Interesting article by Lynne Brindley, the chief executive of the British Library, wherein she is worried about whether we’re saving enough—not enough money, but enough of the digital evidence of our times. In an essay in Sunday’s Observer, she worries that whole chunks of national memory are being lost and that “historians and citizens of the future will find a black hole in the knowledge base of the 21st century.”
Are we loosing ourselves?
She sees two examples:
“At the exact moment Barack Obama was inaugurated, all traces of President Bush vanished from the White House website, replaced by images of and speeches by his successor. Attached to the website had been a booklet entitled 100 Things Americans May Not Know About the Bush Administration – they may never know them now. When the website changed, the link was broken and the booklet became unavailable.
The 2000 Sydney Olympics was the first truly online games with more 150 websites, but these sites disappeared overnight at the end of the games and the only record is held by the National Library of Australia.”
So, what do you think? Are we being too hasty in removing material? Should we leave all web content up for posterity? Like old magazines in libraries, when do Web Sites cease to be relevant, and is the nature of the beast to always change/upgrade?
