A few weeks ago my sister was bemoaning the demise of her website after the company hosting it went offline. I told her about the Wayback Machine where she could find an earlier version of her website to reference.
The Wayback Machine, also known as the Internet Archive, is just that: a collection of old websites. It employs a robot program which crawls the Internet saving websites, except for ones that specifically block crawlers. At last count there were 456 billion web pages saved.
Aside from the non-profit Internet Archive, there’s the International Internet Preservation Consortium and a growing number of institutional initiatives, including the Illinois Digital Archives.
When you search the Archive -- https://archive.org/web/ -- you’ll find lots more than old web pages, though. This Wayback Machine contains one of the world’s largest open collections of digitized and audio books, software, TV shows and news broadcasts, feature films, 78-rpm recordings and, yes, radio broadcasts.
Last year the Wayback Machine captured a social media page which was used in the investigation of the Malaysia Airline crash. By the time of the crash, the possibly incriminating statement had been deleted from the page but saved by the Archive.
In 1996, two years before the dawn of Google, Brewster Kahle started the Internet Archive in his attic. The physical location these days is a Greek Revival temple in San Francisco that Kahle bought because it matched their logo and reflects their mission: “universal access to knowledge.”
Here’s to visionaries who turn worthwhile missions into realities and can see value in preserving the past.
I’m Paula Garrett and that’s my perspective.
