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[InetBib] Raiders of the Lost Web



Diesen Post von der englischsprachigen RDA-Liste wollte ich Ihnen nicht 
vorenthalten. 

Ein schönes Wochenende
Marita Dickenscheid

---

Marita Dickenscheid
Universitätsbibliothek Hagen
Dez. Medienbearbeitung
Katalogisierung

-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: rda-l-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:rda-l-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] Im 
Auftrag von James Weinheimer
Gesendet: Freitag, 16. Oktober 2015 14:51
An: AUTOCAT; Resource Description and Access; Radical Cataloging; Next 
generation catalogs for libraries
Betreff: [RDA-L] Raiders of the Lost Web

Apologies for cross-posting.

I suggest this disturbing article from the Atlantic, about the disappearance 
from the web of an article that was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize as recently 
as 2007. 
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/10/raiders-of-the-lost-web/409210/

In short, the article that disappeared was published by the now-defunct Rocky 
Mountain News. It was published in print but they updated it extensively for 
the newspaper's website, in fact making an entire separate interactive 
interface for it. When the paper went out of business the next year, it sent 
its paper archive to the Denver Public Library, but the website was 
(apparently) just shut down. The story about the extensive, online article (34 
parts) is enlightening, but one part about recreating the site struck me:

"...most of the work involved combing through old code and adapting it for a 
today’s web. In a pre-iPhone 2007, “The Crossing” had been designed as a 
desktop experience. It also relied heavily on Flash, once-ubiquitous software 
that is now all but dead. “My role was fixing all of the parts of the website 
that had broken due to changes in web standards and a change of host,” said 
Sawyer, now a junior studying electrical engineering and computer science. “The 
coolest part of the website was the extra content associated with the 
stories... The problem with the website is that all of this content was 
accessible to the user via Flash.”"

This struck me about how fast things are changing: "pre-iPhone" is now 
considered a type of "era" in terms of information and computing, and that 
Flash is all but dead (on the web, Flash was one of the major ways to add 
animation and video but is being phased out, especially with browsers on mobile 
devices).

All this is true, and all since 2007. Just 8 years ago, it was a different era! 
The first iPhone came out in 2007 and Google recently announced that there were 
more searches on mobile than on desktop 
(http://searchengineland.com/its-official-google-says-more-searches-now-on-mobile-than-on-desktop-220369).
 
I think even younger people would be amazed at that. (Actually, Flash on the 
web has been dying for awhile and I think I would have been concerned using it 
for important purposes even in 2007)

In my experience, it is tricky to mention archiving with web developers. 
I remember once I mentioned archiving at an institution where I was a 
consultant, and the immediate answer was: we don't archive. That's not our job.

I replied: You have the only copy in the world. You control the URL. You are 
the archive--nobody else can be. You can decide to be an archive that throws 
everything away after it reaches a certain age--and there are archives that 
work that way, but nobody can do it but you because you control everything. If 
25 years from now, people see a reference to something on your website that was 
published today, should those people be able to access it?

I mentioned that maybe it didn't necessarily have to work seamlessly but people 
who want to access a page that has been taken down (archived), should find out 
what they must do to access the page. If nothing else, just make sure the 
information itself, not necessarily the bells and whistles with javascripts, 
flash, java, etc. but all the information itself, is in the Internet Archive 
and retrievable. Then, you can hope for the best, but they had to do something.

Web developers often don't think in those terms. That is a librarian idea. I 
wonder how many articles such as the one described in the Atlantic article 
really are lost forever? The pictures and videos of cats and babies can 
disappear, but other sites are more important.

I say this, but at the same time, I wonder about my own blog site, 
http://blog.jweinheimer.net. My blog was originally on Blogger at 
http://catalogingmatters.blogspot.com/ but I changed to Wordpress for some 
reason I have forgotten, tried to transfer everything, and lost some of it. A 
lot of my blog is in the Internet Archive, but you have to search under both 
URLs. In the IA, it only goes back to 2010 but on my current site, it goes back 
to the beginning in 2007.

I just noticed my first post where all I did was mention that I was starting a 
blog. 
http://blog.jweinheimer.net/2007/08/opening-post-and-purpose-of-this-blog.html

That post has gotten 63 thumbs up and 61 thumbs down.

Well, you can't please everybody! At least I'm ahead of the game--for the 
moment!

(The Atlantic article was also discussed at
http://teleread.com/library/what-to-do-atlantic-writer-frets-about-survival-of-web-content-but-apple-cant-even-keep-its-e-book-store-going-reliably)

James Weinheimer weinheimer.jim.l@xxxxxxxxx First Thus 
http://blog.jweinheimer.net First Thus Facebook Page 
https://www.facebook.com/FirstThus
Personal Facebook Page https://www.facebook.com/james.weinheimer.35
Google+ https://plus.google.com/u/0/+JamesWeinheimer
Cooperative Cataloging Rules
http://sites.google.com/site/opencatalogingrules/
Cataloging Matters Podcasts
http://blog.jweinheimer.net/cataloging-matters-podcasts
The Library Herald http://libnews.jweinheimer.net/


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