Tag Archives: Brewster Kahle

Internet Archive backup in Canada?

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It’s a good idea whether or not the backup site is in Canada and regardless of who is president of the United States, i.e., having a backup for the world’s digital memory. The Internet Archives has announced that it is raising funds to allow for the creation of a backup site. Here’s more from a Dec. 1, 2016 news item on phys.org,

The Internet Archive, which keeps historical records of Web pages, is creating a new backup center in Canada, citing concerns about surveillance following the US presidential election of Donald Trump.

“On November 9 in America, we woke up to a new administration promising radical change. It was a firm reminder that institutions like ours, built for the long term, need to design for change,” said a blog post from Brewster Kahle, founder and digital librarian at the organization.

“For us, it means keeping our cultural materials safe, private and perpetually accessible. It means preparing for a Web that may face greater restrictions.”

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While Trump has announced no new digital policies, his campaign comments have raised concerns his administration would be more active on government surveillance and less sensitive to civil liberties.

Glyn Moody in a Nov. 30, 2016 posting on Techdirt eloquently describes the Internet Archive’s role (Note: Links have been removed),

The Internet Archive is probably the most important site that most people have never heard of, much less used. It is an amazing thing: not just a huge collection of freely-available digitized materials, but a backup copy of much of today’s Web, available through something known as the Wayback Machine. It gets its name from the fact that it lets visitors view snapshots of vast numbers of Web pages as they have changed over the last two decades since the Internet Archive was founded — some 279 billion pages currently. That feature makes it an indispensable — and generally unique — record of pages and information that have since disappeared, sometimes because somebody powerful found them inconvenient.

Even more eloquently, Brewster Kahle explains the initiative in his Nov. 29, 2016 posting on one of the Internet Archive blogs,

The history of libraries is one of loss.  The Library of Alexandria is best known for its disappearance.

Libraries like ours are susceptible to different fault lines:

Earthquakes,

Legal regimes,

Institutional failure.

So this year, we have set a new goal: to create a copy of Internet Archive’s digital collections in another country. We are building the Internet Archive of Canada because, to quote our friends at LOCKSS, “lots of copies keep stuff safe.” This project will cost millions. So this is the one time of the year I will ask you: please make a tax-deductible donation to help make sure the Internet Archive lasts forever. (FAQ on this effort).

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Throughout history, libraries have fought against terrible violations of privacy—where people have been rounded up simply for what they read.  At the Internet Archive, we are fighting to protect our readers’ privacy in the digital world.

We can do this because we are independent, thanks to broad support from many of you. The Internet Archive is a non-profit library built on trust. Our mission: to give everyone access to all knowledge, forever. For free. The Internet Archive has only 150 staff but runs one of the top-250 websites in the world. Reader privacy is very important to us, so we don’t accept ads that track your behavior.  We don’t even collect your IP address. But we still need to pay for the increasing costs of servers, staff and rent.

You may not know this, but your support for the Internet Archive makes more than 3 million e-books available for free to millions of Open Library patrons around the world.

Your support has fueled the work of journalists who used our Political TV Ad Archive in their fact-checking of candidates’ claims.

It keeps the Wayback Machine going, saving 300 million Web pages each week, so no one will ever be able to change the past just because there is no digital record of it. The Web needs a memory, the ability to look back.

My two most relevant past posts on the topic of archives and memories are this May 18, 2012 piece about Luciana Duranti’s talk about authenticity and trust regarding digital documents and this March 8, 2012 posting about digital memory, which also features a mention of Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archives.

Digital disasters

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What would happen if we had a digital disaster? Try to imagine a situation where all or most of our information has been destroyed on all global networks. It may seem unlikely but it’s not entirely impossible as Luciana Duranti, then a professor at the University of British Columbia School of Library, Archival, and Information Sciences, suggested to reporter Mike Roberts in a 2006 interview. She cited a few examples of what we had already lost, (excerpted from my March 9, 2010 posting)

… she commented about the memories we had already lost. From the article,

Alas, she says, every day something else is irretrievably lost.

The research records of the U.S. Marines for the past 25 years? Gone.

East German land-survey records vital to the reunification of Germany? Toast.

A piece of digital interactive music recorded by Canadian composer Keith Hamel just eight years ago?

“Inaccessible, over, finito,” says Duranti, educated in her native Italy and a UBC prof since 1987.

Duranti, director of InterPARES (International Research on Permanent Authentic Records in Electronic Systems), an international cyber-preservation project comprising 20 countries and 60 global archivists, says original documentation is a thing of the past.

Glyn Moody’s March 5, 2012 posting on Techdirt notes a recent attempt to address the possible loss of ‘memory’ along with other issues specific to the digitization of information (I have removed links),

But there’s a problem: as more people turn to digital books as their preferred way of consuming text, libraries are starting to throw out their physical copies. Some, because nobody reads them much these days; some, because they take up too much space, and cost too much to keep; some, even on the grounds that Google has already scanned the book, and so the physical copy isn’t needed. Whatever the underlying reason, the natural assumption that we can always go back to traditional libraries to digitize or re-scan works is looking increasingly dubious.

Fortunately, Brewster Kahle, the man behind the Alexa Web traffic and ranking company (named after the Library of Alexandria, and sold to Amazon), and the Internet Archive — itself a kind of digital Library of Alexandria — has spotted the danger, and is now creating yet another ambitious library, this time of physical books …

For some reason this all reminded me of a Canticle for Leibowitz, a book I read many years ago and remember chiefly as a warning that information can be lost. There’s more about the book here. As for Kahle’s plan, I wish him the best of luck.