An introduction to the important work of digital archivists:
Much like the family member that collects, organizes, and identifies old family photos to preserve one’s heritage, digital archivists seek to do the same for all mankind.
Just copy and paste.
Dear soon-to-be-former user…
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A love letter to the Internet Archive.
The Long Now blog is featuring the bet between myself and Matt on URL longevity. Just being mentioned on that site gives me a warm glow.
Jason’s rip-roaring presentation from Defcon last year.
Now this is some prioritisation I can admire:
I’m going to build valuable, reliable, sustainable web services that will last forever.
A thoughtful—and beautifully illustrated—piece by Geri on memory and digital preservation, prompted by the shut-down of Gowalla.
The video of my talk from Webstock, all about wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff like networks and memory.
The video of my presentation on digital preservation at last year’s Build conference.
Our communication methods have improved over time, from stone tablets, papyrus, and vellum through to the printing press and the World Wide Web. But while the web has democratised publishing, allowing anyone to share ideas with a global audience, it doesn’t appear to be the best medium for preserving our cultural resources: websites and documents disappear down the digital memory hole every day. This presentation will look at the scale of the problem and propose methods for tackling our collective data loss.
Thanks to Jason Scott, every episode of The Sound Of Young America ever recorded is now stored on the Internet Archive. Get huffduffing!
Burying physical copies of dead websites in a Croatian cave.
Colly’s thoughts on digital preservation are written in a lighthearted tongue-in-cheek way but at least he’s thinking about it. That alone gives me comfort.
A beautiful reminder that by publishing on the web, we are all historians.
Every color you choose and line of code you write is a reflection of you; not just as a human being in this world, but as a human being in this time and place in human history. Inside each project is a record of the styles and fashions you value, the technological advancements being made in the industry, the tone of your voice, and even the social and economic trends around you.
Reminiscences of the BBSs of yesteryear that could in time be applied to the social networking sites of today.
I’m going to try to make it along to this event in London next month.
A worrying report on the state of digital preservation and the web, specifically in the UK. Welcome to the memory hole.
A superb post by David that ties together multiple strands of personal digital preservation through homesteading instead of sharecropping.
Stewart Brand wrote this twelve years ago: it’s more relevant than ever in today’s cloud-worshipping climate.
I’d like to think that it’s ironic that I’m linking to The Wayback Machine because the original URL for this essay is dead. But it isn’t ironic, it’s horrific.
Amber documents her attempt to turn physical objects imbued with meaning into digital artefacts.
A truly impressive achievement by Archive.org: all the television footage from September 11th, 2001 gathered in one place on the web.
Here’s one to add to Instapaper or Readability to savour at your leisure: Aaron Straup Cope’s talk at Museums and the Web 2010:
This paper examines the act of association, the art of framing and the participatory nature of robots in creating artifacts and story-telling in projects like Flickr Galleries, the API-based Suggestify project (which provides the ability to suggest locations for other people’s photos) and the increasing number of bespoke (and often paper-based) curatorial productions.
Brewster Kahle explains how and why the Internet Archive is keeping physical copies of the books it digitises.
Digital preservation in the art world.
Luke’s notes from my talk about long-term thinking and online preservation at An Event Apart in Boston.
How the Mormon Church are storing and preserving genealogical data inside a mountain.
The editor of New Scientist writes about deletionists and preservationists while adding his own personal poignant perspective.
A blog devoted to sifting through the gems in the Geocities torrent. This is digital archeology.
The threat to Google Videos shows businesses are not suitable cultural custodians — they can’t be held accountable to the public.
Adrian Hon’s Kickstarter project has already reached its goal. I can’t wait for the podcasting to start.
Andy hammers home the benefit of a long-term format like HTML compared to the brittle, fleeting shininess of an ephemeral platform-specific app.
A detailed look at how French archivists go about preserving websites.
If you speak Flemish, you might enjoy this article based on a chat I had with a Belgium journalist.
If you don’t speak Flemish, well, just move along.
Read it and weep. Here are the articles on Wikipedia that reference URLs that are getting axed as part of the BBC’s upcoming cull.
Everything is worth preserving and protecting.
I answered a few questions right after giving my talk at the Phare conference in Ghent.
This is my prediction. If you think it’s wrong, challenge it. We shall then partake in a wager.
I wish I had a teacher like David when I was in school.
URLs, permalinks, archives … preservation. It all matters so very much.
This is the stuff James Bond stories are made of. Except in this case, the fortress exists to store data rather than criminal masterminds.
On 18 May 2010, the Planets (Preservation and Long-term Access through Networked Services) Project deposited a time capsule in the vaults of datacenter, Swiss Fort Knox, in Saanen, Switzerland. It contained the decoding information for five digital file formats on media ranging from paper, microfilm and floppy discs to CDs, DVDs and USB sticks.
This consortium of institutions and universities came together “to provide practical solutions and expertise in digital preservation.”
PLANETS stands for Preservation and Long-term Access through Networked Services.
The fascinating story of the BBC Domesday Project and its subsequent fate.
The purpose of the CAMiLEON project was to demonstrate the value of emulation in preserving not only the data stored in obsolete systems but the behaviour of the systems themselves - in this case one of the very first interactive multi-media systems. The aim was to reproduce the original user experience as accurately as possible, and the CAMiLEON team argued that the slight faults in images as displayed from the analogue discs were a part of that experience, and should not be cleaned up as Andy proposed to do. Our aim was different - we wanted to preserve the data with the highest quality available consistent with longevity.
A tour of the Global Seed Bank in Svalbard.
The intriguing tale of a fictional archivist, storing past visions of the future in a storage facility that acts as a space ark.
He has put money in the bank which will pay for the space well beyond his lifetime. Each year he collects technological predictions that had been made for that year and conserves the ones that didn’t come true in the form of 35mm slides. The ship itself consists of a refrigeration unit to help preserve the slides, a slide projector and light box in case these technologies have become extinct by the time of its recovery, and a system to get power from the outside. In an annual ritual on April 11th Walker adds another box to the mission.
Brilliant; just brilliant. Connor O’Brien remains skeptical about the abstract permanence of “the cloud.” The observations are sharp and the tone is spot-on.
If your only photo album is Facebook, ask yourself: since when did a gratis web service ever demonstrate giving a flying fuck about holding onto the past?
The BBC’s decision to actively delete old content (rather than simply allowing it to take up some space on a server) really gets my blood boiling.
The BBC asked the public to contribute their memories of World War Two to a website between June 2003 and January 2006…” and five years later some suit decided to bin them.
Let’s make the Bletchley Park data machine-readable so we can start mining the stories they contain (like Old Weather).
Bletchley Park need help to catalogue and create a proper archive of these decrypts.
I want in!
Aaron Swartz gets technical about online digital preservation.
Preserving the papernet.
Jeffrey points out another point of failure in our online storage: the willingness of site owners to sell their product (and your data) to a big company for a quick payout.
Mandy writes about digital preservation:
The technological means to produce an archive are not beyond our skills; sadly, right now at least, the will to do so is insufficient.
Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe — a digital preservation initiative based at Stanford.
An accurately-downbeat look at digital preservation.
Dave Winer is putting together technology to battle share-cropping and enable the Pembertonisation of your content: you host the canonical copy and distribute to third-party services.
A thoughtful piece on how Twitter can complement blogging, but is far too often used as an impermanent substitute.
…if you didn’t blog it, it didn’t happen. In fact, I first wrote about this idea a bit on Twitter a few years ago. See if you can find it.
This looks like it could be a handy tool for backing up Flickr photos.
A viciously accurate assessment of Yahoo’s scorched earth policy towards our online collective culture:
All I can say, looking back, is that when history takes a look at the lives of Jerry Yang and David Filo, this is what it will probably say: Two graduate students, intrigued by a growing wealth of material on the Internet, built a huge fucking lobster trap, absorbed as much of human history and creativity as they could, and destroyed all of it.
An oldie but a goodie. This is why we have standards.
Matt encapsulates a lot of what I've been thinking about recently: the real-time web is all well and good, but let's not forsake the enormous potential for fulfilment in archives.
One web page for every book. I love this project.
Lucy Inglis, curator of Georgian London, on the role she and other bloggers play.
Yes! Yes! Yes! An excellent fisking of that ridiculous New York Times article that confused problems in the present with data longevity.
Dan Gilmore, reporting from a conference on digital preservation. I should pay attention to this
This article needs a great big "citation needed" slapped on it. Yes, people need to think about what they post on the web, but no, that stuff will not stay around "forever." If anything, the web suffers from the opposite problem: memory loss.
Mandy's take on Dieter Rams's design principle that "good design is long-lasting."
This is wonderful: sad, beautiful, and wonderful ...it's what I've been trying so hard to clumsily articulate. Read it. And smile. And weep.
Here lies what we could salvage from the ashes of GeoCities.
Crap. The very powerful term extractor API from Yahoo is being closed down. Sad developer is sad.
Archive.org is indexing Geocities sites (as it always has). Yahoo are going to fuck all about their users data/dreams/memories and Yahoo are going to do fuck all about the URLs.
A python script from Dan Benjamin to help you do your bit in battling the datapocalypse.
Eleven years old and more relevant than ever.
Phil Gyford on why he will miss Geocities. "It’s only thanks to the efforts of people like the Internet Archive and Archive Team that we’ll have a record of what people, rather than companies, published in the past. As companies like Yahoo! switch off swathes of our online universe little fragments of our collective history disappear. They might be ugly and neglected fragments of our history but they’re still what got us where we are today."
The perfect person for the job—George will be working on the Internet Archive's Open Library project: a webpage for every book ever published.
Paul Mison shares his thoughts on moving towards a decentralised web of services rather than silos of data. "Now I'm wondering: is there a space for a piece of user-installable software, like Movable Type or Wordpress, that aggregates their data from sites across the web, and then presents it as a site? If there is, is it even possible to write it in a way that anyone who couldn't have written it themselves can even use it?"
Archive your Twitter updates with this PHP script.
The blog of the preservation officer at the University of California.
This presentation by Steven Pemberton increases in value over time.
This could prove to be very useful in the event of future Pownce/Jaiku implosions.
The importance of providing predictive text for minority languages (including Irish). To help preserve languages, advocates are pushing to make more written languages available on cellphones.
Excellent explanation of DRM by Mark Pilgrim, prompted by MSN Music's gunshot to the head.
The Museum of Computing ("committed to the preservation and display of examples of early computers") needs a new home. Do you know of anywhere that might be a good fit?
Gavin Bell has posted the slides from his excellent talk at BarCamp London 2.
This is the plain vanilla look.
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