Re:Never trust a corporation to do a library’s job
by ghaff on Sunday February 01, 2015 @02:33PM
(#8981295)
All that is true but it was also true before digital media. While saving "everything" (whatever that means exactly) may or may not be a laudable goal there are always going to be practical limits to what any organization can realistically achieve for the reasons you cite and others. I could probably name any number of online magazines that have gone belly-up or at least restructured and old content in CMS systems is effectively gone forever as a result. I'm not sure how you would even approach archiving a complex site with high fidelity.
Even if the Library of Congress, say, took the task on with good funding, lots of things wouldn't be preserved. (And I'm not sure I would like seeing the government in this role in any case.)
There is tons of stuff from the 90s that is gone. For example, back in the day there were a few audio shows that were recorded in realaudio. archive.org doesn't capture that stuff. I was going through the archives of bluesnews.com for a project and found all these references to interviews with people like Carmack and Romero and other more obscure people and the audio is just gone. I tweeted at one of the guys who owned the company and he says the harddrives are in storage and he wants to get them online again one day but that day may never come.
Another example, gamespot used to have some good articles about the history of things like rts games and such. archive.org has most of that stuff but not all. I messaged the people doing the tech support on the site about it and they were like "yeah, that was a few site upgrades ago" and had not interest in trying to get that stuff back online properly.
With joystiq and tuaw shutting down it is only a matter of time before aol just pulls the plug on those sites, too.