SBA

We’ve Lost Our Memories

A long, long, long time ago, thought to be between 48 BC and 642 AD, the Great Library of Alexandria was destroyed. Allegedly up to 400,000 scrolls were lost. We don’t know whether it was destroyed by the notorious vandal Julius Caesar, or in the Muslim conquest of Alexandria, or due to some other event in between. It may have been destroyed several times, certainly there are historical accounts of multiple events to which the destruction is attributed, or it may have merely been partially destroyed in each until the last, final obliteration. Whichever, the destruction of the Royal Library of Alexandria was a major loss that, today, is still mourned by historians because it is presumed that it contained important documents which would enhance our understanding of the Ancient Egyptian and Greek history upon which western civilisation is founded. With the destruction of the Great Library history lost the repository that was responsible for “collecting all the world’s knowledge”. 

The Great Library may not have been the sole repository of those documents, the sum of that knowledge may have survived in copies of documents distributed across the other major libraries of the ancient world - but nobody can say for certain, we simply don’t know all that is missing. Historical documents, recent and ancient, are immensely important to us because they help to explain the events, discoveries, cultures and philosophies which have shaped how we got to where we are today. Of course we no longer have that risk, our important recent public histories are safely stored by digital technology and mostly available for all to read via the web. Or are they?

Probably not. Since 1991, when the the World Wide Web became a reality, countless documents have been published solely in electronic form, and have since disappeared. In January 1994 I published a technology reference book on my website of the day (it also sold well in hardcopy) which I am happy to say is still on the web and available to read - making it amongst the oldest original web documents still online. Such longevity on the Internet is the exception, not the rule; web documents are in general short-lived items which are lost or discarded when we update our websites or upgrade the computer systems which host them. 

This is rarely a major problem; most people and organisations tend to live in the here and now so the loss of an old web page is either irrelevant or a matter of minor regret - our websites hardly have the significance of the Great Library of Alexandria. In general the minority of organisations which produce documents of historical significance are careful to preserve them, but nevertheless we are increasingly dependent on the web as the primary medium for news publication and archives and hence vulnerable to the loss of our digital libraries. 

This new reality came to earth with a bump in the Isle of Man last month when Isle of Man Newspapers finally escaped the clutches of Johnston Press, whose share price has lost 88% of its value over the past two years. The sale of the Manx national papers to Tindle Newspapers necessitated a new home for the Isle of Man Today website, and given that I was no fan of the previous website hosted by Johnston Press I was looking forward to seeing the new incarnation under Tindle’s ownership. I think it’s fair to say, as a consumer, that the new website is a small improvement; it seems to be cleaner, faster and easier to navigate, but alas, no archives! We have lost our digital memories, the online history of Isle of Man news has gone AWOL. 

Our loss may not seem significant, but if you want to look up when Tony Parry became Managing Director of Canada Life International, or when Cains first offered their Space Law prize to students enrolled at the International Space University, you will have to look elsewhere. I’ll give you a clue, both were about the same time that past MHK Peter Karran quit the Manx Labour Party and revealed his intention to found a new party.  Whilst the first two of those news items may not be especially significant in the annals of the island’s history, the third has been resonating through Manx politics ever since.

Richard Butt, editor of Isle of Man Newspapers, tells me that he hopes the archives will be restored, but he is not completely confident because the monolithic Johnston Press web system, which serves hundreds of websites encompassing most of the regional newspapers owned by Johnston Press, was not designed to enable disentanglement of an individual online publication such as the Isle of Man Today website. 

The loss of access to our history affects not only us readers; the editorial staff at the paper have similarly lost access to past news stories and their photo library. Extracting all this out of Johnston Press’ computer systems is likely to be a complicated and labour-intensive task at a time when Johnston Press have other priorities.

Richard - if you need technical advice just ask. We should not lose our recent history. 

Anyway, here we are… the Isle of Man Newspapers web archives may not have been in the same league as the Great Library of Alexandria, but they were our recent history. Some of the more infamous folk on the island will probably be pleased they have vanished, but rest of us have lost something of value. If only there was some mystical mechanism which scooped up the past of the Internet.

In 1996 a far sighted entrepreneur in San Francisco set about creating exactly such a thing, the Internet Archive. It started slurping up web pages in October 1996 and in December that year got around to the place where my aforementioned book was first published (I had a look today). Since then it has slurped over 279 billion web pages from over 360 million websites. In 2001 it started making these available to the public in 2001 via the website http://archive.org - otherwise known as “The Wayback Machine”, and its purpose is explicitly to mitigate the problem of the transience of web-published information. The Internet Archive website at one time said:

“Most societies place importance on preserving artifacts of their culture and heritage. Without such artifacts, civilization has no memory and no mechanism to learn from its successes and failures. Our culture now produces more and more artifacts in digital form. The Archive's mission is to help preserve those artifacts and create an Internet library for researchers, historians, and scholars.”

Take a peek one rainy day; if you know what you’re looking for The Wayback Machine is one of the most amazing treasure troves of information on the planet. It’s like Google but for stuff that has vanished from the web. Amongst the gems within is its capture of IOMToday.co.im, from November 2004, including the story (dated 18th October) titled “NEW PARTY VOW AS KARRAN QUITS”. There are earlier captures dating back to 2001 from the older iomonline.co.im website but sadly they don’t work very well.

Wonderful as The Wayback Machine is, it has its limitations. It can’t slurp information hidden behind login screens or paywalls, and necessarily can’t visit every website every day, so it is an incomplete record, a series of snapshots in time. Nevertheless it is broad and deep enough to encompass the moment of events in the past twenty years, even those on our little island. 

For as long as there have been computers the experts have been entreating us to make our own backups of digital data, and for just as long many people and organisations have regretted their failure to follow this advice. You can’t predict how you will be separated from your current and historical data; maybe your computer will crash, perhaps the company which provides your systems will go bust, you may fall victim to ransomware, if you live in the wrong place your systems may even be wiped by an electromagnetic bomb delivered by cruise missile. Whatever … back it up. You never know when you might need it.