Memory Lane changes as time passes - even for digital archives

NET RESULTS:We tend to think the internet will store its own content forever. We are very wrong

On my regular walks with my dogs, we pass a corner next to a park where the prevailing breeze whisks loose leaves, empty crisp packets and other bits of detritus up against a wall.

Anyone with dogs will know that piles of damp leaves attract them in much the same way as catnip does cats, and all forward movement ceases as they snuffle around. So this corner is always where we take a little contemplative pause.

Last weekend, a page torn from a newspaper lay among the heap of leaves – hardly unusual, but one of the headlines caught my eye. “Jets for Dublin to London”, it proclaimed.

That seemed oddly anachronistic, as did a smaller article at the bottom, entitled “Oireachtas Art Lectures”.

This flagged an upcoming set of Oireachtas-sponsored public art talks at the Municipal Gallery. Hard to imagine that as a top line budget item these days.

The newsprint scrap turned out to be the bottom half of an October 1967 page from the Irish Press.I carefully folded it up and pocketed it to have a proper look once I got back home, and the dogs and I moved on.

Back at the house, a closer examination revealed that the first headline I’d seen did indeed refer to the arrival of jets from Aer Lingus and British European Airways, to replace the propeller aeroplanes on the route – slashing half an hour or so off the existing flights. Heady times indeed!

But the best article on the entire page was innocuously headlined “Minister’s Wife’s Appeal”.

And this was the story in its entirety: “Mrs Maureen Haughey, wife of the minister for finance, has made an appeal for a foster mother for her Irish wolfhound, Gráinne. The wolfhound gave birth to 12 pups and some help is needed if they are all to survive, she said. The phone number is 334593.”

Where does one even begin to parse the layered delights of this snippet? An appeal for a foster dog mother? A wolfhound named Gráinne? The printing of what was, presumably, a minister’s home phone number in a daily newspaper? The fact that such a story would even be reported? The utter perfection of it all.

How easily something this wonderful is lost forever (I would guess I am likely to be the only person to have read it again in over 40 years). Someone could dig through microfiche copies of the now defunct Press, and might stumble upon this particular page and notice this tiny little item in the right-hand column – but it's very unlikely, even setting aside that not many people these days know how to crank through old newspapers on microfiche machines.

In our internet-enabled, electronic era, such a delightful if minuscule piece of Irish history would really only live on if digitised.

Or would it? The issue of digital archiving is actually far more fraught than it might at first appear. Take newspapers. These days, most papers present their stories online in a digital format and it might seem that this would guarantee that they’ll be around for eternity. After all, there’s nothing to convert – they are already in electronic form.

But if, as has happened with increasing frequency, papers close down, what happens to that archive? There are costs involved with keeping it online, let alone in a well-presented and easily searchable format.

And there’s also the problem of “link rot”. There’s no guarantee that a link which takes me directly to a story today will remain forever associated with that story. I’ve already been in a situation where a large body of writing I did for a publication – which I thought would always be available conveniently to me online, back in the early days of the internet – vanished when they changed the way they structured their links.

Back then, I don’t think anyone really thought about how updating and streamlining an archive would cause a lot of the archive simply to vanish. But it did.

Formats are a huge issue as well. For a sense of the problem, just think about how many forms of eventually defunct storage media you have used over the past decade. Many of us have gone from floppy disks to CD ROMs, to DVDs, to external hard drives, and now, perhaps, the cloud.

Bricks-and-mortar institutions have all of those problems as they try to preserve documents, as well as the headache of an endless stream of digital formats and changing standards that, in turn, are not consistent across all archives. A format can easily become as obsolete as the large floppy disk in no time at all, making content inaccessible.

At least, you might think, there’s all that stuff out there on the internet that’s going to be around forever – easy to archive that. But no, this too is a deeply complex area, also plagued with changing formats, vanishing content and disappearing domains.

Recognising they need to try to tackle some formal level of preservation, organisations such as Brewster Kahle’s Internet Archive in the US (archive.org) make a heroic attempt to preserve as much as they can of the internet’s riches. In Europe, the Internet Memory Foundation (internetmemory.org, with Kahle on its board) works to do the same.

They still can’t save everything. Still, they can do far more with today’s digital toolkit than yesterday’s archivists slowly preparing bound volumes of newspapers, or copying them to microfiche, could. And someone using the Internet Archive’s wonderful Wayback Machine site – which lets users explore a time-lapse series of saved webpages for individual sites – will no doubt find their own digital equivalent of a newspaper scrap from decades before, drifting among the bytes.