[-empyre-] In the year 2525 - Using the web archives

["Paul Koerbin" <pkoerbin@nla.gov.au>]

Well folks, despite the fact that our impulses are apparently absurd and
that we are doomed upon this mortal coil - thanks for constructive
contribution APA - we will I guess try to salvage some small amount of
dignity in the face of the catastrophe by pursuing our small works
diligently, lest, to paraphrase Kafka, the bony structure of our own
foreheads prevent us from moving at all.

I would like to find out how people think the archives of online
resources will or may be used. To a large degree we who are working to
build these archives are just doing what we can and expecting and hoping
that their content will be utilised. However it would interesting to
hear how others, especially the creators of works, think web archives
might be used now or in the future. 

I attended the first meeting of the International Internet Preservation
Consortium Researching Requirements Working Group in London in September
last and heard a lot from researchers whose interest is the study of the
Internet per se. This was quite a revelation since their perspective was
not one that saw content as necessarily of primary interest; or at least
there were other dimensions that were just as important to them. That
is, they were intersted in such things as:
the context of the resources as much interest as the content; 
the ontology of the web; 
the sociology of the web and how it was/is used at any given time; 
how the web is annotated by the bloggers and so on. 
So much of this is not captured  in or derivable from the sorts of
archives we are currently building. I found this fascinating but I also
wonder if this is a bit misleading too. Is this the interest of a small
number of researchers whose subject is the web? The reality of working
in a library with a working online archive is that the requests we are
aware of are still very much for the content (and I mean textual or
visual content) and I suspect (but don't know) that people seeking this
content don't care much if the font is different from the original or if
the fancy Flash intro doesn't work, provided they can get to the text or
image. Artistic creations are obviously going to be a different case,
but I am thinking more generally and most of the content of the web we
are archiving at the NLA is textual and visual content with a certain
amount of multimedia.

Anyway, would be interested on people's thoughts and speculations about
the use of web archives now and into the future.

Paul


Paul Koerbin
Supervisor
Digital Archiving Section
National Library of Australia

(02) 6262 1411
pkoerbin@nla.gov.au