Friday, October 16, 2015

Orphan Works and the Lost Web

Adrienne Lafrance recently wrote an article in the The Atlantic, posted on October 14, 2015: on the nascent state of digital preservation on the web: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/10/raiders-of-the-lost-web/409210/
She tells a story about a 34-part series, published in the Rocky Mountain News: http://thecrossingstory.com/chapters/index.html investigating the aftermath of a fatal bus crash in 1961. The series called "The Crossing", published in 2007, became a Pulitzer Prize-finalist in feature writing for a series in 2008. The next year, the newpaper which published the series on the Web went out of business, then: "One day, without warning, "The Crossing" evaporated from the Internet.".
The article reminds us of the fragility of the web and some of the efforts that the Internet Archive and The Library of Congress have been making in the areas of digital preservation, and maybe surprisingly bibliographic control: https://medium.com/@adriennelaf/what-will-yesterdays-news-look-like-tomorrow-7f82290ab8d0
Additional relevant commentary includes:

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