Web Heritage Could Be Lost

Squiff writes "The British Library warns us that 'The UK's online heritage could be lost forever if the government does not grant a "right to archive"' in the UK. Never mind the Wayback Machine, The British Library declares that 'the average life expectancy of a website was just 44 to 75 days, and suggested that at least 10% of all UK websites were either lost or replaced by new material every six months,' with the material within them being amongst the most revealing regarding the state of contemporary culture."

Re:why?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's "heritage," which means "whatever happened in the past, for whatever reason, we are obligated to point out and say 'we came from here,' even if only so we can say 'look how far we've come.' "

You must be one of those people who doesn't understand reconstructions of old-fashioned rooms in museum exhibits. It's an anthropological thing.

Most Websites Should Be Lost To The Ages

[WrongSizeGlass]

Does the UK really want to be remembered for their craptacular websites? Not that theirs are any worse than anybody else's, but please ... most websites are like a night of bad drinking. Let's move on already and let time take care of the rest.

Re:why?

[iluvcapra]

Why would anybody care about Mary Chestnut [wikipedia.org] or Victor Klemperer's [wikipedia.org] diary? If someone were trying to understand something like the Barack Obama campaign or the Tea Partiers 50 years from now, and all we had were official statements and published news reports, the picture of what was actually going on in the country would be significantly warped. Wherever people gather, there needs to be a chronicle, otherwise some authority in the future is going to make some arbitrary guess about what people believed or wanted.

Re:why?

[grumbel]

Anything of significance will either stick around, or be archived by others who find it significant.

The problem is that you can only evaluate the historic value of something years or decades after it happened. That's why plenty of movies and early TV shows got lost or even destroyed. Even the original moon landing footage is gone. All that stuff just wasn't considered valuable enough and the self space or the reusable magnetic tape was considered more important than the data contained in them.

Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it and we seem to be doing exactly that when it comes to archiving the Internet.

Re:why?

[ibwolf]

The funny thing, what we consider junk today sometimes - mind you, only sometimes - turns out to be really interesting a few generations down the line.

Case in point, advertising leaflets from the early part of the 20th century were undoubtedly not held in high regard at the time. Today however researchers regard them as a useful source of information that was not captured in other media at the time, usually because it was something "everyone knew".

The point is that we are ill equipped today to judge what will be "valuable" tomorrow.

Re:Sadness

[Pojut]

Not entirely...far less viruses and spyware, spam wasn't as big of a deal, drive-by browser hijacking was far less common...besides, I would take a blinking marquee of text over pop-ups and banners any day.

Re:why?

[BrokenHalo]

Not every single bit of information is really worth the effort to save

That's what you might think now, but a historian of the future would probably disagree. By way of an example, it's possible to gain an insight into practices of the past by looking into details of regulations: few official records exist, for instance, detailing fraudulent practice in the food industry in 16th or 17th century England, but the fact that there are statutes specifically forbidding stuffing meat with rags to make it look "plumper" tell us a lot about common practice of the time.

History isn't just made up of dates and battles. It is made up of countless little bits, each not in itself very important, but contributing to the whole.