Rogue Archivists Unite!

In the realm of digital history, one of the most challenging issues is that of preservation. What, in the mass of online information, should we be saving? How much can we realistically save? Who should do the saving? Well, Archive Team has one solution.

Archive Team is a loose collective of rogue archivists, programmers, writers and loudmouths dedicated to saving our digital heritage. Since 2009 this variant force of nature has caught wind of shutdowns, shutoffs, mergers, and plain old deletions – and done our best to save the history before it’s lost forever. Along the way, we’ve gotten attention, resistance, press and discussion, but most importantly, we’ve gotten the message out: IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY.

Certainly, this is a noble effort. Companies create websites which are then used and shared by people around the world, but when the company is ready to drop the ball, where does that leave the users? Archive Team not only keeps their ears to the ground to be prepared for any upcoming potential loss of digital heritage, but also gives everyday people the tools they need to participate in this effort, and to save that which is important to them. In my previous post about digital preservation, I mentioned that collaboration was going to be key to this effort; not just between institution and institution, but also between institutions and indivisuals. Archive Team is another avenue in which individuals can participate in preserving our online heritage and digital memory.

But are there ethical and legal issues arising from this kind of rogue archiving? I don’t believe so. Archive Team is only saving that which is at risk of disappearing altogether. They are not stepping on any toes by taking money out of the pockets of these companies who are the original creators of that site. Here you can see a really great article from MIT Technology Review about Archive Team in which Scott explains that he and the Archive Team do not seek permission before undertaking one of their raids, though as a rule they only go after files that are publicly available, and Scott says most sites do not complain. There has been a TON of media coverage about the work that Archive Team is unedrtaking, and many have lauded them as heros of digital preservation. However some problems have inevitably arisen. One example is explained by Jason Scott, Archive Team’s creator, in this video called, “That Awesome Time I Was Sued for Two Billion Dollars.” If you want to hear more from Archive Team’s creator, this video shows Jason Scott explaining how and why he does this work.

Keeping Up with the Buzz

In last week’s post, Save This!, I discussed the importance of collaboration in the effort to save the web. Institutions like the Library of Congress and the Internet Archive have made great leaps forward in this massive task, but they need our help! Large institutions can’t possibly know of every website that holds meaning for individuals who use the web; it is up to us to help preserve those sites which hold meaning for us.

In thinking about what site I would archive, given the opportunity, so many different things came to mind. Should it be something educational or fun? In thinking about what websites I visit everyday, one stuck out as being both educational and fun, while having its finger right on the pulse of what is happening in the world around us. This website is Buzzfeed.

This is a website that provides news updates from around the world, literature reviews, opinion pieces, short quizzes, and much, much more. The up-to-the-minute site is chock full of information to satisfy a wide range of interests for people from all over the world (though perhaps its main audience is of the younger to young professional age groups). But there are some serious problems that face anyone who might try to keep an archive of this web resource.

One of the problems is the fact that the site is updated not once a week, not once a day, but rather every few seconds a new article is added to the site. This obviously creates the issue of deciding when to archive the site…would you have to archive the site once a week? Once a day? Would that be enough to capture everything that the site offered to those who check it more than once per day?

Another issue is the fact that the site holds a variety of formats from text, to photos, to video, to interactive quizzes. What kind of hardware would be needed to collect these various formats in a useful way? Would the site have to be broken down into its various formats? How would that effect the future understanding of how this site operated and was used by people in their daily lives?

Unfortunately, if this site were to disappear tomorrow, we would lose a vast resource for entertainment and news which speaks in a way the younger generations seem to find accessible. If the Internet Archive could find a way to overcome the issues of format, this would be an excellent addition to their collections.

Save This!

When asked to picture an archive, most of us would probably think of something like the one pictured above: a physical place where physical items are stored in some protective housing, under some kind of temperature control. But let’s get with it! This is 2014! As we spend more and more of our lives on the web, it becomes more and more important to preserve it. You might be thinking: how can we possibly even begin that process? There is just SO MUCH on the internet! Luckily, many institutions have already been developing programs to select and preserve many websites. However we can’t simply leave a task as large as this to these institutions.

In the effort to archive and preserve the massive quantity of content on the web, it seems that one of our most powerful tools is collaboration. Not just between institutions, but between institutions and individuals. The Library of Congress, Internet Archives, and similar institutions can accomplish a great deal, but it will become more and more important for individuals to put in the effort as well. I recently discovered the Library of Congress’ K-12 Web Archiving Program. Here’s a short video about it:

In the video, some of the children discuss how this program made them aware of the impermanence of the web. One teen mentions how he felt when he learned that YouTube was celebrating its 5th birthday; he says, “I thought that site had been around forever.” This first step, the realization that the lifespan for something on the internet is not very long at all, is important for everyone to understand. We all need to pitch in and preserve that which is most important to us. We put so much time and effort into constructing and maintaining our personalities and our lives on the web, we should put time also into capturing and preserving what it was like to be a part of this internet world for future generations.