Note: article may be paywalled if you’ve read all your free articles from Wired for now. Archive link in that event.
[…] Against the back wall, where one might find confessionals in a different kind of church, there’s a tower of humming black servers. These servers hold around 10 percent of the Internet Archive’s vast digital holdings, which includes 835 billion web pages, 44 million books and texts, and 15 million audio recordings, among other artifacts. Tiny lights on each server blink on and off each time someone opens an old webpage or checks out a book or otherwise uses the Archive’s services. The constant, arrhythmic flickers make for a hypnotic light show. Nobody looks more delighted about this display than Kahle.
It is no exaggeration to say that digital archiving as we know it would not exist without the Internet Archive—and that, as the world’s knowledge repositories increasingly go online, archiving as we know it would not be as functional. Its most famous project, the Wayback Machine, is a repository of web pages that functions as an unparalleled record of the internet. Zoomed out, the Internet Archive is one of the most important historical-preservation organizations in the world. The Wayback Machine has assumed a default position as a safety valve against digital oblivion. The rhapsodic regard the Internet Archive inspires is earned—without it, the world would lose its best public resource on internet history.
Note: article may be paywalled if you’ve read all your free articles from Wired for now. Archive link in that event.
I’m surprised they’re not pursuing govt grants and trust/foundation funding like a terrier. There has to be money out there for digital preservation work.
Google just started pointing search results to the archive instead of their own cache. I would hope Google would be donating some supportive money to the archive as a goodwill gesture.
With Google’s new “don’t be paying for anything someone else will do for free” MO I’m doubtful
Yeah…Honestly now that you mention it I never have looked into how they’re structured and if that may play a part in them not doing so. What I do know is that I respect their mission and want to see them stick around and reshape things to allow for more organizations like them to exist rather than get snuffed out.