We’ve all heard the warning that “The internet is forever.” But in reality, huge swaths of the digital world are disappearing all the time: websites go dark, governments purge public records, social media posts vanish, and streaming platforms remove films and music, Without deliberate efforts to preserve this material, much of our recent history could simply cease to exist. The Internet Archive has spent decades fighting that disappearance, most nottably through its Wayback Machine, which preserves snapshots of a web that is otherwise constantly being rewritten. Current Affairs spoke with Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine, and librarian Chris Freeland, co-editor of the Internet Archive’s new Vanishing Culture report, about why the internet is far more fragile than we think and what is lost when corporations and governments can make information disappear.

 

Nathan J. Robinson

Okay, listen, I want to start with a phrase—a phrase that will get under your skin, a phrase that I'm sure you've heard many times, and that we're going to correct here at the beginning. And the phrase is some variation on "the internet is forever," that is to say, when you put something online, it's never going to go away. I've heard that all of my life; I have lived through the birth of the internet, the entire history of the internet, and I've heard that all the time. So, tell us, is the internet in fact forever? And if not, in what ways is it not?

Mark Graham

I don't understand why anyone ever thought that that was true. Okay? First of all, nothing is forever. And so if you start with "nothing is forever," and then you look at a medium of publishing and communications as ephemeral and fragile as the internet, why would we possibly think that would be forever? Now, some things on the internet, a lot of things on the internet, have been around for a long time. That's good. But a lot of the internet is gone, and these days, more and more of what people are sharing online is designed to not be around very long.

Chris Freeland

I think that was more of a cautionary and maybe morality tale that we told our nieces and nephews—I don't have kids—always telling the generation below, "Be careful; beware of what you're putting online." And I think we were taking such broad strokes of "it's always going to be there." The reality is exactly as Mark said: it's not. Nothing lasts forever, and a lot of content online is actually much more delicate, precarious, and endangered than if that same information was made available in printed form, only because we have centuries of experience preserving paper over time, and just a handful of decades, really, now in preserving digital content.

Graham

We can quantify this a little bit too. There have been some studies that have been done to try to understand material that had been made available via the internet and whether or not it was in fact available today. So a couple of years ago, Pew Research looked at a series of URLs that were about 10 years old and found that 38 percent of them were no longer available on the live web, and that was a sample set across a whole set of disciplines. There were a couple of reports that Jonathan Zittrain did out of Harvard; one of them looked at Supreme Court opinions and footnotes of those opinions, and another one looked at links in New York Times articles. And those studies too found that if you look back about 10 years, a good percentage of those resources were simply no longer available on the live web.

Freeland

Enter the Wayback Machine.

Robinson

Yes, I was going to say the Pew study that you talk about and mentioned in Vanishing Culture, and one of the important things is that a lot of the things are only preserved because the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine is out there preserving them, and but for the intervention of the Wayback Machine, these things would, in fact, disappear.

Graham

Indeed. And Brewster Kahle kind of got it right about 30 years ago. He thought a few things. He thought this new internet thing, and the web in particular, was probably going to be fairly important, and it was probably going to be something that would be worth saving, because it was probably pretty fragile, and a lot of stuff would just eventually disappear. So he basically put in place efforts to press record on a lot of the evolution of these mediums, and now a large part of the web. We archive north of a billion URLs a day.

Robinson

It is extraordinary that if it weren't for this guy saying we need to hit record, you could lose so much of human knowledge. And one of the things the report talks about is how in previous mediums, we have lost many things that we would want to preserve. So in the history of film, no one thought that these things needed to be saved—or in Britain, famously, we ran articles about how the BBC wiped the tapes of all of these classic television shows that now, 40 years later, are things that everyone wishes had been preserved. At the time, no one thought to do it. And because there wasn't a guy out there who said we needed to actually put some effort into making sure this stuff survived, a lot of stuff got lost forever.

Graham

Yes, and it's not only that people didn't take the effort to save and preserve things, but traditionally, historically, efforts have been made to get rid of stuff. I think of, for example, the Mayan codices—there are only about three of them. They're the written language of the Mayan culture, and only about three of these books exist today. Or the Rapa Nui language of Easter Island. There's only about 30 of these wooden tablets, and why such a small number? Because there were active efforts to destroy the culture, the history, and the recordings of those peoples.

And this is basically the story of humanity, whereas churches and governments have historically worked really hard and pretty successfully to erase a lot of our history.

Freeland

There's that intentional erasure, and then there's the accidental loss, and I think that it's an important thing for us to remember and to keep in mind: the protocols that run the web do not address archiving. There is a fatal flaw. That's my language, not Tim Berners-Lee's or anybody else's, that the web does not have an inherent archiving mechanism, and so the Wayback Machine is sort of this add-on to the web that fixes what I see as this fatal flaw with the web. Fatal flaw, maybe that's overstating it, but I'm looking around and thinking, "Wow, if archiving had been baked in, we might not be having some of the fights that we're currently having about taking down content that's online and that's being published on the web."

So I think that the Wayback Machine is an incredibly important addition to the online world in which we live, and just as you said, I can't imagine what our cultural history would be like today in the 2020s without being able to look back over 30 years of history as it's been captured by the Wayback Machine, starting in 1996.

Graham

You're absolutely right, Chris. It's an imperfect hack, and I actually have discussed this with Tim Berners-Lee, who's the guy who invented the web, and he agrees that it was a bit of an oversight that this basically no version control system, for example, was part of the core plan for this web that we've evolved.

Freeland

And that's why when you see the evolution of publishing systems online, like with the wiki system, versioning history was a very important part of that publishing system to incorporate because it fixed a flaw that was present in the original web.

Graham

That is so true, and yet at the same time, when you look at Wikipedia sites, there are something like 320 Wikipedia language editions around the world and something like 70 million articles. These articles consist of claims that people make that are backed up by references, citations to secondary sources, books, academic papers, and published news sources, and those sources, unlike the actual articles in the Wikipedia system, are not necessarily inherently archived. Step in the Wayback Machine. So because we've been archiving much of the public web for the last 30 some years, we've been able to go back and look at these hundreds of millions of citations and Wikipedia articles, find ones that in fact return to "404" or "page not found," and edit them. To date we've done that more than 30 million times. We fixed more than 30 million broken links, and we identify and fix more than 10,000 additional broken links on any given day.

Robinson

Can you talk about what the pernicious effects of not being able to access preserved original information are? I've been a researcher, doing books, trying to find things out. I'm a political writer, so I go back to news stories, and I have to get quotes; the quotes are oftentimes damning quotes, things that politicians have said, so I know why it's really important to be able to find those things, and digitally, as opposed to in the newspaper, things can very easily be changed.

Even big publications like the New York Times will stealthily edit articles on their website, so you can go back to the website the next day, and you're like, "I thought that article was a little different yesterday," and maybe it was. It's not like the newspaper, where you can get out your piece of paper and nobody's able to change it. And, of course, when the Trump White House came in, they erased, I believe, the entire records of the Biden White House's whitehouse.gov. So, can you talk a bit, Chris, about the effects for researchers, the consequences of the kinds of losses that we're talking about?

Freeland

If we think about how the news was produced 30 years ago to the point that you were talking about, where you're going back, needing to look at previously published articles—staying within the news lane, not looking at books, but just looking at news—a reporter used to be able to go into the morgue. They could walk into the depths of their newsroom, the depths of their building, into the place where the filing cabinets with all the previous stories, and be able to look at that history.

Well, guess what, we've now made the change where we're not publishing in print; we're not publishing in any other kind of fixed media. We're instead publishing online. That electronic content is all that we have, and in some cases, it is incredibly delicate. It can vanish; it can be changed because there's no inherent version control or stated version control. So we don't necessarily have the same fixed content that we did 30 years ago in terms of news.

Graham

That's absolutely correct. And I was going to also say, the proof is in the pudding. On any given day we observe five to 10 news articles published somewhere, in the United States or around the world, that are based in part or in whole on material available from the Wayback Machine or the Internet Archive. Political articles, historical articles—articles that wouldn't be able to be produced had it not been for the availability of these archives. And so on any given day, CNN, NBC, BBC, NPR, and others can file their stories and be able to cite specific archives, the URLs of maybe something that a politician had said, a report that a government had produced, a scientific paper, some historical reference, or something that is only available from the Wayback Machine.

Robinson

Let me give you a specific example here. I just wrapped up a book on JD Vance, and if you're writing about JD Vance, one of the things you have to write about is how his opinions have changed. Well, JD Vance used to tweet a lot of his opinions about Donald Trump that were very negative. JD Vance deletes his tweets, so going back and trying to reconstruct JD Vance's tweets from 2016 turned out to be quite difficult. Sometimes they're quoted in news articles, but the news article links to a tweet that he has since deleted, so there's no actual proof that he said anything. And so as someone who is a kind of historian of JD Vance, the record of his public opinions has actually kind of disappeared because he got rid of it, because it's on social media.

Graham

That's an excellent example. I think Andrew Kaczynski, the KFile on CNN, has actually filed a number of stories about Vance based upon archives that we've preserved.

Robinson

So, let's talk a little bit about the effect that that social media has, the fact that so much information is coming out in the form of Instagram stories, which are designed to disappear, or Facebook posts.

Graham

This really gets into some of the challenges of web archiving. There are many, they are evolving, and it's what we focus on every day here at the Internet Archive. One of them you mentioned is social media, kind of the dominant platform that people are writing and sharing and producing videos on, and all the rest of that. The first challenge is there's just so much material; it's an enormous amount of material, and far more than we could possibly archive. We archive a smidgen, for example, of what's published on, say, YouTube. Only a very small amount.

You mentioned Instagram and Facebook, the Meta properties. Those are notoriously difficult to archive. Meta makes it very technically challenging to archive. So you have issues with just the enormity of the material that's there, the technical barriers in being able to access that material, and then also knowing what way you should archive. So, if you can only archive a certain amount, then you really want to figure out some good signals to try to give you some idea of material that may be of cultural or historical relevance into the future, and at the same time, maybe somewhat fragile. So that's the trick. And it's not like this black-and-white, obvious kind of way of coming up with that balance, but that's what we work toward.

Freeland

I think this topic has always intrigued me. So as a librarian, growing up as an amateur hoarder, it blew my mind when Snapchat came along—the very idea that you are intentionally creating content that is designed to dissolve and to not be there. I just didn't understand it. Everything that I've done, all the pictures that I've taken that I still have on my external drives that I'm carrying forward into the cloud, it's all there. I'm creating this stuff with the intention of it sticking around, not the intention of it disappearing and dissolving in front of my very eyes or the eyes of the person who I have sent this content to.

And so I just think it's funny that there has been this change from, "Oh, we have to create this and hold on to it," to, "Nah, let's create it and throw it away immediately." And so, how are people working around that? There's a lot of conversation coming up in the archiving world of personal digital archiving about screenshots. So many people are taking screenshots on their phones and their desktops. The screenshot is one way that people are now grabbing onto this disappearing content.

Robinson

That sort of raises an important question of verification. If I came across a website that purported to archive JD Vance's tweets, for instance, and it could show me screenshots of every tweet by JD Vance, but of course it's so easy to fake a screenshot of a tweet. You just retype the text. And so one of the issues it seems to be, and one of the reasons that it's nice that the Wayback Machine has built something that people actually trust, is that you can have what seems like the material, but knowing the provenance of it or the chain of custody is also difficult.

Graham

Yes, absolutely. And so we take great pains to help ensure the integrity of our archives, and in fact, we make available more than 500 affidavits a year to lawyers and law firms that want to use material from the Wayback Machine as evidence in courts. To the best of my knowledge, the Wayback Machine evidence that was joined with an affidavit that our staff has represented has always been accepted. For decades, we've gone out of our way to be very careful about the work that we do and to help ensure the integrity and the availability of this material.

Freeland

I think an important part of that is because the content is addressable. So, this thing was said at this place online. You can follow that URL, possibly into the web archives or onto the live web, to verify and check that information, so it's not just what is presented to me. So, that's what makes the Wayback Machine different from a tweet that's inserted into a news article or a screenshot. It's not just this thing that has been said; it's this thing at this place at this time.

Graham

Yes, and I want to give you an example of this thing we're talking about. In February of this year, NPR ran a story that said that the US State Department was going to delete all the social media posts prior to the second Trump administration, and that day we kicked into gear. We archive a lot of social media, so it wasn't like we were starting from zero, but every single time we go deep into some area, we find that we did a pretty good job, but we missed some stuff, so that's what we did.

And the first question was, what platforms are we even talking about here? And we ended up focusing on Twitter/X and then asking ourselves, what accounts are we talking about? We identified something like 700 Twitter/X accounts that had been used by embassies, consulates, and ambassadors around the world over the last couple of decades, and then we went in and we tried to identify the hundreds of thousands of individual posts and ensure that we had done a good job of not just archiving those posts and the associated video, audio, web pages, PDF files, and all the body of material that our government had gone out of its way to share with the world. Oh, and by the way, within a few days, large amounts of these social media posts were, in fact, removed from the platforms.

Robinson

We've talked about there about how governments can purge their records from the web, how links can get broken, and how social media posts can either be programmed to disappear, as in the case of an Instagram story or a Snapchat, or can be deleted. But you talk in the Vanishing Culture report about the broader shift from the model of the ownership of information to the licensing of information and the effect that that has on librarians' ability to build archives. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Freeland

Sure. If I think about the libraries that I grew up in—I'm 50, almost 51 years old, born in 1975. So we used to go to the library a lot because I grew up in a time and place where we didn't have air conditioning in my house, so we would literally go to the library to chill out and like hang out around ideas. Those libraries, those shelves, were chock full of content that the library owned. They had paid money to buy the books, to buy the newspapers, to get the film, and the records. Those were all collections that the library purchased, owned, and sat on the shelves and preserved over time. That is not the case today for much of the content that's coming into libraries.

Rather than content that libraries can purchase to own, we are forced to license on temporary terms simple access to the material. So we're just renting access to books and media now, and so the publishers have become our landlords.

Graham

Another dimension of this is that in the last few years we've seen a rise of AI companies that are providing services to the public based on them then scooping up pretty much all the material that's been publicly available on the web, including news articles and other kinds of licensed material or copyright-protected material in some fashion, and right now there's a bit of a backlash against that. A lot of publishers aren't happy with this; they don't think they're being fairly compensated, and they think that their material is being used in ways that are hurting them, that are hurting their business models, and in fact, some are considering it an existential threat to their ability to continue to produce high-quality journalism. And one of the reactions to that is to lock things down.

So you're seeing a lot of material that has previously been openly available now being more and more put behind a paywall, or maybe there's a Cloudflare or an Akamai block in front of it. I went to a website this morning, and it blocked me with a Cloudflare block. It was like, "This IP number..." and I was like, "I have no idea why it was blocking me." On the bottom, it said, "Write to the website and ask them to unblock you with this Cloudflare code and this IP number," and I'm like, "I can't get to the website; I don't know what the email address is to write to the person. How am I going to find the person to write to?" It's ridiculous! So it's getting pretty frothy out there and challenging in terms of our ability to access information that historically has been fairly available and accessible to us.

Freeland

Yes, the news used to be a public good. It has a lot of protections in the Constitution. Now it's treated as just another commodity.

Robinson

Our magazine from the start committed to no paywalls because I've been so frustrated as an independent researcher with no university affiliation with how expensive it is just to flick through and do basic research in the news. You can go to 50 different sites, and they all require a subscription. Even places like the BBC, which should be a public service, and CNN now include paywalls on their basic news articles, and unless you're using some way of getting around, it's harder and harder to get through some of these paywalls even with those tools.

You have to pay so much money just to do any kind of basic research, and you realize that unless someone is very wealthy or very committed, you're just basically not going to have access to 90 percent of all journalism and information.

Graham

Individual people aren't going to have access to that, and then also these systems that are being built that more and more of us are turning to to try to understand our world don't have access to this material either: the AI platforms. So something like 10 percent of people now are turning to AIs to get news. Reuters just came out with a study that said for the first time more than 50 percent of people around the world are primarily getting their news from social media platforms.

So social media platforms replace the prior primary news sites as destinations, and now AI is quickly becoming an important source, and I think in the near term, the dominant way that we're going to be informed. And so, if these AI systems are only getting their material from these non-paywalled sites that are publicly available, a significant percentage of that material will be produced by authoritarian governments, outright mis- and disinformation, produced by corporate interests that have a particular and strongly biased perspective, hyperpartisan, and it's not going to provide us with a depth and a breadth of an understanding of the balance of perspectives that is required for us to be able to have a true understanding of the world that we live in.

Freeland

Nathan, you said it best: the truth is paywalled, but the lies are free. At the Internet Archive, we quote that on a very regular basis. I was just on another webinar earlier today where Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive, mentioned it. We dropped it into the chat. I have that citation ready at hand to drop into chats because it comes up at least weekly in conversation. So incredibly important. You really nailed it.

Robinson

Yes, I was proud of that because it was pithy, but in practice, it's very alarming.

Freeland

The reason why it rings true to everyone, and why people, especially librarians, really understand it, is because it's pithy and accurate and just spot on. Not only is it a good sound bite, but it hurts us in our soul when we think about it.

Graham

It's aged well, too. You wrote this a few years ago.

Robinson

In 2018, I think.

Graham

But it just continues to evolve, and the complexities of it continue to be illuminated, and like Chris said, it's a rally cry and something that is a lens for me to try to be able to understand this world we live in.

Robinson

Yes. And, of course, it's not just paywalls. You have some really disturbing accounts of how things can be lost in this Vanishing Culture report. Obviously, many of us are familiar with the experience of going on Spotify and building a playlist, and then all of a sudden you go on, and one or two or three of the songs have been grayed out. The music has been taken from you. And this happens on streaming platforms for films too. If you had a DVD or CD collection, once you've got it, these are yours. As long as you've got a DVD player, you can play that DVD. As long as you've got a CD player, you could play that CD. But now anything can be taken away from you at any time, and you point out that it is taken.

And I didn't even realize that, for example, the archives of Comedy Central, which used to host these clips that you could watch of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report from their peak era—which are actually kind of historically important because these are some of the leading media critics of the Bush administration in 2007 and 2008—just took the archives offline! You can't watch them anymore. And I went on Reddit, and there are some people saying, "Oh, you could still torrent them," and it's like, how are people going to do that? It's very difficult. This whole archive, which was very accessible to people—it was easy to go on and play any clip from The Daily Show ever from their entire archive—was just taken offline one day for a corporate decision.

Freeland

MTV News is another excellent and terrible example of that kind of erasure. Paramount just pulled the plug one day, and there went decades of cultural writing about our music culture and entertainment. And so some people say, "Well, so what?" And in fact, we saw that in some social media posts around the MTV News takedowns. People were like, "I'm glad that all of that dreck is gone," and I completely disagree with that. I think that it was published, it served a purpose, and we should preserve it. I don't know what the information that I need to have access to is until I need it, and then if I can't go find it, it's gone. It is completely absent in our historical record. Again, thanks to the Wayback Machine, some portion of that MTV News—a large portion, 400,000 pages of that MTV News archive—are reserved and are still available.

Graham

We've been talking a lot about the Wayback Machine and a little bit about books and academic papers. We also archive a lot of television at the Internet Archive. We're archiving more than 80 TV channels, more than 60 outside the United States, 24/7. These are television news all over the world. We transcribe the material, we translate it, and we use optical character recognition to identify all the characters that are on every single one of the screens and make that available for search. And this is a medium, a dominant way, that many people around the world are informed, and it's inherently ephemeral. Yesterday's news, who records it?

This woman named Marion Stokes—we could do a show about her, maybe sometime in the future—did actually record a lot of it in the United States by herself on VHS machines, but almost no one is doing this kind of work. And yet, the Internet Archive has a television news archive that you can go into today, and you can go and see what was on Iranian or Israeli or Russian or North Korean television yesterday.

Robinson

And that's so important, because if you want to understand, for example, how the war in Ukraine is talked about in Russia by Russian political pundits, you need Russian state television. Sometimes when you look at Israeli news, you can understand how Gaza is discussed in Israel. It's often very disturbing, but if no one's recording it and getting the clips, you aren't able to do this kind of analysis of what the media discourse in a country about a particular conflict is. So there are real reasons why even if 90 percent of what is recorded will not be used by anyone for research, you don't know what you need until later. And I want to give one more example of the uses of the Internet Archive.

I knew a writer named Kaleb Horton, who died a couple of years ago. He was in his 30s, and Kaleb was a wonderful writer, and sometimes he wrote for big publications, but oftentimes he wrote for little, tiny publications, and the thing about little tiny publications is they go out of business, and then their archives get taken offline. And so when he died, some of his best pieces that he never reprinted on his website were just on the sites of these small publications, and the only way to assemble a collection posthumously of what he'd written was to go through the Wayback Machine. That's another example. This man's pieces, who was a great writer, would just disappear into the memory hole were it not for the fact that this one site is preserving them.

Graham

Some people get proactive about it. Nathan, didn't you recently write a book with Noam Chomsky?

Robinson

Yes.

Graham

And didn't you take and ensure that every single footnote in that book was archived in the Wayback Machine? So, in effect, you took the effort to future-proof your work.

Robinson

Yes, because otherwise you're linking to things that are gone by the time someone clicks them, and then you're unable to prove your case. The whole point of citing something is so that your reader could go back and check your work.

Freeland

That verifiability is so incredibly important. I think Mark mentioned it at the top that the work that he, his team, and others have been doing, backstopping those citations in Wikipedia, correcting the broken links, and linking to the preserved links in the Wayback Machine—that single-click access to verifiable facts—is so incredibly important online.

Robinson

People should check out your Vanishing Culture report. It's available. They can get a PDF of this for free on the Internet Archive website, or they can buy a print copy. And you have many contributors to this who are discussing some of the ways in which cultural preservation is important in specific cases. Chris, maybe you want to mention just one or two of the instances that your contributors have written about in this report before we get to what I want to close out with here, which is, what do we do, how do we make this better, and what are the legislative fixes, etc.?

Freeland

Two of my favorite essays in the book—there are about 20 different essays. The first one is from a media scholar named Taylor Cole Miller, who writes about the DuMont Television Network, which was a '50s-era TV network, for which the archives are probably lying at the bottom of the Hudson River, and there are one or two shows that are available out of this entire network's production of its run. Two shows are available and archived, and they give us a glimpse into what these live shows and the recording studio were like, what the conversation was. One of the shows that's archived was a woman's story hour, and the way that the host interacted with the women on screen is just fascinating. And boy, wouldn't it be nice if there was more than just that one episode, but at least we have that one.

And then another essay that I really enjoy that has resonated with everyone online is Katie Livingston's essay about why it's important to preserve family cookbooks and regional cookbooks. And so the story of the family cookbook is something that, if you grew up in a cooking culture like I did—my mom and grandma were great cooks. We had a family cookbook; we had the index files with the corners bent and grease stains and annotations all over that. That cookbook is as important as the family Bible, possibly with the genealogy section, because it tells the story of our family and the way that we fed one another and the way that we entertained.

But you think about those regional cookbooks, like the Ladies Auxiliary of the First United Methodist Church of Robinson, Illinois. When you think about them, they are both ubiquitous and rare. So, you can walk into a Goodwill or another thrift store, and you can probably see a dozen of these kinds of cookbooks. They're often with a plastic binder on the side, homemade or semi-homemade. And so there are lots of them, but any individual edition or any individual cookbook is incredibly rare, because they were only produced a couple dozen at a time, or maybe a couple hundred if it was a really big congregation or a large county. So being able to go back and find that one recipe from Mrs. so-and-so's Spanish Cream Pie might be impossible, although there's an entire body of these kinds of cookbooks out in the wild still, and ready to be preserved and digitized and preserved over time.

Robinson

I found one of the most alarming things that I hadn't even thought about in this book was actually the disappearance of old video games, which at first you might think, well, it's just video games. But then you think, if 80 percent of the novels that had been written were totally inaccessible to people, can you imagine what a loss of literary history that would be? But with video games, that kind of immense loss has occurred.

To conclude here, Mark, I know there have been, obviously, major legal challenges to the Internet Archive's work. There are major logistical challenges in the form of, as you mentioned, the shutting down of websites and the ability to archive them. Can you talk a little bit more about what the major difficulties facing those who are trying to keep our culture from vanishing are today, and then maybe what the single few most important things that could be done to make this easier would be?

Graham

Sure. Maybe a little bit of bad news, good news, kind of thing is, with the new Trump administration, we all witnessed, and are actually still witnessing almost on a daily basis, large amounts of material published by our government just going offline—millions and millions of web pages, PDF files, social media posts, videos, etc., produced by government agencies. Some agencies themselves were shut down, like, for example, USAID or large parts of the US Agency for Global Media, etc. So, in the last year and a half of that, we've witnessed this massive purge of public material published by the US government.

And in part, as a response to that, although many of these efforts have been going on for a long time, there is a new understanding of some of the threats to what we have thought was this public record. People have come together in various ways, some of them working with the Internet Archives, some of them working on their own efforts, to help identify at-risk information and to preserve it. So out of the adversity comes the response, the positive response. I think that we should expect more than that, though, and not have to be playing catch-up and plugging these holes. We could maybe get a little more institutional about access to material published by governments, but also, as Chris noted, an understanding of news as a public good. In the early days of the Postal Service, for example, there's a provision for the free exchange of newspapers. So if you publish a newspaper in Ohio, you could exchange it for a newspaper in Florida, and these exchanges went on as a fundamental understanding of the special role that news played in our society. And there are many other examples of these special affordances that news organizations and journalists have rightfully enjoyed. But I'm going to suggest that with those come some special responsibilities, in particular the responsibility for this material to be available in libraries. Let's just keep it really simple.

So there is an example of this, by the way, in US copyright. I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding—you could do your own research—is that it's referred to as the Vanderbilt clause, and it applies to television news archiving in the United States and the availability of that material in libraries. I might suggest the exploration of efforts to create something like a Vanderbilt clause, if you will—maybe call it the Internet Archive or the Wayback Machine clause, I don't know—to help ensure public access to this vital public good called news and information and material published by our own government.

Freeland

When we were publishing Vanishing Culture, one of the questions that came up was, well, what can I do? And so to your listeners, what can you do? It is both a personal and an institutional problem. And so personally, what can you do? Buy your favorite stuff on physical media, and if you're able, keep your own local archives for personal use. So that's at the personal level. At the institutional level, Mark is exactly right. We need to support efforts for libraries to be able to own and preserve digital media. Right now, those vanishing books, those licensed ebooks that libraries are getting charged per use or per seat to have temporary access to, we'd really like for libraries to be able to do the same things in the digital world that they can in the physical world, and there are efforts afoot to make that happen.

There's a campaign called Our Future Memory that is getting libraries around the world to sign on to say basically that, what libraries could do in the physical world, they ought to be able to do in the digital world. To protect our history and our future history, we need libraries to be able to preserve digital media.

Robinson

One of the tragedies here, and I think this is especially the case when you look back at the silent films that have been lost or the wiping of BBC television programs, is how avoidable it was. How even though it takes effort to archive and preserve, it's not an insurmountable amount of effort. If there had been some commitment from the start to preserving silent film, it could have been done. I don't mean to diminish the amount of work, because I know the Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine have to do a lot of work to keep this stuff, but it's all doable.

One of the most frustrating things is when you think how easy it would be to provide universal access to all human knowledge, given the technological capabilities that we have. It would be, as a technical matter, easy to give everyone instant access to every film ever made, and a lot of the restrictions and difficulties we face are artificial. They're created by law or the absence of institutions that are sufficiently funded or that are empowered to do this kind of work. So I want to kind of conclude on a little bit of a hopeful note, which is that the technical feasibility here is not really the obstacle.

Graham

It's not, no. It's a matter of will and taking on this challenge at a society level. Look at the amount of resources that are invested in the physical infrastructure of libraries and other memory institutions—the buildings, the staff, the acquisition of the books, etc.—and now the shift to the digital world, and as Chris has pointed out, the shift away from an ability for a library to actually own the material and instead selectively license it in a very constrained fashion with limited use of it.

So, there's some catching up that I think needs to happen, and as you rightly point out, Nathan, it's not that big of a deal. It would take a minuscule amount of the total amount of money that's spent on libraries, just in the United States alone today, right now, to basically fill that gap and to take and bring the library system into this new digital world in a way that serves everyone.

Freeland

Yes, the challenge is policy, not technology.

Graham

Right. Yes.

Robinson

Well, I do recommend that everyone obviously support the Internet Archive and also check out this Vanishing Culture report. Chris, you co-edited this, but you have a lot of different contributors who, as I say, take different angles and talk about different areas and archiving and preservation in those areas. It's a neglected issue and under-discussed, but it's of critical importance to those of us who then have to use this information to create analysis. For my day-to-day job, I have to go in and dive into people's old tweets and YouTube videos and books and articles, and so I have really come to appreciate the work that you all do, such as finding an article from the Orlando Sentinel in 2003 about the Iraq War that has been taken offline. We definitely have benefited immensely from your work. So, thank you, Chris Freeland and Mark Graham.

Graham

Well, thank you, Nathan. I just want to say, and we benefit from you. You're one of our favorite patrons because you use our library, and more than anything else, that's what we care about and want to encourage, because when people use our library and they give us feedback and tell us how we can get better, that's what we live for. It helps us build a better library and be a greater service to more people, so thank you.

Robinson

Yes. I should say, when I say support the Internet Archive, I do not just mean give the Internet Archive money, although that is a good thing to do. Go on the site, explore the collections, use the collections, and make things from the stuff. They're doing it for good reason.

Freeland

You will find the things that you want and some things that you need, but a lot of things that will open your eyes and hopefully enlighten your day.

 

Transcript edited by Patrick Farnsworth.