Report: “Delete Never: The Digital Hoarders Who Collect Tumblrs, Medieval Manuscripts, and Terabytes of Text Files”

From Gizmodo:

“Data hoarder means to me simply someone who collects and curates digital data,” said the user -Archivist, one of the moderators of /r/datahoarder, in a private message on Reddit. “It’s a little removed from the disorder we usually see from traditional hoarders.”

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Many people active in the data hoarding community take pride in tracking down esoteric files of the kind that often quietly disappear from the internet—manuals for older technologies that get taken down when manufacturers redesign their websites, obscure punk show flyers whose only physical copies have long since been pulled from telephone poles and thrown in the trash, or episodes of old TV shows too obscure for streaming services to bid on—and making them available to those who want them.

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Itdaniher, an experienced Linux system administrator, also runs software provided by the group Archive Team to help download materials at risk of disappearing from the internet and help them make their way to the nonprofit Internet Archive. Founded by the digital archivist and filmmaker Jason Scott in 2009, Archive Team calls itself “a loose collective of rogue archivists, programmers, writers and loudmouths dedicated to saving our digital heritage.”

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Filed under: Data Files, News