Archiving the Web is Focus Of New Financial Times Article (2300 Words)

The nearly 2300 word article (perhaps the longest one we’ve seen on the topic in the mainstream press) is titled, “How to preserve the web’s past for the future” and was published today by the Financial Times. It was written by Hannah Kuchler, the FT’s San Francisco correspondent.
From the Article

• “It is a golden age for librarians, historians and scholars and it is the sweep of digital tools in the humanities that make it so,” he says. “In the past, if you wanted to study the evolution of language for a PhD or the roles of women in different eras, you had to do all the grunt work with references and citations all done by hand. Now it can be done by machine at an astonishing rate.”–Brewster Kahle

• Now, using the Danish national web archive, which takes a snapshot of all “.dk” websites four times a year, he can track how the internet as a whole is developing in his country, from the different types of websites to the balance between text and images.

• Issues surrounding privacy also play an important part. Some companies have privacy policies, which prevent them from making identifiable information available, while researchers say they struggle to get information from Facebook, where people often restrict what they post to friends only.

Read the Complete Article

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