Re: [Nethistory] Collecting the history of networking, a possible methodology

[Brian E Carpenter <[e-mail]>]

Joe,

...
> This to me seemed like a good approach to Internet history: the anarchic commons free-edit with no pretension of journalistic integrity; the resulting pile of clues provides a basis for actual research.

There's a lot to what you say, but there is one aspect that's quite worrying
in informal crowdsourcing of the material: long-term retention.

Fact: stuff that you thought was nicely available on the Web turns out to
unavailable five years later, except perhaps via the wayback machine.

Example: CERN has recently been searching for a copy of the original
first web page ever.

Example: some of the "archival" sources I used for my own recent book
turned out to have vanished when I did a final pre-publication check
of their URLs.

I think it is essential to have an organised method of securing copies
of material and putting them somewhere that has a high probability
of long-term survival. Crowdsourcing is a *great* method of getting the
material, but a lousy method of collecting and preserving it.

My conclusion is that we *do* need an organised team of curators.

     Brian