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Averting the Digital Dark Age

How Archivists, Librarians, and Technologists Built the Web a Memory

Ian Milligan

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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...

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.

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Reviews

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.

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Book Details

Release Date
Publication Date
Status
Preorder
Trim Size
6
x
9
Pages
208
ISBN
9781421450131
Illustration Description
3 b&w photos, 1 b&w illus
Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1. Representing Meridians and the Mind
Chapter 2. Early Modern Metaphors as Translation
Chapter 3. The Limits of Anatomy through Tu ()
Chapter 4. Generic Maps and the Failure

Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1. Representing Meridians and the Mind
Chapter 2. Early Modern Metaphors as Translation
Chapter 3. The Limits of Anatomy through Tu ()
Chapter 4. Generic Maps and the Failure of Standardization
Chapter 5. Modern Mediations in Difference and Diplomacy
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Glossary A. Key Concepts
Glossary B. Other Sinographic Terms
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Author Bio
Ian Milligan
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Ian Milligan

Ian Milligan (ONTARIO, CANADA) is a professor of history at the University of Waterloo, where he also serves as an associate vice president in the Office of Research. Milligan is the author of The Transformation of Historical Research in the Digital Age and History in the Age of Abundance? How the Web Is Transforming Historical Research.