Re:If we lose the Internet Archive, we're screwed – The Stat...
by ghaff on Thursday April 06, 2023 @12:08PM
(#35470430)
In fairness, a lot of content created over the past 25 years or so only exists in ephemeral digital form. Some is captured in sources that libraries subscribe to but a lot of it isn't. (Of course, libraries also subscribe to content that was never on the open web.)
It's also the case that pre-web, a lot of that sort of content was pretty much lost to time. Per a discussion, a little while back, relatively little from the BBS era is preserved because it was mostly a distributed group of hobbyists.
Re:If we lose the Internet Archive, we're screwed – The Stat...
by crazygringo on Thursday April 06, 2023 @02:41PM
(#35472570)
> researchers can continue to do all those things using traditional methods
No they can't. Citations that point to URL's that no longer exist require IA. There's no other tool currently.
I do think the label applies to researchers. And except for the case of "tracking down citations to webpages that don't exist anymore," researchers can continue to do all those things using traditional methods (which may be a harder, but still easy enough, especially if it's your job).