Field trip: Internet Archive
Have you visited the Internet Archive lately? It's officially (as of this month) a library. Coming soon: a tool that will make it really easy to upload videos and mark them with tags. Now, you've heard of this already — there are several commercial applications that do this. But the Internet Archive is dedicated to archiving and preserving web content:
The
Internet Archive is working to prevent the Internet
- a new medium with major historical significance
- and other “born-digital” materials
from disappearing into the past. Collaborating with
institutions including the Library
of Congress and the Smithsonian,
we are working to preserve a record for generations
to come.
I visited the Internet Archive building in San Francisco today. It looks as if the Internet Archive and OneWebDay will be collaborating, and I couldn't be happier about that.
One project that needs doing, and needs leadership and prodding: interviews with people about their early web involvement and memories. The Archive has a nice Computers and Technology video area, but a much more substantial project would be to have citizen journalists out there recording interviews and making the raw footage available to everyone via the Archive. This may be a OneWebDay project in the making — if you'd like to volunteer to work on this, the barriers to entry are vanishingly low.
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