Internet Archive's San Francisco Home Badly Damaged By Fire 104
Rambo Tribble writes "The San Francisco building housing the Internet Archive, and its popular Wayback Machine, has suffered a serious fire. While no archived data was destroyed, materials awaiting archival were. Rebuilding will be a major undertaking, and the group is soliciting donations."
almost could have been like 48 B.C. (Score:5, Insightful)
the modern day Library of Alexandra burning
Re:Why is the archive worth preserving? (Score:3, Insightful)
Because.
Yes.
Yes.
Re:Why is the archive worth preserving? (Score:5, Insightful)
Aside from the chuckle I get from visiting geocities pages once a decade, what reasons are there for helping to preserve it?
Is the preservation of old internet sites anything more than a curiousity that will end up in museums? Is it useful to the human race in some way?
Is the preservation of old manuscripts anything more than a curiousity that will end up in museums?
Is the preservation of old books anything more than a curiousity that will end up in museums?
Is the preservation of old newspapers anything more than a curiousity that will end up in museums?
Is the preservation of old films anything more than a curiousity that will end up in museums?
The internet is just the latest evolution of information sharing. We've found (often the hard way) that information is generally worth preserving. While a lot of what is on the Internet today will never be of interest to anyone, it is impossible to guess very accurately at what will be of interest. Often the things no one thought had any long term value at the time of their creation, wind up being the most valuable to future generations of researchers.
Re:Fire insurance (Score:4, Insightful)
Fire insurance might cover the physical materials that were damaged, but they probably won't cover the time and associated costs of rebuilding the information, not to mention lost time.
Re:Why is the archive worth preserving? (Score:4, Insightful)
Is the preservation of old internet sites anything more than a curiousity that will end up in museums? Is it useful to the human race in some way?
Most of its not. Someone's blog or twitter feed today will be the future's Diary of Anne Frank. Its hard to know now what is or will be important 50, 100, or 1000 years from now.
Its also useful in the shorter term for everything from investigating crime ( a new lead in a cold case brings to light a new suspect, and suddenly some chatter on geocities or other long defunct page is relevant evidence), to fighting bogus patents (groklaw used to reference the archive to cite prior art), to looking at documentation for older things... where the manufacturer has removed the documentation pages / gone of out business, the support forums removed, end user hosted fansites/discussion etc have gone dormant, abandoned and eventually disappears. Much of it still searchable & recoverable in the archive.
Re:Why is the archive worth preserving? (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you fucking kidding me? Archaeologists get excited digging through ancient garbage. How can there be any doubt that relics from the birth of the internet won't be incredibly informative to future civilizations?
It's attitudes like yours that caused so many silent films or early episodes of Doctor Who to be lost to time.
Two words: historical revisionism (Score:5, Insightful)
It helps to prevent history from being rewritten by the history writers, the liars, and the pretenders. I'd say its utility is beyond measure.
Re:Why is the archive worth preserving? (Score:5, Insightful)
Talk to the average archaeologist. And then let him lament for a moment or two on how little we know of the life of the "common man" of old. We know everything of the life of kings and emperors, and even of them we often only hear the important parts of their life. The everyday life of most of human history is in the dark, simply because nobody bothered to record it. What for, it's so common, so ordinary, why should we note down how we live our life?
Today we're often puzzled how certain things were done. We found games in the tombs of pharaohs and have no idea how to play them because nobody bothered to write down the rules to it, simply because they were so common knowledge that nobody bothered to write them down. And the same applies to a lot of other ancient knowledge that is lost simply because we do not have any records of it, either because nobody bothered to note it down, considering the information not important and so common knowledge that it's moot to write it down, or because the records were few and all of them lost in time.
Yes, that's not going to teach us any new and exciting technology. But it would teach us how our ancestors lived and we would learn about the past. It would be interesting. You may disagree, you may think it is not, but then again, who are we to say what people find interesting?
Personally, I think learning about our past is interesting. How people lived. How they thought. What they feared. What they hoped for. I'd consider the life of the average person in old times interesting. How much would you know of the US of today if you only knew about the life of presidents and some celebrities? How much of its culture, its problems and its aspirations would you understand if that's the only information you had?