“We are the only species on the planet, so far as we know, to have invented a communal memory stored neither in our genes nor in our brains. The warehouse of this memory is called the library”*…
The Internet Archive has been saving copies of the web for almost as long as the web has been around. Brewster Kahle, the archive’s founder, studied artificial intelligence at mit in the 1980s. Later he helped found two technology companies — Wide Area Information Server, a system for text-searching databases on remote computers, which was bought by aol, and Alexa Internet, which helped catalog the web and was acquired by Amazon. Kahle launched the Internet Archive in 1996, in a San Francisco attic. Over the years, a few computers have blossomed into one of the largest digital libraries in the world, encompassing 279 billion web pages, 12 million books, and millions more copies of music, films, television shows, and software. (In the lobby, a new arcade machine lets visitors play 500 vintage games from the past 40 years.)…
On the day after the election, Kahle published a blog post addressed to the Internet Archive’s supporters. “I am a bit shell-shocked — I did not think the election would go the way it did,” he wrote. “As we take the next weeks to have this sink in, I believe we will come to find we will have new responsibilities, increased roles to play, in keeping the world an open and free environment.”
The archive had already started backing up copies of every government website that existed during the Obama administration — a practice they began at the end of George W. Bush’s presidency. And this January, they released a searchable database containing 520 hours of Trump’s televised speeches, interviews, and news broadcasts.
Still, they were not prepared for the spike in public attention after Trump’s election. A few days after the inauguration, Reuters reported that White House officials had ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to take down its climate change page. People sent messages to the archive, asking if they planned to preserve the information. Similar questions came when the Department of Agriculture abruptly removed thousands of documents from its website, including animal welfare inspection records for some 9,000 labs, zoos, and breeders across the country. “We have all that,” Graham said. Lately the archive has started receiving phone calls from people claiming to have inside information about government websites under threat of getting scrubbed…
More at “Save all- Archiving the Internet in the Trump Era.”
And for an even richer look (and listen) to the Internet Archive and its band of bad-ass librarians (including a fascinating interview with Brewster Kahle), check out “Where to find what’s disappeared online, and a whole lot more: the Internet Archive.”
Let us save what remains: not by vaults and locks which fence them from the public eye and use in consigning them to the waste of time, but by such a multiplication of copies, as shall place them beyond the reach of accident.
– Thomas Jefferson
* Carl Sagan
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As we prioritize preservation and access, we might spare a thought for Judith Fingeret Krug; she died on this date in 2009. An American librarian, proponent of freedom of speech , and critic of censorship, Krug became Director of the Office for Intellectual Freedom at the American Library Association in 1967. In 1969, she joined the Freedom to Read Foundation as its Executive Director. Krug co-founded Banned Books Week (and here) in 1982. The eighth edition of the Intellectual Freedom Manual, published in 2010 by the Office for Intellectual Freedom of the American Library Association, was dedicated to Krug’s memory.
