Adactio: Links—Tagged with archive

Safeguarding music | Global Music Vault | Svalbard

This sounds like an interesting long-term storage project, but colour me extremely sceptical of their hand-wavey vagueness around their supposedly flawless technical solution:

This technology will be revealed to the world in the near future.

Also, they keep hyping up the Svalbard location as though it were purpose-built for this project, rather than the global seed bank (which they don’t even mention).

This might be a good way to do marketing, but it’s a shitty way to go about digital preservation.

Reflections as the Internet Archive turns 25

Brewster Kahle:

The World Wide Web at its best is a mechanism for people to share what they know, almost always for free, and to find one’s community no matter where you are in the world.

The Internet Is Rotting - The Atlantic

A terrific piece by Jonathan Zittrain on bitrot and online digital preservation:

Too much has been lost already. The glue that holds humanity’s knowledge together is coming undone.

The Botanist Who Defied Stalin - Issue 99: Universality - Nautilus

Lysenko vs. Vavilov feels like the 20th century version of Edison vs. Tesla.

How Yahoo Became an Internet Villain - The Atlantic

Andy, Jason, and Maciej testify against Yahoo.

The Internet : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

This video is a charming trip down to memory lane to the early days of the public internet:

It wasn’t quite the World Wide Web yet, but everybody started hearing about this thing called “the Internet” in 1993. It was being called the Information Superhighway then.

The Internet Archive on the future of the web - Protocol — The people, power and politics of tech

A profile of Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive:

Tech’s walled gardens might make it harder to get a perfect picture, but the small team of librarians, digital archivists and software engineers at the Internet Archive plan to keep bringing the world the Wayback Machine, the Open Library, the Software Archive, etc., until the end of time. Literally.

archives.design

All of these graphic design books, magazines, and type specimens are available for perusal on the Internet Archive.

Keepers of the Secrets | The Village Voice

A deeply fascinating look into the world of archives and archivists:

The reason an archivist should know something, Lannon said, is to help others to know it. But it’s not really the archivist’s place to impose his knowledge on anyone else. Indeed, if the field could be said to have a creed, it’s that archivists aren’t there to tell you what’s important. Historically momentous documents are to be left in folders next to the trivial and the mundane — because who’s to say what’s actually mundane or not?

What is happening to our digital archives?

Employing the principle of least power for better digital preservation:

New frameworks and technologies spring up to try and cope with the speed of change. More and more ways to build and release things faster and cheaper becomes the norm. And, the more this happens, the more we deviate from standards: good ol’ HTML and CSS.

Kissa. Book. Launch. — Roden Explorers Archive

Own. Your. Nook. There’s power in owning your nook of the ‘net — your domain name, your design, your archives — and it’s easier than ever to do so, and run a crowdfunding campaign at the same time.

Back in 1985, Ian wrote to NASA to get some info for a shool project (that’s how it worked before the World Wide Web). NASA sent him a treaure trove in response. Here they are, scanned as PDFs. Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, the Space Shuttle, and more.

The Stacks Reader | A Treasure Trove of Classic Journalism

Digital preservation of dead-tree media:

The Stacks Reader is an online collection of classic journalism and writing about the arts that would otherwise be lost to history. Motivated less by nostalgia than by preservation, The Stacks Reader is a living archive of memorable storytelling—a museum for stories.

The Permanent Legacy Foundation

A non-profit that offers digital preservation services for individuals.

Permanence means no subscriptions; a one-time payment for dedicated storage that preserves your most precious memories and an institution that will be there to protect the digital legacy of all people for all time.

The GitHub Archive Program will safely store every public GitHub repo for 1,000 years in the Arctic World Archive in Svalbard, Norway.

This is a fascinating project from Github, the Long Now Foundation, the Internet Archive, the Bodleian Library and others. All of the public code on Github on February 2nd, 2020 will be archived for 1000 years in a vault in Svalbard.

Mind you, given the amount of dependencies that most “modern” code projects rely on, I can’t foresee the code working after 1000 days.

I’m Taking Ownership of My Tweets—zachleat.com

I fully expect my personal website to outlive Twitter and as such have decided to take full ownership of the content I’ve posted there. In true IndieWeb fashion, I’m taking ownership of my data.

Of the 21 news organizations in our study, 19 were not taking any protective steps at all to archive their web output. The remaining two lacked formal strategies to ensure that their current practices have the kind of longevity to outlast changes in technology.

Apollo Presskit Directory

Ah, what a wonderful treasure trove this is! PDF scans of Apollo era press kits from a range of American companies.

Categories include:

Official NASA
Earth
Launch
Lunar Module
Moon
Astronauts
Reveal

There’s something so fascinating about the mundane details of Isolation/Quarantine Foods for Apollo 11 Astronauts from Stouffer’s.

Link tags: archive

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