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Who Moved My Page?

By Kathy Farrel (Intel) (63 posts) on December 14, 2009 at 5:14 pm

I think of the Internet as one eternal bulletin board. People keep posting things out on the board and often just walk away - at least I hope they do so my links/bookmarks always work. Yeah - right! There will always be content that is moved or deleted (with the owner never leaving any info on where it went - it's just gone). As my colleague says - the Internet gets broken all the time. But I have about a thousand bookmarks right now (and you probably do too) - at least half of which don't work because someone broke the Internet.

What to do?

I am selfishly thinking of a particular bookmark, linking to an article I co-wrote for Intel.com back in 2001. It was a technical overview of .Net when it was a brand new technology. I was pretty proud of it at the time (still am) and as a writer keeps clippings of what is written, I printed the article. But it was four pages long and printing it wasn't the same - didn't look as good - and nothing like a newspaper clipping.  Wouldn't it be nice if that bookmark just worked forever? Well, there is this Web site: http://archive.org that has something called the Way Back Machine (it's right in the middle of the page I'm pointing you to).  You insert the original url and click the Take Me Back button and a range of years (1996 'til the present - is '96 when the Internet was born?) show up with your link in the correct year. So I put my url in there and lo and behold! there is the original article - all the nearby links don't work but there it is. Don't know how this works but so glad it does.

But wouldn't it be great if you could put in an old url and see the old page as if it had never been archived? The Memento Project involves just that. As noted by New Science last month, computer  scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico (and other locations) are working on "Time Traveling" web browser technology.  Scientist Herbert Van de Sompel points out that people "treat the Web like a library" and one has to know how to search the library (remember the Dewey Decimal System?) to find what you're looking for.  Check out New Science - I follow them on Twitter and learn about lots of new and exciting technology, projects and just ideas. Do read more about this.

An interesting side note is the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program at the Library of Congress - where they are working on a national strategy to manage what they call "significant digital content." So I guess this means that just as we have preserved precious hard copy documents like the Declaration of Independence, we are preserving important electronic documents too but we won't have to go to the Smithsonian or the Library of Congress to see them.

Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: archive, Bookmarks, Library of Congress, Memento Project, National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program

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Comments (4)

December 16, 2009 6:54 AM PST javierandrescaceres Total Points: 6,735 Black Belt

The "Way Back Machine" - Very useful.

January 15, 2010 9:52 AM PST Narayan

Nice day Kathy ! Sound knowledge of Memento Project, New Scince, Way Back Machine. Thanks.

January 15, 2010 9:54 AM PST Kathy Farrel (Intel) Total Points: 9,186 Community Manager

Narayan - thanks for the compliment. I had fun writing that blog. Which reminds me - it's time to write another one! Hope your weekend is a good one.

January 15, 2010 1:46 PM PST Gael Holmes Hofemeier (Intel) Total Points: 20,926 Black Belt

How about "Who piled more cheese onto my cheese?"

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