This well-researched in-depth piece doesn’t paint a pretty picture for archiving online news:
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.
Deleting your old thoughts may be giving your older self a kick they really don’t deserve. And the beauty of having an archive is that you don’t need to decide whether you were right or not. Your views, with a date attached, can stand as a reflection of a specific moment in time.
Reconciling every past view you’ve ever had with how you feel now isn’t required. It sounds exhausting, frankly.
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.
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.
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.
Flickr is removing anything over 1,000 photos on accounts that are not “pro” (paid for) in 2019. We highlight large and amazing accounts that could use a gift to go pro. We take nominations and track when these accounts are saved.
Making a copy of a web page which is a copy of a newsgroup post by Iain M Banks. 1994::2001::2021
Losing an eleven year bet.
2022 was once unimaginable to some web folks.
The most pernicious of falsehoods is the idea that the internet never forgets.