Averting the Digital Dark Age
Subtitle: How Archivists, Librarians, and Technologists Built the Web a Memory
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2024
Language: eng
Format: eBook
ISBN-13: 9781421450131
Description: How the internet's memory infrastructure developed—averting a "digital dark age"—and introduced a golden age of historical memory.

In early 1996, the web was ephemeral. But by 2001, the internet was forever. How did websites transform from having a brief life to becoming long-lasting? Drawing on archival material from the Internet Archive and exclusive interviews, Ian Milligan's _Averting the Digital Dark Age_ explores how Western society evolved from fearing a digital dark age to building the robust digital memory we rely on today. By the mid-1990s, the specter of a "digital dark age" haunted libraries, portending a bleak future with no historical record that threatened cyber obsolescence, deletion, and apathy. People around the world worked to solve this impending problem. In San Francisco, technology entrepreneur Brewster Kahle launched his scrappy nonprofit, Internet Archive, filling tape drives with internet content. Elsewhere, in Washington, Canberra, Ottawa, and Stockholm, librarians developed innovative new programs to safeguard digital heritage. Cataloging worries among librarians, technologists, futurists, and writers from WWII onward, through early practitioners, to an extended case study of how September 11 prompted institutions to preserve thousands of digital artifacts related to the attacks, _Averting the Digital Dark Age_ explores how the web gained a long-lasting memory. By understanding this history, we can equip our society to better grapple with future internet shifts.