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:
- David Rosenthal, the designer of the Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe (LOCKSS) protocol: http://blog.dshr.org/2015/10/a-pulitzer-is-no-guarantee.html writes about the story from the perspective of an orphan font problem where the underlying platform is also under copyright, in addition to the content. In the case of "The Crossing", Adobe Flash, which to many observers is headed to obsolescence, is integral to delivery of the series.
- Paul Jones, of the a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and director of ibiblio.org wrote on some of the efforts in digital preservation to virtualizing and preserving entire websites: http://ibiblio.org/pjones/blog/the-web-going-dark-preserving-and-serving-aging-websites/
- Jill Lepore wrote in the New Yorker earlier this year on some of the efforts going on at the Internet Archive in trying to preserve the web: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/26/cobweb
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