Who archives the web?

One of the most positive characteristics of digital media - whether that's text, photographs, sound or video - is that they can be stored and copied without degradation. With analogue media, every copy you made from the original meant a drop in quality. And whatever carrier you used to store the material - whether print, film, vinyl or magnetic media - there was always the risk that of deterioration over time. So it's easy to think of digital media as indestructible.

But of course that's only true as long as you keep at least one copy.

If I was to close down this blog tomorrow - and I have no intention of doing that - then 563 posts (representing more than 250,000 words) and 2000+ comments would be lost forever. I know there would be fragments here and there, but the archive could never be recreated in full. And it's no good looking to Google - their task is to index all current web pages, not to keep a historical archive.

Now I'm not suggesting that it matters very much what happens to my blog, except perhaps to me. But the ease with which intellectual copyright - and historical record - can be lost is a little frightening. National libraries have established means for storing every book, magazine and newspaper that is published for the benefit of posterity, but attempts to archive digital content have been much less effective, not least because of the multitude of digital media formats. In fact, Adam Farquhar, in charge of digital projects for the British Library, recently pointed out that the world has in some ways a better record of the beginning of the 20th century than of the beginning of the 21st.