This year the Internet Archive turns 25.
Increasingly, much of daily life is conducted online.
The COVID-19 pandemic has pushed even more interactions to the web.
You may not realize portions of the internet are constantly disappearing.
you’re able to help us save the internet, too, as a citizen archivist.
Disappearing act
People and organizations remove content from the web for a variety of reasons.
Sometimes its a result of changing internet culture, such as the recentshutdown of Yahoo Answers.
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When a website is updated, for example, the previous version is overwritten unless it was archived.
Web archiving is the process of collecting, preserving, and providing continued access to information on the internet.
Often this work is done by librarians and archivists, with assistance from automated technology like web crawlers.
It is funded through donations, grants, and payments for its digitization services.
Over750 million web pages are captured per dayin the Internet Archives Wayback Machine.
Why archive?
Archiving government websites promotes transparency and accountability.
Especially during times of transition, government websites are vulnerable to deletion with changing political parties.
Twitter supplies the Library of Congress with the texts of tweets, not shared images or videos.
Instead of comprehensive collecting, the Library of Congress now archives only tweets of significant national importance.
Screen capture from the Dec. 18, 1996, archived version of the Ty website, creator of.
Anyone can be a citizen archivist and preserve history through theInternet Archives Wayback Machine.
The Save Page Now feature allows anyone to freely archive a single, public website page.
This may be due to sensitive content or the personal preference of the web developer.
Over 800 institutions useArchive-It, a tool from the Internet Archive, to create archived web collections.
The websites of today are the historical evidence of tomorrow, but only if they are archived.
