NEWS FEATURE
Internet Archive fed up with online feeds
On its 25 anniversary Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle spoke to Tony Marx, CEO of the New York Public Library. Here are some of the key messages.
Graduating from MIT in 1982 with a degree in computer science focused on artificial intelligence, Brewster Kahle said the coming digital revolution was obvious. “There was a transition in how peo- ple express themselves and pass on knowledge – the print to digital tran- sition – and we knew that this was coming. In 1980 it was assumed it had already happened when it hadn’t.” But he said history showed that these momentous changes generally weren’t documented well by libraries and archives: “This transition was going to happen from print to digital – and so I looked at what happened when things went from oral to manuscript, then from manuscript to print – and it was kind of chaos.
“So, I thought why don’t we go and try to do something right with this digital transition? Let’s make it so that the expression of people putting these things in this open world could be remembered.”
The Internet Archive recorded its first web page at 2.42pm on 10 May,
1996 and the contents of the archive were made publicly accessible in 2001 with the development of the WayBack Machine. The early signs were that libraries were going to make the same mistakes again. Brewster offered the first complete collec- tion of the World Wide Web to the Library of Congress, it was two terabytes. He said: “It took them 18 months to go and say ‘yes’. And you say, ‘why did it take so long?’ You know why not? And it’s like [they were ask- ing] ‘does it deserve to be in the library?’” He said: “This is like the time of the Reformation, [when] libraries didn’t collect print because [they thought] all the real stuff was manuscript. Pamphlets – they were the blog posts of their time… they were just not thought of as library grade.”
Proactive However, this attitude changed quickly: “So what was a kind of surprising thing, in the early days of the Internet Archive, was how ‘up’ the libraries were for collaborat- ing and working together… it’s been this amazing collaborative project.” But he emphasised that: “Libraries, in this digital age, have got to be much more
proactive than they used to be. We used to just buy the new books… wait for people to die and we get their stuff… but in this digital world the average life of a webpage is only 100 days before its changed or deleted. So, you’ve got to be proactive to go and get it. He said people need to find excuses for action rather than inaction. Internet Archive collected and digitised records when it was only legal to share 30 seconds of them but Brewster said, “we were able to get a law passed last year, thanks to Ron Widen, so that pre-1971 out of print recordings can be made available by libraries for free, so we said ‘great we’ve got 20,000 of those’.” Other examples he gave included the Archive wading into Wikipedia ‘cita- tion wars’ – “behind every Wikipage there’s a pushing and shoving… and people would win arguments based on the heft of the source, especially if you can click on it.” So they fixed 12 million links using the WayBack Machine, one example being Wikipedia’s Holocaust page’s 140 book references none of which had links, are now fully linked.
Problems Brewster Kahle at The Web Conference 2019. July-August 2022
However technology changes have made archiving the web more difficult, but also more important – as content becomes more ephemeral with fewer links. “One of the big differences between Web 1 and Web 2,” Brew- ster says, is that “by participating in the internet, you left something that people could build on” but with “Web 2, if you define it as these platforms, it just scrolls away. It’s not called pages anymore. It’s called a feed. I mean a feed? Isn’t that what you do to horses? It’s like something is really wrong here. We shouldn’t be spending our time just babbling something that [disappears] into the ether, we should be building something together… lets go and create things that are worthy of being in the library.”
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