We started iterasi with the idea that individuals should be able to save Web pages they find interesting. We saw this as fundamental to one’s use of the Web. Everyone spends a lot of time searching the web for answers and use bookmarks to save what they found. However, bookmarks often point to pages that are no longer be there. So we thought we’d fit a pretty generic need by supplying something more than just bookmarks.
From inception we thought of personal and business uses for iterasi. But there has always been, in the back of our minds, a case to be made for a greater purpose. Some of our users save receipts, some articles, others save programming tips. All of this is good. Some are using iterasi to capture historical events. In a posting here in November I referred to the work of one user who captured the front pages of digital news magazines heralding the Election of Barack Obama as President of the United States in 98 news sites from around the world. This is a great set of Web pages and now, thanks to the creator, a record for the entire world to see.
An article titled titled ‘Websites must be saved for history’,
published this past Sunday in the Guardian (www.guardian.co.uk ), describes the problem where history, in effect, disappears when a Website changes. The author cites two examples; 1) the recent changes in whitehouse.gov, which remove references to the Bush Whitehouse, and 2) the removal of more than 150 sites relating to the 2000 Olympics in Sydney shortly after the games ended.
This article makes the point that despite the huge technical advantages of the digital age, we stand to actually lose some accounts of history. Certainly any method used to record history is subject to loss. Paper rots. Statues erode. Wood decays. All of our digital capabilities offer potentially huge advantages over these more physical solutions.
The problem is that digital content has a habit of disappearing. For a variety of reasons, publishers remove, replace or deprecate their content. Sometimes websites simply go away. Whatever you call it, history is now recorded in the form of a Web page may at some point may be destroyed or stored where no one can see it. We are left with the situation where there is no guarantee that history recorded in digital form will be available in a consistent fashion for future generations.
Not that this is news to anyone. The Internet Archive (www.archive.org ), founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle, uses hundreds of servers and petabytes of storage to capture and record the Web. From their Website:
Most societies place importance on preserving artifacts of their culture and heritage. Without such artifacts, civilization has no memory and no mechanism to learn from its successes and failures. Our culture now produces more and more artifacts in digital form. The Archive’s mission is to help preserve those artifacts and create an Internet library for researchers, historians, and scholars.
Archive.org is a great service that has proven its value to Internet users over the years. They capture Web pages at a varying frequency as determined by their own algorithms. As such, they are very well equipped to capture the Web and therefore help stem to loss of historical Web pages.
At iterasi we have taken a different approach. We do not know where all the great nuggets of information are on the Internet. But we think you do. So we allow you to build your own archive. We hope you archive pages you find valuable and, if appropriate, share them publically so that others may benefit from what you found. They may contain historic events or they may contain your favorite recipes. Whatever you archive, I bet others may will find value in what you archive.
Referring back to the article in the Guardian, the iterasi archive has 29 pages on Whitehouse.gov from the Bush administration and zero pages of the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, Australia. On the former, hey that’s 29 pages that perhaps don’t exist anywhere else on the Web. I can’t feel too bad about not having web pages from the 2000 Olympics as we started iterasi in 2007.
So if you use iterasi, realize that you are also a librarian and a historian. So go forth and save the Web! Someone in the future may benefit from your efforts.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
I thought this sounded great until I read this:
iterasi reserves the right, for any reason, in our sole discretion and without notice to you, to terminate, change, suspend or discontinue any aspect of the Site, the Software and/or the Services, including, but not limited to, information, data, text, graphics, messages, links, photos or other materials (“Content”), features and/or availability…
So I save all my stuff and you can just delete it with no notice, giving me no opportunity to move it elsewhere? Why would I use this?