[ih] Archiving Internet history

[Leo Vegoda]

On Wed, 15 Feb 2023 at 22:08, John Gilmore via Internet-history
<internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

[...]

> It would be better if there were ten Internet Archive nonprofits (or
> government agencies) scattered around the planet.  Each of them would
> ideally be taking copies of each others' full holdings, as well as doing
> their own crawls of the live web, and scanning in whatever physical
> cultural works they are particularly interested in.  Anybody know any
> Internet billionaires or spy-agency VP's who want to catalyze and endow
> a second Internet Archive?  The big advantage for spy agencies is
> stealth; you can look anywhere you want in your own archive, and nobody
> knows where you are looking.

Many national libraries actively archive websites from their own
countries. The UK example is:

https://www.webarchive.org.uk/en/ukwa/info/nominate

That is the page for nominating a site that should be archived.

I hope I am right in assuming that people already working in Legal
Deposit Libraries
(https://www.bl.uk/legal-deposit/about-legal-deposit) think deeply
about doing this well and preserving for centuries and beyond.

I'd hope that we don't need to reinvent organisational structures that
not only already exist but also have legal authority and public
funding.

Kind regards,

Leo