Thursday, January 3, 2013; 1:24:00 PM Eastern
Making web archives safe
- This is an important subject.
- I just moved scripting.com, a site that goes back to 1995, from an Apache server to an S3 bucket. In the process we generated a zip file that contains everything. It seems to me that archive is a piece of history.
- What university is ready to receive such a gift?
Background: I have a famous great uncle from Germany who was an author and translator. His work is studied in universities. My mother ended up with (paper) copies of all his books from his own collection. We went on a search for a university that would add them to their collection, and found one, and now we're fairly confident we did the right thing for Uncle Arno's legacy.- But with digital stuff, who is going to make a big deal out of receiving a zip archive, when anyone's copy is exactly the same as all the others?
- In other words, how can I make this bit of history safe? I have no clue.