History According to the 'Net
January 28, 2009 at 8:00 am
by Christopher
I just read an opinion in the Guardian titled We're In Danger of Losing Our Memories, by Lynne Brindley, the chief executive of the British Library. This is something I've considered before, but first, a pertinent quote:
"At the exact moment Barack Obama was inaugurated, all traces of President Bush vanished from the White House website, replaced by images of and speeches by his successor. Attached to the website had been a booklet entitled 100 Things Americans May Not Know About the Bush Administration - they may never know them now. When the website changed, the link was broken and the booklet became unavailable.
The 2000 Sydney Olympics was the first truly online games with more 150 websites, but these sites disappeared overnight at the end of the games and the only record is held 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. Historians and citizens of the future will find a black hole in the knowledge base of the 21st century.
...People often assume that commercial organisations such as Google are collecting and archiving this kind of material - they are not. The task of capturing our online intellectual heritage and preserving it for the long term falls, quite rightly, to the same libraries and archives that have over centuries systematically collected books, periodicals, newspapers and recordings and which remain available in perpetuity, thanks to these institutions."
Brindley isn't the only one concerned about the potential disappearance of history. Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive, created the Wayback Machine with this very idea in mind so that you can view a website's various changes in the past (at least as far back as 1996). By the way, I listened (just yesterday) to an interview with Brewster Kahle on the CBC radio audiocast of the Spark, which is worth checking out in light of this question of the preservation of online history. But the issue Brindley mentions still stands for all that info that gets deleted or removed in between indexings by the archive.
This is why I appreciate my brothers and sisters at the Long Now Foundation, who hope to "provide counterpoint to today's 'faster/cheaper' mind set and promote 'slower/better' thinking" by "creatively foster(ing) responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years." Clearly, they're not trying to do this only through a website...
Can you even imagine 10,000 years into the future? I can't even envision 1 year into the future given how quickly we experience change these days! (On that note, check out Long Bets, a website which archives predictions and their eventual outcomes in order to increase accountability toward future-thinking. You'll see that many predictions end up being quite wrong.)
Chris, I'm glad you bring up the issue of "losing history." About an hour after President Barack Obama's inaugural, I also visited the new WhiteHouse.gov site, and one of my first thoughts was "Where is all the George W. Bush stuff?" Not that I think that the site should not ave been rebuilt for the new administration, but I did notice the lack of an archive where this information could be accessed. I'm certain that the data hasn't been destroyed, but I do think that not only should there be an easily accessible library of speeches, photos, and articles from the previous administration, but also that the materials be kept in context, that is, to preserve the organization and presentation of this information as it originally appeared.
As the person responsible for producing the Skyscrapers monthly newsletter and keeping the web site updated, I generally find myself in the position of Keeper of the Data, and much of what our group produces is digital data. Most astrophotographers have now abandoned film in favor of CCD and digital imaging. No longer is there any correspondence in the form of letter-writing, it is all done by email now. Just about all articles and submissions for the newsletter are electronic files (we still have one member who regularly submits hand-written articles for the newsletter, and even though it requires more work for me to include them, I always express my gratitude and encourage him to continue writing because the work he submits is of great value to what we do). Our newsletter has been produced as a PDF file for quite a many years now, and even though many of us make printed copies of it, the newsletter can only contain so much material. Because we still mail about a dozen copies through the US Postal Service and the rates for sending a magazine-sized newsletter (not to mention the time required to produce one that large) would be prohibitive.
I often have conversations about these types of issues with Skyscrapers historian Dave Huestis, who wrote much of our historical summary for our 75th anniversary book that we produced in 2007. We pored over a lot of material in the form of old slides, photographs, manuscripts, and correspondence to produce the work. Whenever we found something new it was like striking gold. He would often call me late at night with an excited "guess what I found!", and I would eagerly make digital copies of all of the items we thought were important to telling the story. We discussed the likeliness that three generations from now, anyone doing a similar project covering our next 75 years may find it difficult to collect enough material for a legitimate representation of the history.
Since our 75th anniversary book project was completed over a year ago, I have a newfound appreciation for keeping physical records of our weekly and monthly activities. As a result, I am just about finished making our first-ever yearbook covering most of what we did in 2008 that I plan to have printed through one of the self-publishing services available. It is more or less of an experiment, but I hope that I can continue the tradition through the coming years so that we can preserve what would ordinarily be just transient data on a web site. This would make it far easier for future generations of Skyscrapers to know exactly what we did during this time in history when much of the world's data disappears into a digital black hole after just a few short years.
Jim,
Wow, thanks for such a thorough read and comment! I think you're right on, though. It's ironic that while the internet has enabled us to have more information available to us than ever before, it could also lead us to have nothing but the present. Ok, that's a bit of hyperbole, there's plenty of history online. But, there is a point somewhere in there, right? What happens to all that content that gets replaced for transitional reasons, like the whitehouse.gov site? I agree with you, it should be backed up and stored at another URL- maybe georgewbush.whitehouse.gov?
Chris