Adactio: Links—Tagged with archive

To remember, or to forget?

What are your own scribbles, your own ordinary plenty, not worth much to you now but that someone in the future may treasure?

The race to save our online lives from a digital dark age | MIT Technology Review

For many archivists, alarm bells are ringing. Across the world, they are scraping up defunct websites or at-risk data collections to save as much of our digital lives as possible. Others are working on ways to store that data in formats that will last hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of years.

Openly Licensed Images, Audio and More | Openverse

A library of CC-licensed photos.

Next time you’re tempted to use a generative “AI” tool to make an image for a slide deck, use this instead.

minimum interesting service worker

An interesting idea from Tantek for an offline page that links off to an archived copy of the URL you’re trying to reach—useful for when you’re site goes down (though not for when the user’s internet connection is down).

unrot•link

Remy has turned his linkrot-battling technique into a service that you can use. He has more details on his blog.

Whole Earth Index

Here lies a nearly-complete archive of Whole Earth publications, a series of journals and magazines descended from the Whole Earth Catalog, published by Stewart Brand and the POINT Foundation between 1970 and 2002. They are made available here for scholarship, education, and research purposes.

No more 404

I really, really like the progressive enhancement approach that Remy is taking here with outbound links:

When a real user clicks on a link, it’s swapped out to be redirected through my own endpoint that checks if the URL is still OK, and if so permanently redirects the visitor, otherwise my endpoint checks the Web Archive for the URL and permanently redirects to that instead.

I think I’m going to do the same! I’d have to rewrite the server-side code in PHP, but that shouldn’t be too tricky.

This could a project for the next Indie Web Camp I attend.

Canadian Typography Archives

Go spelunking down the archives to find some lovely graphic design artefacts.

Shining a Light on the Digital Dark Age - Long Now

A false sense of security persists surrounding digitized documents: because an infinite number of identical copies can be made of any original, most of us believe that our electronic files have an indefinite shelf life and unlimited retrieval opportunities. In fact, preserving the world’s online content is an increasing concern, particularly as file formats (and the hardware and software used to run them) become scarce, inaccessible, or antiquated, technologies evolve, and data decays. Without constant maintenance and management, most digital information will be lost in just a few decades. Our modern records are far from permanent.

Lunar Codex

Time capsules on the moon, using NanoFiche as the storage medium.

35mm scans — writer/editor/reporter

Clicking through these cold war slides gives an uncomfortable mixture of nostalgic appreciation for the retro aesthetic combined with serious heebie-jeebies for the content.

The slides appear to be 1970s/1980s informational or training images from the United States Air Force, NORAD, Navy, and beyond.

A History Of The World According To Getty Images

A short documentary that you can dowload or watch online:

The film explores how image banks including Getty gain control over, and then restrict access to, archive images – even when these images are legally in the public domain. It also forms a small act of resistance against this practice: the film includes six legally licensed clips, and is downloadable as an HD ProRes file. In this way, it aims to liberate these few short clips from corporate control, and make them freely available for viewing and artistic use.

Licensed under aCreative Commons 0: “No rights reserved” license.

LukeW | Ask LukeW: New Ways into Web Content

I like how Luke is using a large language model to make a chat interface for his own content.

This is the exact opposite of how grifters are selling the benefits of machine learning (“Generate copious amounts of new content instantly!”) and instead builds on over twenty years of thoughtful human-made writing.

Worse than LaserDiscs?

Kevin takes my eleven-year old remark literally and points out at least you can emulate LaserDiscs:

So LaserDiscs aren’t the worst things to archive, networks of servers running code that isn’t available or archivable are, and we are building a lot more of those these days, whether on the web or in apps.

Ancient Web Browsers | tweedy

This is an archive of the very earliest Web browsers — the true pioneers, the Old Gods, the Ancients:

WorldWideWeb, LineMode, Viola, Erwise, Midas, TkWWW, Samba, Lynx, w3, FineWWW

Deleting your old thoughts may be giving your older self a kick they really don’t deserve. And the beauty of having an archive is that you don’t need to decide whether you were right or not. Your views, with a date attached, can stand as a reflection of a specific moment in time.

Reconciling every past view you’ve ever had with how you feel now isn’t required. It sounds exhausting, frankly.

A Long Bet on Link Rot is Resolved, but Questions About the Durability of the Web Still Remain - Long Now

The Long Now foundation has a write-up on my recently-lost long bet:

On February 22, 02011, Jeremy Keith made a prediction that he hoped would be proven wrong.

A Long Bet Pays Off - Internet Archive Blogs

The bet was been won (not by me, thankfully) and Jason has some thoughts.

Link tags: archive

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