NPR: Internet Historians Mourn Loss Of Cultural Record As Yahoo Prepares To Delete Groups. “Yahoo Groups was once a place where people turned to find out what was happening in their communities. Then Facebook, Tumblr and other sites came along, making Yahoo Groups obsolete. So earlier this fall, Verizon, which now owns Yahoo, announced it will delete the archives of every Yahoo Group. That was supposed to happen this coming Saturday, but Verizon just announced it will extend the deadline until next month. NPR’s Neda Ulaby reports Internet historians and activists are scrambling.” I can’t find any other mentions of the deadline being extended at the moment, but I’ll keep an eye out. And why am I banging on about this? Because it’s going to happen again. And again. And again. And somebody has to care.
digital impermanence
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.”
Columbia Journalism Review: Preserving work in a time of vanishing archives
Columbia Journalism Review: Preserving work in a time of vanishing archives. “‘NOTHING DISAPPEARS ON THE INTERNET,’ people like to say, but journalists know that’s not necessarily true. Articles frequently disappear when online publications shutter or restructure. The internet is more like an Etch-a-Sketch than a stone engraving—over time, some marks endure, but the rest are swept from the canvas.”
The Gazette: Gazette policy guides removing minor crime stories from website
The Gazette: Gazette policy guides removing minor crime stories from website. “The Gazette has been receiving an increasing number of requests from people we’ve written stories about who say they’re being impacted long after charges were dropped or their court case has been completed. Whether it’s a job search, housing or growing kids Googling their parents’ names, many find it difficult to fully put the incident behind them. We have put together a series of criteria that we’ll use to consider removing articles about non-felony and non-violent criminal offenses from our website.”
Internet Archive: The Wayback Machine’s Save Page Now is New and Improved
Internet Archive: The Wayback Machine’s Save Page Now is New and Improved. “Every day hundreds of millions of web pages are archived to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. Tens of millions of them submitted by users like you using our Save Page Now service. You can now do that in a way that is easier, faster and better than ever before.”
The Wayback Machine: Fighting Digital Extinction in New Ways (Internet Archive)
Internet Archive: The Wayback Machine: Fighting Digital Extinction in New Ways. “The average web page might last three months before it’s altered or deleted forever. You never know when access to the information on these web pages is going to be needed. It might be three months from now; it might be three decades. That’s how the Wayback Machine serves—making history by saving history. Now, the Wayback Machine is fighting digital extinction in brand new ways.”
Tucson Sentinel: Tucson Citizen archive back from the dead — ‘such as it is’
Tucson Sentinel: Tucson Citizen archive back from the dead — ‘such as it is’. “After vanishing at the beginning of the year, a small fraction of the former online archive of the Tucson Citizen has been restored — but more than 200,000 stories are still unavailable. The bare-bones remnants of the Citizen’s archive vanished from the Internet in January, and corporate staff gave conflicting accounts about whether hundreds of thousands of news stories would ever be accessible again.”
