Lynne Bradley, chief executive of the British Library, on the importance of archiving Internet pages for historical purposes:
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.
These are just two examples of a huge challenge that faces digital Britain. There are approximately 8 million .uk domain websites and that number grows at a rate of 15-20% annually. The scale is enormous and the value of these websites for future research and innovation is vast, but online content is notoriously ephemeral.
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.
I for one would love the ability to cite archived and dated versions of my websites in my work. The Internet Archive Wayback Machine does a fairly good job of archiving particular sites, but isn’t particular user-friendly or searchable by anything other than URL. Perhaps a project such as Zoetrope will solve this problem?
Hmmm…surely millions of books have been destroyed or lost over the last thousand years. So, this isnt really a new problem regarding knowledge of history going astray. Although the internet is often used as a way of documenting history and current events, the fascinating aspect of history often involves rediscovery. History will always be lost and at some point either reappraised, or literally discovered. However, Bush’s politics should very much be forgotten.
You’re right, it’s not a new problem, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a problem: just because lots of stuff has been lost in the past doesn’t mean you should let it be lost. I can’t imagine any future historian wanting to write the history of our time not wanting access to such material as is published in blogs etc., as banal as most of it seems to us now. So why not preserve it? Isn’t it sad that much of the first twenty years of the web is lost already?
As for Bush’s policies, I think the old phrase about people who don’t remember history being doomed to repeat it applies here.