The Internet Archive should receive significant government funding. It's insane we let cultural treasures disappear into the wind when we can preserve them for negligible costs.
The LoC seems to have some web archiving going on, but it’s very selective. I don’t know how any good archivist can think they will know what will be important in the future.
I did a search for MTV and only got 3 results, and only 1 is actually from MTV. For the cultural significance MTV had, I find this hard to believe.
https://www.loc.gov/web-archives/?q=MTV
I can’t figure out how to actually view the archived page, which is also an issue. What good is an archive if it can’t be accessed.
Either way, it seems like if the government was going to put more money behind internet archiving, they’d fund their own service to make it better.
In the current operating environment, it is important to optimize for optionality.
(No affiliation with the Internet Archive, just a concerned citizen)
I think its a fair way to have some check and balance between a centralized library doing all the archiving, and a million libraries each with their own archival system.
Don't take it for granted.
I mean, when it dies it will be a greater tragedy than the burning of the library of Alexandria (at least many of the books there were copied elsewhere), it will be a tremendous blow to our collective knowlege and memory.
But it's inevitable that it will go away.
In the long run we are all dead, yes. But whether it will be around in the next decades is up to us who are currently alive.