Columbia University: Just Launched: U.S. Women’s and Girls’ Magazines Web Archive. “Developed by librarians within the Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation, the archive consists of websites of women’s media that previously existed as print magazines and have long documented women’s thoughts, activities, economic power, sexuality, political interests, social, cultural, and domestic life.”
born digital
Wired UK: Inside Radiohead’s mission to archive everything
Wired UK: Inside Radiohead’s mission to archive everything . “In January 2020, the many strange iterations of Radiohead’s multiple websites were brought back to life when the band launched the Radiohead Public Library. If you visit radiohead.com today, you’re greeted with neatly organised digital ‘shelves’, stacked with music, high-quality videos, merch and ephemera from every era of the band. Most of those preserved websites are deliberately opaque. One, from the era of The Bends (the critically acclaimed album released in 1995), collects negative reviews of the website itself on a neon background. (‘Do NOT visit this site. It is confusing, garbled rubbish,’ reads one.) But, if the Radiohead of the early 2000s found innovation in obfuscation, in 2020 the band has recognised that a truly radical online act is to actually provide clarity.”
Motherboard: It’s Time to Archive the Internet Archive
Motherboard: It’s Time to Archive the Internet Archive. “Five of the world’s largest publishers sued the Internet Archive, claiming its open-access digital library is a mass infringement on their copyright. The move puts the internet’s most important archive in danger, and has at least got some data hoarders talking about archiving the Internet Archive, and what that would even look like.”
Digital Preservation Coalition: How do you preserve records from within an EDRMS?
Digital Preservation Coalition: How do you preserve records from within an EDRMS?. “Last month the DPC kicked off a new task force. A group specifically focused on considering how to preserve records from within an Electronic Document and Records Management System (EDRMS). According to Wikipedia, ‘Electronic document and records management is used by organizations to manage documents and records throughout the document life-cycle, from creation to destruction.’ …but what if ‘destruction’ isn’t appropriate? What if preservation is required? In many organizations it is likely that some records require longer term retention or may even need to be kept in perpetuity.”
New York Times: Meet Your Meme Lords
New York Times: Meet Your Meme Lords. “Future researchers can rest easy: Know Your Meme, Urban Dictionary, Creepypasta and Cute Overload have all been preserved by the Library of Congress. So has the band website for They Might Be Giants and the entire published output of The Toast, the humor site that shut down in 2016. And while the Library of Congress owns a rare print copy of the Gutenberg Bible, the web archive features the LOLCat Bible Translation Project, which rendered the bible in LOLspeak.”
British Library: 15 Years of the UK Web Archive – The Early Years
British Library: 15 Years of the UK Web Archive – The Early Years. “Think back 15 years to the beginning of 2005. Future Prime Minister David Cameron wasn’t yet Leader of the Conservative party and Google Maps, Twitter and the iPhone all had yet to be launched. It was, however, the year that we started collecting copies of UK published websites for permanent preservation and access.”
National and University Library in Zagreb: Croatian Web Archive launches new website
National and University Library in Zagreb: Croatian Web Archive launches new website. “On 20 February 2020, the Croatian Web Archive (Hrvatski arhiv weba, HAW), a system of the National and University Library in Zagreb for cataloguing, archiving and enabling long-term preservation of and access to Croatian web resources, launched its new website. The Archive’s website’s new, third interface follows the latest developments in the advance of the World Wide Web, and the related technologies and services, as well as the changing requirements of its users, and makes available new features aimed at enhancing user experience.”
COGConnected: Flashpoint Project Archives 36,000 Flash Games Offline
COGConnected: Flashpoint Project Archives 36,000 Flash Games Offline. “Flashpoint is a colossal offline archive of every Flash game the team can scoop up, preserved and protected from ultimate destruction. Flash is vanishing from the internet forever, you see. Adobe is officially killing the system on December 31st, 2020. That means BlueMaxima has less than a year to save every game they can from the slowly sinking ship.”
Motherboard: The Geocities Archive Is Bringing the Early Internet to Life
Motherboard: The Geocities Archive Is Bringing the Early Internet to Life. “Geocities was one of the first places your average person could make a website for free. The Geocities Gallery aims to archive these sites and return them to functionality, MIDIs and all.”
Editor & Publisher: New RJI Project Seeks to Preserve Digital Archives
Editor & Publisher: New RJI Project Seeks to Preserve Digital Archives. “Fearful that future generations could lose historical recordings, footage, and stories, the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute (RJI) and the University of Missouri (MU) Libraries are working together to ensure the survival of today’s digital news with the help of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and a $250,000 grant.”
Library of Congress: In a Web Archives Frame of Mind: Improving Access and Describing the Collections
Library of Congress: In a Web Archives Frame of Mind: Improving Access and Describing the Collections. “In 2018, the Library of Congress Web Archiving Team embarked on a journey to streamline description of the Library’s voluminous web archives. As part of that continuing effort, the Library of Congress Digital Content Management Section is excited to announce the release of 4,258 new web archives across 97 event and thematic collections!”
Make Tech Easier: How to Find Out When a Webpage Was Published
Make Tech Easier: How to Find Out When a Webpage Was Published. “When you’re doing research on a topic, it’s vital to ensure your sources are up to date. If you’re writing an academic paper, dates of publication are often required in the citations. The majority of the time, getting the date is easy: simply look on the site and find the ‘published on’ date to find how recent it was. Things get a little more complicated when there is no date listed on the webpage. When this happens, how do you know when the page was published?”
Introspective Digital Archaeology: The Digital Derangement of Archives
Introspective Digital Archaeology: The Digital Derangement of Archives. “So do digital archives represent a paradigm shift from traditional archives and archival practice, or are they simply a technological development of them?” Not lengthly, but dense and thought-provoking and well-written. Can you compare something to a slice of really good fruitcake without being pejorative?
Ars Technica: Verizon reportedly blocks archivists from Yahoo Groups days before deletion
Ars Technica: Verizon reportedly blocks archivists from Yahoo Groups days before deletion. “An ad-hoc group scrambling to archive as much content as possible from Yahoo Groups ahead of the site’s final demise next week is running into trouble as more than a hundred volunteer archivists say Yahoo’s parent company, Verizon, has banned their accounts.” This is a big steaming pile of you know.
Boing Boing: GIF site Gfycat announces mass deletions, threatens Archive Team with lawsuit
Boing Boing: GIF site Gfycat announces mass deletions, threatens Archive Team with lawsuit. “Gfycat is a site that people upload GIFs to so they can share them with other people reliably. Used most conspicuously to host memes, clips from other media, and animated porn, it announced Wednesday that it was planning to permanently delete old, anonymously-posted images within days. Archive Team, a web preservation initiative coordinated by Jason Scott, set about archiving the site’s soon-to-vanish content. So Gfycat’s CEO, Dan McEleney, threatened it with a lawsuit, describing archival of the memes it hosts as a ‘denial of service attack’ and demanding compensation.”
