Can the Internet be archived?

You've probably been frustrated by the short lifespan of most web pages, but you may not know about the team trying to do something about it.  jIll Lepore, Harvard professor, award-winning author and staff writer for The New Yorker has just written a wonderful and insightful article about the people behind the Internet Archive. It's titled The Cobweb: Can the Internet be Archived? and it's in the Jan. 26, 2015 issue of The New Yorker.

As a librarian and a computer scientist we feel this topic is very important to us as entrepreneurs in the personal history space and to society as a whole.

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Everyday we're reminded how fragile the Internet is. We regularly look for things that turn out to no longer be there. Even though we know better, when we see the message “Page Not Found”, we're still a bit surprised.

As a librarian, it is very disturbing to know that sources can’t be traced or verified in today’s world of link rot. It’s nearly impossible to know the validity of a story when you realize that it can be changed, edited or deleted within seconds. This is really creepy and one reason why the Internet Archive (https://archive.org) and it’s Wayback Machine exist.

As just one example, one of our previous companies Glassbook was sold to Adobe in 2000. If you enter glassbook.com in a browser, you get Adobe’s home page where there is no mention of Glassbook. You can then do a search on Adobe.com where you'll get a list of press releases. Further sleuthing on Google for Glassbook will result in random occurrences of the word glassbook and some links related to our company. If you want more, the Wayback Machine is the place to look.

According to the Wayback Machine, the Glassbook URL http://glassbook.com was "Saved 131 times between January 25, 1999 and December 17, 2014." You can then see on a calendar the dates those saves took place.

We love the Wayback Machine and are grateful to Brewster Kahle and his team for taking on the challenge of archiving more than 452 billion Web pages over time. With pages being added daily, that number has surely been surpassed.

Recapping a few details from the New Yorker article: 

• "The average life of a Web page is about a hundred days."
• "Social media, public records, junk: in the end, everything goes."
• "The Web dwells in a never-ending present. It is—elementally—ethereal, ephemeral, unstable, and unreliable."
• Link rot (Page Not Found), an updated Web page (original has been overwritten), content drift (a page has been moved and something else is where it used to be), reference rot (combination of link rot and content drift) all interfere with knowing what is or was even remotely true on the Internet.
• "According to a 2014 study conducted at Harvard Law School, “more than 70% of the URLs within the Harvard Law Review and other journals, and 50% of the URLs within United States Supreme Court opinions, do not link to the originally cited information.” 
• “A team of digital library researchers based at Los Alamos National Laboratory reported the results of an exacting study of three and a half million scholarly articles published in science, technology, and medical journals between 1997 and 2012: one in five links provided in the notes suffers from reference rot."

The motto of the Internet Archive is “Universal Access to All Knowledge.” A great goal and much needed service to society. 

One of our biggest goals for Timebox has been to provide a way for people to archive their own valuable digital data, which for many of us is tends to be our digital photos and the stories that go with them. Like the Internet Archive, Timebox is still a work-in-progress, but we are all working to try to ensure that our digital lives are have a long existence.

Leviathan by David Sedaris

A funny, moving article by David Sedaris was published in the Jan. 5, 2015 issue of The New Yorker and is worth a read.

The author describes a family reunion at his house on Emerald Isle. His brother’s diet, relationship with his father and local color including turtles are all fair game.

Memories can be fickle and for many of us holding on to the good memories can be just a little harder to do. As David Sedaris writes:

"Is it my fault that the good times fade to nothing while the bad ones burn forever bright? Memory aside, the negative just makes for a better story: the plane was delayed, an infection set in, outlaws arrived and reduced the schoolhouse to ashes. Happiness is harder to put into words. It’s also harder to source, much more mysterious than anger or sorrow, which come to me promptly, whenever I summon them, and remain long after I’ve begged them to leave."

Later on he writes:

"While I know I can’t control it, what I ultimately hope to recall about my late-in-life father is not his nagging or his toes but, rather, his fingers, and the way he snaps them when listening to jazz. He’s done it forever, signifying, much as a cat does by purring, that you may approach. That all is right with the world. “Man oh man,” he’ll say in my memory, lifting his glass and taking us all in. “Isn’t this just fan-tastic?”"

At least those good memories have been written down. Hopefully they took some photos.

Boston’s Time Capsules

In Sept. 2014 a 113-year-old time capsule was found inside the head of the historic lion statue on top of the Old State House in Boston.

Then, a second historical time capsule was found in a cornerstone of the Massachusetts State House on Dec. 11, 2014. 

The first capsule, dating back to 1901, was found when the golden lion statue was removed for cleaning and contained photographs, newspaper clippings and a book.

After the cleaning the capsule was put back in the lion's head after adding an iPhone 5, letters from journalists covering the event and the most recent edition of the same book found in the 113-year-old capsule.

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On Jan. 6, 2014, the 2nd capsule, actually a 5.5x7.5 brass box, was opened by conservators at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and it contained the following:

• 2 dozen centuries old coins
• a medal depicting George Washington
• a silver plate marking the day the capsule was placed - July 4, 1795
• a paper impression of the seal of the Commonwealth
• a title page from the Massachusetts Colony Records
• the front pages from five folded newspapers

Apparently, the 2nd capsule had been previously opened and added to in 1855. At that time the original container - a leather pouch - was replaced by the box. 

We think this is all very exciting. We’re not sure if they included any apps with the iPhone 5 but hope so.  Someone’s Timebox would certainly add a fun description of everyday life in 2014 and earlier years.

Photographs above of  the time capsule found in the cornerstone of the Massachusetts State House building with the contents removed  © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.