Archiving the web

Born digital

National libraries start to preserve the web, but cannot save everything

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Readers' comments



Jim Boulton

I'm running an event on just this subject as part of Internet Week Europe 11th-12th Nov (, all welcome.

Websites have been the most important form of brand communication for the last 15 years but in 5 years time I doubt they'll exist. The rise of the app heralds a shift away from brand-centric websites towards user-centred connected desktop experiences. Despite the best efforts of the Wayback Machine, game changing websites lie disassembled and incomplete on forgotten hard drives and broken lap tops. Worse still, the guardians of this culture are geeks like myself who were concentrating on running their businesses by the seat of their pants rather than preserving history. Soon we will know less about what was seen on PC screens — the HTML blossoming that helped change our world utterly — than we do about the relief carvings in Mohenjo-daro or the Yucatán

If we are to preserve the pioneering years of the commercial web we need to act now.


For all the knowledge and information on the web, the Library of Congress chose to acquire the ENTIRE archive of Twitter.

This would be a great choice only for future archeologists who seek the answer to "what was the fundamental cause behind the collapse of the 21st century human civilization". The answer: our inability to form coherent thoughts.


6 comments, 3 of which are spam, sums it up really

The functionality of the web often requires it to be online, but the goal of a web site is to communicate something via text, video or audio, this content usually exists offline too.

Content generated on the web itself, such as this comment, or via cloud computing is a different matter, but how much of that will be worth keeping ?

We don't record our every conversation, why worry about our digital verbiage ?


"What happens if Microsoft is bankrupt and forgotten in 2210?"

If nobody can enforce the copyrights (hopefully eliminated by 2210 anyway), any other company can make software to play the format.
'Media player classic' and 'foxit" PDF reader are two examples.


The problem goes beyond proprietary data. Datasets, such as those from the Met Office on temperature, usually include metadata and the programs needed to analyze that data, often included in the same file. The proprietary format is often used because an open source format is not suitable, and it is difficult to transform the data into another format.

In addition, the question is, "Who owns the data?" In olden days, copyright law required registration and deposit and a short, fixed term. But copyright law since the 1970s has veered away from the utilitarian philosophy of the Statute of Anne, to promote access to works instead of the perpetual monopoly of the Stationers' Company under royal license and censorship, towards instead some European notion of moral rights and perpetual natural rights to copyright, with no requirement for registration or deposit, that might make it impossible to archive this digital information, even though it was initially published freely and might even include Creative Commons license along with copyright. It is simply time to change the copyright law to correspond with the Internet age.


The sentence "What happens if Microsoft is bankrupt and forgotten in 2210?" is quite funny. First because it is almost certain that Microsoft and almost all other companies existing today will NOT be around in 2210. How many private companies last 2 centuries? And in case you were thinking "too big to fail", think to General Motors.

The second reason why that sentence is funny is that the problem of proprietary file formats that become unreadable after a while is much bigger than its Microsoft part, and it takes much less than 2 centuries to become a serious problem. This slideshow contains many proofs of that problem already happening TODAY:

and this is a much shorter article that explains the same issue:

There is also another part of the article that isn't correct:

"The biggest problem, for now, is money".

No, the biggest problem right now is that too many important documents are in proprietary file formats that give no real guarantee to be completely readable fifty years from now. Even there was enough money to copy everything, what good would it make to have many copies of files that are unreadable because their format isn't readable anymore? Again, see the slideshow above for many proofs of how this is NOT a theoretical situation.

Best Regards,
M. Fioretti


Please save all : all branches of knowledge such as Science, arts, philosophy, literature - all... all .....

Dan Star

Why would we want to archive everything? Absurd. If the producer of the information deems it worth preserving, then the incentive should be for the producer to format the information for secure archiving. Just blindly going after "information" is foolhardy as information production on the Internet is exploding as costs reduce to produce active content. 'BBB = Beta Burning Bling'



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