The Burning of the Library at Alexandria in 391 AD
In case you missed it Jill Lepore has written a superb article for the New Yorker about the Internet Archive and archiving the Web in general. The story of the Internet Archive is largely the story of its creator Brewster Kahle. If you’ve heard Kahle speak you’ve probably heard the Library of Alexandria v2.0 metaphor before. As a historian Lepore is particularly tuned to this dimension to the story of the Internet Archive:
When Kahle started the Internet Archive, in 1996, in his attic, he gave everyone working with him a book called “The Vanished Library,” about the burning of the Library of Alexandria. “The idea is to build the Library of Alexandria Two,” he told me. (The Hellenism goes further: there’s a partial backup of the Internet Archive in Alexandria, Egypt.)
I’m kind of embarrassed to admit that until reading Lepore’s article I never quite understood the metaphor…but now I think I do. The Web is on fire and the Internet Archive is helping save it, one HTTP request and response at a time. Previously all the metaphor made me think of was the vast collection of Web content that the Internet Archive is amassing as yet another centralized collection of valuable material that, as with Library of Alexandria v1.0, is vulnerable to disaster or more likely, as Heather Phillips writes, creeping neglect:
Though it seems fitting that the destruction of so mythic an institution as the Great Library of Alexandria must have required some cataclysmic event like those described above — and while some of them certainly took their toll on the Library — in reality, the fortunes of the Great Library waxed and waned with those of Alexandria itself. Much of its downfall was gradual, often bureaucratic, and by comparison to our cultural imaginings, somewhat petty.
I don’t think it can be overstated: like the Library of Alexandria before it, the Internet Archive is an amazingly bold and priceless resource for human civilization. I’ve had the good fortune to visit the actual Internet Archive on multiple occasions, and each time I’ve been struck by how unlikely it is that such a small and talented team have been able to build and sustain a service with such impact. It’s almost as if it’s too good to be true. I’m nagged by the thought that perhaps it is.
Herbert van de Sompel is quoted by Lepore:
A world with one archive is a really bad idea.
Van de Sompel and his collaborator Michael Nelson have repeatedly pointed out just how important it is for there to be multiple archives of Web content, and for there to be a way for them to be discoverable, and work together. Another thing I learned from Lepore’s article is that Brewster’s initial vision for the Internet Archive was much more collaborative, and eventually gave birth to the International Internet Preservation Consortium, which is made up of 32 member organizations who do Web archiving.
A couple weeks ago one prominent IIPC member, the California Digital Library announced that it was retiring its in house archiving infrastructure and out sourcing its operation to ArchiveIt, which is a subscription web archiving service from the Internet Archive.
The CDL and the UC Libraries are partnering with Internet Archive’s Archive-It Service. In the coming year, CDL’s Web Archiving Service (WAS) collections and all core infrastructure activities, i.e., crawling, indexing, search, display, and storage, will be transferred to Archive-It. The CDL remains committed to web archiving as a fundamental component of its mission to support the acquisition, preservation and dissemination of content. This new partnership will allow the CDL to meet its mission and goals more efficiently and effectively and provide a robust solution for our stakeholders.
I happened to tweet this at the time:
https://twitter.com/edsu/status/555486409952608256
Which at least inspired some mirth from Jason Scott, who is an Internet Archive employee, and also a noted Internet historian and documentarian.
https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/555491909243011072
Jason is also well known for his work with ArchiveTeam, which quickly mobilizes volunteers to save content on websites that are being shutdown. This content is often then transferred to the Internet Archive. He gets his hands dirty doing the work, and inspires others to do the same. So I deserved a bit of friendly laughter for my hand-wringing.
But here’s the thing. What does it mean if one of the preeminent digital library organizations needs to outsource their Web archiving operation? And what if, as the announcement indicates, Harvard, MIT, Stanford, UCLA, and others might not be far behind. Should we be concerned that the technical expertise and infrastructure for doing this work is becoming consolidated in a single organization? What does it say about our Web archiving tools that it is more cost-effective for CDL to outsource this work?
The situation isn’t as dire as it might sound since ArchiveIt subscribers retain the right to download their content and store it themselves. How many institutions do that with regularity isn’t well known (at least to me). But Web content isn’t like paper that you can put in a box, in a climate controlled room, and return to years hence. As Matt Kirschenbaum has pointed out:
the preservation of digital objects is logically inseparable from the act of their creation — the lag between creation and preservation collapses completely, since a digital object may only ever be said to be preserved if it is accessible, and each individual access creates the object anew
Can an organization download their WARC content, not provide any meaningful access to it, and say that it is being preserved? I don’t think so. You can’t do digital preservation without thinking about some kind of access to make sure things are working and people can use the stuff. If the content you are accessing is on a platform somewhere else that you have no control over you should probably be concerned.
I’m hopeful that the partnership between CDL and ArchiveIt, and other organizations, will lead to new and improved tools and modes of collaboration. But I’m worried that it will mean organizations can simply outsource the expertise and infrastructure of web archiving, while helping reinforce what is already a huge single point of failure. David Rosenthal of Stanford University notes that diversity is a vital component to digital preservation:
Media, software and hardware must flow through the system over time as they fail or become obsolete, and are replaced. The system must support diversity among its components to avoid monoculture vulnerabilities, to allow for incremental replacement, and to avoid vendor lock-in.
I’d like to see more Web archiving classes in iSchools and computer science departments. I’d like to see improved and simplified tools for doing the work of Web archiving. Ideally I’d like to see more in house crawling and access of web archives, not less. I’d like to see more organizations like the Internet Archive that are not just technically able to do this work, but are also bold enough to collect what they think is important to save on the Web and make it available. If we can’t do this together I think the Library of Alexandria metaphor will be all too literal.
Library of Alexandria v2.0 by Ed Summers, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Originally published at inkdroid.org on January 23, 2015.