Even when I upgraded to XP I was still using that program, until I decided to switch to 7zip.

I'm not talking about for personal reasons. We're discussing historical purposes.

 

[GagHalfrunt]

I don't think it should be done, but if it was to be done I'd trust the hamsters before M$, Apple or the Feds.

 

[Howard]

I know there's a lot of quality information on the web that's no longer available now, that I can retrieve using the wayback machine. It's very handy.

 

[frostedflakes]

You'd be surprised how much stuff is mirrored across the net, you can probably find about anything if you have enough time to search for it.

http://www.google.com/search?h...type%3Apdf&btnG=Search

I also found this part funny.

There is already one stark warning from history. The BBC's Doomsday Project of 1986, intended to record the state of the nation for posterity, was recorded on two 12inch videodisks. By 2000 it was obsolete, and was rescued only thanks to a specialist team working with a sole surviving laser disk player.

"Sole surviving laser disk player"? Thought I read here on ATOT like a week or two ago that Pioneer had only this year stopped production of LD players. :laugh:

 

[T9D]

...

 

[frostedflakes]

Originally posted by: v1001

Originally posted by: frostedflakes
You'd be surprised how much stuff is mirrored across the net, you can probably find about anything if you have enough time to search for it.

http://www.google.com/search?h...type%3Apdf&btnG=Search

I also found this part funny.

There is already one stark warning from history. The BBC's Doomsday Project of 1986, intended to record the state of the nation for posterity, was recorded on two 12inch videodisks. By 2000 it was obsolete, and was rescued only thanks to a specialist team working with a sole surviving laser disk player.

"Sole surviving laser disk player"? Thought I read here on ATOT like a week or two ago that Pioneer had only this year stopped production of LD players. :laugh:

I believe it's a specialized data disc and data player.

My bad, it looks like you're right.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Woudn't a blueray or dvd player qualify as a "laser disk player?". It actually sounds really cool, they should start calling it that.

 

[SmoochyTX]

Originally posted by: GagHalfrunt
I don't think it should be done, but if it was to be done I'd trust the hamsters before M$, Apple or the Feds.

Why don't you think it should be done?

 

[kranky]

This problem is unsolvable. If something only exists digitally, then it is only accessible while there are machines and software available to recreate the content from the ones and zeros. Enormous amounts of information will either be lost altogether, or people will be required to spend time and money to convert data between formats over and over again.

Film and paper have proven to be remarkably stable and long-lasting, yet less and less gets stored this way as time goes by.

Archiving websites isn't the answer. Websites contradict each other, they portray urban legends as fact, they make up things. Twenty years or more down the road, who will know which websites were being truthful and factual?

 

[sdifox]

I don't see the point. There is very few original things on the web worth keeping, and the ones worth keeping, you know someone is keeping it.

 

[Jeff7]

Some day, in 1000 years, humans venturing out of the Solar System will come across Voyager 3. Embedded on the spacecraft shell will be a golden record bearing some inscriptions and an image of a person.
Upon deciphering the instructions for playback, they will be greeted by ancient Earthly recordings....

...give you up
Never gonna let you down....

Followed by imagery of a man holding open his anus, and something involving 2 girls, a container of some sort, and lots of excrement.

Fortunately, the only surviving literature of the time period, Urbandictionary.com, has miraculously survived on a flash drive entombed in semen-encrusted tissue, offering a window into the terribly depraved, racist, intolerant, neurotic culture of the era.

Originally posted by: kranky
This problem is unsolvable. If something only exists digitally, then it is only accessible while there are machines and software available to recreate the content from the ones and zeros. Enormous amounts of information will either be lost altogether, or people will be required to spend time and money to convert data between formats over and over again.

Film and paper have proven to be remarkably stable and long-lasting, yet less and less gets stored this way as time goes by.

Archiving websites isn't the answer. Websites contradict each other, they portray urban legends as fact, they make up things. Twenty years or more down the road, who will know which websites were being truthful and factual?

That's not much different than other pieces of history. That's why we've got historians who try to examine multiple contradicting accounts of events, and figure out what might truly have happened.

Also surviving (somewhere) with the information will be software capable of decoding the binary data. Perhaps computers of the future will have little difficulty decoding the data we have today, at least basic code like text or HTML. Data which has been encoded by proprietary means, such as DivX or FLV, may be more difficult.

Finally, hardcopies have another unfortunate problem, which continually becomes more and more difficult to address: Searchability. We constantly create information at an ever-increasing rate. Just finding the relevant information can be difficult, even with computerized searching functionality.

 

[geno]

nevermind

 

[kranky]

Originally posted by: Jeff7
Some day, in 1000 years, humans venturing out of the Solar System will come across Voyager 3. Embedded on the spacecraft shell will be a golden record bearing some inscriptions and an image of a person.
Upon deciphering the instructions for playback, they will be greeted by ancient Earthly recordings....

...give you up
Never gonna let you down....

Followed by imagery of a man holding open his anus, and something involving 2 girls, a container of some sort, and lots of excrement.

Fortunately, the only surviving literature of the time period, Urbandictionary.com, has miraculously survived on a flash drive entombed in semen-encrusted tissue, offering a window into the terribly depraved, racist, intolerant, neurotic culture of the era.

Originally posted by: kranky
This problem is unsolvable. If something only exists digitally, then it is only accessible while there are machines and software available to recreate the content from the ones and zeros. Enormous amounts of information will either be lost altogether, or people will be required to spend time and money to convert data between formats over and over again.

Film and paper have proven to be remarkably stable and long-lasting, yet less and less gets stored this way as time goes by.

Archiving websites isn't the answer. Websites contradict each other, they portray urban legends as fact, they make up things. Twenty years or more down the road, who will know which websites were being truthful and factual?

That's not much different than other pieces of history. That's why we've got historians who try to examine multiple contradicting accounts of events, and figure out what might truly have happened.

Also surviving (somewhere) with the information will be software capable of decoding the binary data. Perhaps computers of the future will have little difficulty decoding the data we have today, at least basic code like text or HTML. Data which has been encoded by proprietary means, such as DivX or FLV, may be more difficult.

Finally, hardcopies have another unfortunate problem, which continually becomes more and more difficult to address: Searchability. We constantly create information at an ever-increasing rate. Just finding the relevant information can be difficult, even with computerized searching functionality.

Pre-digital age, I think it was a lot easier to evaluate the accuracy of information. In general, the mainstream books, magazines, professional journals and newspapers were considered reasonably reliable. You could use that as a starting point.

I do not believe that the software to decode binary data will always be available. Oh, they may archive it, but there won't be equipment around that can read it. I read somewhere that data from some NASA missions are stored on media that are unusable because they don't have any equipment left which can read them. Not everything can be kept online and once it's stored away, it gets forgotten.