When I started writing about my digital footprint and legacy, I wondered if there was any place on the Internet that contained everybody’s digitized history and whether or not this history was accessible. Could my digital legacy end up being stored on one of these sites. That led me to do a Google search asking the following question:
“Is there a place on the Web that serves as a universal library containing all the content ever posted to sites or digitized from print media, books, film and video, and audio sources that is free and open for anyone to use?”
My follow-up question was:
“Can I add my content to it?”
The search results pointed to the Internet Archive and Wayback Machine. I had to learn more and set up an online account, which cost nothing.
So, what is the Internet Archive?
It is a non-profit digital library representing the largest collection of existing digitized print materials, web pages, software, music, audiovisuals and other forms of media. It is an online resource that is searchable and open for general public use.
The Archive began back in 1996. The first web page was captured on May 10th of that year. Today, it is being continually updated by web crawlers. The first of these was launched in October 1996.
A web crawler, if you are unfamiliar with the term, is a piece of software code or algorithm written to seek out keywords on specific subjects, topics, and phrases, and deliver the results to a designated recipient.
If you want to use your own web crawler, you don’t need to write any code. Google Alerts provides a free web crawler-based service that dumps the results from keyword and phrase searches into your email.
The Archive’s Wayback Machine lets users access more than one trillion websites found in the Internet Archive. The Archive contains older versions of websites as well as current ones. The older dates back as far as 1996. Imagine how much the content and appearance of corporate websites have changed since 1996.
The Archive’s content is enormous. A quick inventory currently includes:
- 916 billion web pages.
- 49 million books and texts, with 35 million research articles and scholarly documents accessible through the Internet Archive Scholar.
- 13 million audio recordings (including 268,000 live concerts).
- 10 million videos (including 3 million Television News programs).
- 5 million images.
- 1 million software programs (including historic computer programs, vintage console and arcade games and more).
If you choose to become a user, you can add to the Archive’s content, a way to permanently preserve your digital legacy.
Using the Wayback Machine for searches is easy. Type the URL or words associated with a site you seek, and it delivers.
Use Internet Archive Scholar to see research papers and articles dating back to the 18th century. Internet Archive Scholar offers a distinct advantage over services like Google Scholar, which I often use for background research for this blog. The problem with the Google tool is that the results I usually get are abstracts that summarize the research, while the entire article remains inaccessible behind a paywall. That doesn’t happen with Internet Archive Scholar.
My search for universal knowledge repositories came across another source, the Universal Digital Library. This is a project with similar ambitions to the Internet Archive. Its focus is the digitization of academic books and documents, and was started by Carnegie Mellon University. Today, new contributions come from 8 other American, 8 Chinese, and 10 Indian universities and European academic institutions as well.
The initial Carnegie Mellon goal had been to digitize a million books in multiple languages by 2007. Today, that number has grown to more than 1.5 million in more than 20 languages, with the library increasing by 7,000 new books daily.
A repository where you can share your knowledge and digital legacy that shouldn’t be forgotten is Wikipedia. This is the online encyclopedia published in 343 languages. It has killed off most encyclopedia publishers except for Britannica and World Book.
Having grown up in a house with both of these print encyclopedias on our shelves, it is hard to believe that the former no longer publishes a print edition while the latter still does, the last one standing, backed by the largesse of Berkshire Hathaway.
Elon Musk recently launched his Wikipedia killer, Grokipedia, an attempt to supplant the former because he claims it has an inherent liberal bias. The recent launch of Grokipedia contains 800,000 entries and pales in comparison to the millions of entries to be found in Wikipedia. It also appears to have used its AI to grab Wikipedia content. That is bound to be a lawsuit in the making.
Wikipedia also offers a repository of freely usable media, called Wikimedia. This is another place where you can deposit your digital legacy of images, videos, sounds, diagrams and more.
