Averting the Digital Dark Age

In a remarkably brief span of time, a seemingly fragile new medium—the web—became not only preservable but deemed worthy of preservation. Ian Milligan compellingly documents the swift actions of key organizations and individuals who ensured that our modern digital record would not be lost. Averting the Digital Dark Age is thus a human story as much as a technological one.

Historical exploration of nearly any subject in the late 20th to early 21st century will require engaging with web archives. Milligan has written an invaluable guide to the emergence of the web and the collaborations between industry, the Internet Archive, and national libraries that now serve as critical preservation infrastructure.

A digital dark age and an age of information abundance have been heralded in the popular imaginary for years. However, robust historical reasearch about these topics has been lacking. Ian Milligan's Averting the Digital Dark Age fills this gap by providing an outstanding and thought-provoking analysis of the web's forgetting and remembering.

In Averting the Digital Dark Age, Ian Milligan reveals how fears of digital loss gave way to an era of online abundance. The book emphasizes the crucial efforts of professionals and archivists at the Internet Archive and national web archives in preserving our digital heritage, telling the important history of how they came to safeguard society's digital memory.

This wonderfully readable book tells the compelling story of the individuals, teams, institutions, and organizations instrumental in ensuring that the richness and diversity of the early web remains accessible to us today. It argues convincingly that far from risking a digital dark age, we are entering an age of carefully stewarded digital abundance.