The Mission to Save Vanishing Internet Art
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
archive.org, of course, has partial copies of some of these -- but it often seems to have trouble with comics and is usually missing years and years of content as a result.
Part of my motivation is similar to your worry that these things will disappear forever, despite having been a huge part of our culture. And I figure one of the best ways to get help on archiving comics is for people to complain "hey your site doesn't do comic X" and then I know that it exists and can get it into the system for crawling.
I know saying "hey I'm working on it" isn't much better than "hey I thought about that too" but if you're interested I can attempt to let you know when I get far enough to put it up on the web instead of my workstation at home.
Obviously, re-hosting web comics is a murky, at best, territory, but this will easily allow local only access for your personal benefit.
I think rehosting is pretty bad, copyright infringement at best and not very nice to boot. That's why I decided that cropping and thumbnailing would be the way to go; enough of a picture to let someone say "yeah I saw that one already" but not so much that they don't go to the artist's site to see new comics.
http://aaaan.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/archiving-the-di...
With links to https://www.incca.org/articles/aktivearchive
It sucks, because as I get older I have less time and energy and more and more competing projects that compete with that limited time.
Can we create a tube clone in some copyright haven ... the culture belongs to humanity.
There are many snapshots on https://web.archive.org but no actual content. Because it was only available to approved guests. Except for some enigmatic abuse, and pushing hell.com addresses. So it goes.
It is a challenging project. Many of these project have both client and server side technologies that must be recaptured, so it is more than just Flash (or Director/Shockwave). I made a project called Airworld that may be part of this Rhizome initiative [1]. It was originally commissioned by the Walker Art Center in 1999 and ultimately involved two different servers that used Perl CGI scripts, mySQL and RealServer on the back end, HTML and RealMedia plugin on the client side. The museum lacked the infrastructure and personnel to keep it alive and it slowly died over the course of 10 years. Even though it's still in the institutions collection.
It is a big problem for 'off-line new media' too. Artist's CD-ROMs, for example. The Rose Goldsen archive of New Media Art at Cornell University Library has made a huge effort to maintain these works [2]. And physical, sculptural 'New Media' works also take massive effort to maintain. I know from experience. [3].
Museums are experts in conversation. They are beginning to think about the challenges that digital technologies bring. But there is a lot of work to do.
[1] http://www.walkerart.org/collections/artworks/airworld [2] http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu/general/cd.php [3] http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/2002.274a-e/
The reception has been positive, I recommend the strategy to other content creators.