TechCo: 5 Tools to Help You Search the Archived Internet . “Anything that’s low tech is dismissed as ‘from the stone age,’ but stone is by far the most stable way to record information. Not only will the hard drives and networked routers of today never last a thousand years, but plenty of information online won’t even last the decade. As local newspapers or long-in-the-tooth startups go under, they all leave dead links scattered across the internet, constantly replaced with fresh links that will themselves eventually die. Wow, sorry, didn’t mean to get too dark there. My point is, memories that you might want to keep are increasingly likely to exist only on the internet — rambling G-Chat conversations with your best friend, say, or your first WordPress blog. If you want to preserve, protect, or search through your online footprint, read on to learn which five online tools can best help you comb through the archived internet.”
born digital
Born Digital: How Social Media and Paperless Offices are Reshaping the University Archives (Princeton Alumni Weekly)
Princeton Alumni Weekly: Born Digital: How Social Media and Paperless Offices are Reshaping the University Archives. “The artifacts of activism at Princeton come in many forms: membership cards for the Veterans of Future Wars, a satirical student group that made national headlines in 1936; audio cassettes from WPRB’s coverage of a campus meeting at Jadwin Gym during the May 1970 strike that followed the U.S. invasion of Cambodia; and scores of photos, mostly black-and-white, from public demonstrations such as the 1978 occupation of Nassau Hall, when students protested University investments in companies doing business in apartheid-era South Africa. During the 2015 Nassau Hall sit-in — the protest that sparked a re-examination of Woodrow Wilson 1879’s legacy and a broader discussion of diversity and inclusion at Princeton — archivists knew they would need to take a different approach, one not dependent on file boxes.”
Researcher Access to Born-Digital Collections: an Exploratory Study (Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies)
Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies: Researcher Access to Born-Digital Collections: an Exploratory Study. “While a small, but growing number of institutions offer access to born-digital collections, there is scant literature documenting researcher interaction with these materials. This paper addresses this gap through documenting and analyzing researcher interactions to portions of born-digital collections at New York University (NYU) Libraries, with the cooperation of NYU’s Fales Library and Special Collection and the Digital Library and Technology Solutions Department, as well as the National Digital Stewardship Residency (NDSR) program.”
Motherboard: Motherboard Made a Tool That Archives Websites on Demand
Motherboard: Motherboard Made a Tool That Archives Websites on Demand. “Archiving services, such as the Wayback Machine, may be a staple of online journalism, but they sometimes have a problem. While, say, Archive.is might preserve one particular webpage, perhaps the Wayback Machine can’t, depending on what sort of restrictions the website developer has put in place. For example, someone stopped copies of MSNBC host Joy Reid’s blog, which hosted a stream of homophobic comments, from displaying in the Wayback Machine. With that in mind, I made a quick tool that can push a single webpage or URL to multiple archiving sites at once, and fire back the newly minted digital copies in response. Hopefully it will help reporters and researchers more efficiently figure out which service will work best for that particular site.”
Internet Archive: 27 Public Libraries and the Internet Archive Launch “Community Webs” for Local History Web Archiving
Internet Archive: 27 Public Libraries and the Internet Archive Launch “Community Webs” for Local History Web Archiving. “With generous support from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, as well as the Kahle/Austin Foundation and the Archive-It service, the Internet Archive and 27 public library partners representing 17 different states have launched a new program: Community Webs: Empowering Public Libraries to Create Community History Web Archives. The program will provide education, applied training, cohort network development, and web archiving services for a group of public librarians to develop expertise in web archiving for the purpose of local memory collecting…. The program will result in dozens of terabytes of public library administered local history web archives, a range of open educational resources in the form of online courses, videos, and guides, and a nationwide network of public librarians with expertise in local history web archiving and the advocacy tools to build and expand the network. “
Techdirt: ESA Comes Out Against Allowing Museums To Curate Online Video Games For Posterity
Techdirt: ESA Comes Out Against Allowing Museums To Curate Online Video Games For Posterity. “A week or so back, we discussed the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment (MADE) calling on the Copyright Office to extend exemptions to anti-circumvention in the DMCA to organizations looking to curate and preserve online games. Any reading of stories covering this idea needs to be grounded in the understanding that the Librarian of Congress has already extended these same exemptions to video games that are not online multiplayer games…. MADE’s argument is that online multiplayer games are every bit the art that these single-player games are and deserve preservation as well. Well, the Entertainment Software Association, an industry group that largely stumps for the largest gaming studios and publishers in the industry, has come out in opposition to preserving online games, arguing that such preservation is a threat to the industry.”
Bellingcat: How to Archive Open Source Materials
Bellingcat: How to Archive Open Source Materials. “There are two main reasons to archive all of the digital evidence that you use an investigation: to preserve it in case it is removed from its original source, and to prove to your audience that the material (if it has been removed) really existed as you present it. Screenshots can be easily forged, so it is vital that you find a way to retain the materials in a way that shows that you did not have the opportunity to modify the content.”
