Headline, October27, 2013

''' +> {DIGITAL} :!!! RIGHT TO 

REMEMBER <+ '''

The technology of the past : Aliweb, Jumpstation and WebCrawler have long since been pensioned off, or subsumed into other services.

Even the Wayback Machine  -a search engine that allows users to call up old web pages which have vanished from the scene  -come up empty handed

The Wayback Machine's inventor, Brewester Kahle,  in 1996, founded a non-profit organisation, the Internet Archive, to create a free internet library capable of storing a copy of every web page of every website ever to go online.

The Wayback Machine allows users to view the library's archived web pages as they appeared when published. Today the Internet Archive includes texts, audio, moving images and software. At the last count, its collection more than 150 billion items.

An interesting spin-off from the Internet Archive is the Open Library, which aims to provide a Web page for every book in existence. The Open Library is not to be confused with the project Gutenberg, founded by the late Michael Hart, the inventor of the electronic book back in 1971.

Project Gutenberg offers some 40,000 e-books that can be downloaded free in any of the popular e-reader formats.

Open Library, by contrast, is essentially an editable catalogue. The org works with various libraries around the world to catalogue their their book collections and scan in various texts. So far it has amassed details of over 20m titles and scanned in the contents of some 1.7m books.

But Why is Mr Kahle doing all this when Google, Amazon, Apple and others are putting civilization's creative outpourings online as fast as their editing, scanning and recording machines can cope?

The obvious answer is because these commercial entities charge for access to some info, whereas non-profit archives are generally free. Money aside, there are other reasons for encouraging open-source archives. 

For one, commercial outfits can be picky about granting search engines, other than their own, access to content they have archived.

And even with material old enough to be in the public domain, users of the proprietary archives can still be denied the right to copy or distribute it

The world and the Internet, it seems, has given little thought to the exasperation of lost in cyberspace.

As the Internet Archive notes, without libraries, people would find it hard to exercise their   ''right to remember''.

As more and more public info moves from printed to digital form, it is vital that virtual libraries of all kinds archive as much of it as they can in the interests of future reference and accountability.

 For its part, !WOW! and the world students must remember to preserve things for posterity.   

With respectful dedication to the Students, Professors and Teachers of North Korea. See Ya all on the World Students Society Computers-Internet-Wireless : 

''' !!! Shield & Defender !!! '''

Good Night & God Bless!

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless