I just read the Jan/Feb issue of MITs Technology Review which features a piece called Fire in the Library. It made me mostly sad. It's about a group called the Archive Team and their efforts to scrape and archive what I would all "failed internet nation states" like poetry.com and geocities. The depressing part was the fact that this group is doing the job of libraries with a minute fraction of the resources. The bright sparks are that they are doing it, as well as Brewster Kahle's involvement and the loose affiliation of the project with the Internet Archive. The mostly sad part went away quickly (as it always does for me) and was replaced with the "how could we participate" part. Libraries are doing some of these things, but in a very piecemeal and exclusive fashion. Academic libraries are focusing on the scholarly record, preserving the record of promotion and tenure and so students in the future can largely not read it either. It occurred to me that the space needed for what the Archive Team is salvaging is a tiny fraction of the space the global university community stewards for our own communities, and we should step up and offer resources. Who knows, maybe the next e.e. cummings is sill hovering in the now mostly lost poetry.com archive? I'm not sure the Archive Team would want our help, and the uncertainties around the copyright of what they are scrapping would cause risk embolisms for must institutions, but I can dream ;-)
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