[SCC_Active_Members] Capturing information from the WWW

[Henry Lowood]

Hello,

Just a few words in defense of the Internet Archive.   First, it does 
capture quite a bit of content, though of course not everything; 
that's ridiculously difficult to do in the scope which the IA has 
taken on for itself.  And that's not to mention the difficulties of 
preservation, integrity of data, etc., all the things this group 
knows about so well.

I have mounted a couple of historical exhibits for which we did quite 
well with targeted use of the IA collection; for example, we were 
able to reconstruct pretty well the pre-launch site for Ultima 
Online, even though by the time our exhibit took place, Origin had 
long since been taken over by EA and the site closed down.    It 
wasn't perfect, we had to stitch together a couple of the pages and 
many of the downloadable files were not available, but we were able 
to find documentation that otherwise would have surely been lost.

These are of course well-known issues with any kind of archival 
repository, whatever format.   It's impossible to save everything and 
esp. difficult to do so in a passive manner.  The IA offers a model 
that differs from traditionally curated archives, and this model 
diverges from practices established in different institutional and 
technical contexts.   I think in time they will continue to move in a 
direction that blends in more active curation, but we'll have to see.

Also, if I'm not mistaken, there is really nothing preventing use of 
Archive-It or other tools provided by IA to let you choose your own 
materials to save and then use the storage and preservation resources 
it offers. That's what I'm doing at the Machinima Archive (soon to 
hit 500 machinima pieces), as are a number of other "guest curators," 
for want of a better word, with the various moving image collections.

Not meant as a rant, just a good word.

Henry (the other Henry)

At 07:37 AM 1/24/2007, Al Kossow wrote:
>H.M. Gladney wrote:
>
>>Brewster, can you advise my CHM (Computer History Museum) friends concerning
>>IA Wayback ease-of-use ?
>
>The issue is not ease of use, but what CONTENTS of the sites that they
>are archiving are REALLY saved at IA.
>
>I've found that they save the pointer, but not the content itself. This is
>REALLY bad if the site referred to changes, or disappears.
>
>Sadly, the preservation of web content will only become more difficult as
>more and more sites move to on-the-fly serving of the underlying content.
>
>
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Henry Lowood, Ph.D.
Curator for History of Science & Technology Collections
Curator for Germanic Collections; Film & Media Collections
HRG, Green Library, 557 Escondido Mall
Stanford University Libraries
Stanford CA 94305-6004
650-723-4602; lowood at stanford.edu; http://www.stanford.edu/~lowood 
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