ARCHIVING NUMISMATIC WEBSITES

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V27 2024 INDEX E-SYLUM ARCHIVE

The E-Sylum: Volume 27, Number 34, August 25, 2024, Article 6

"When a book is published it will last almost forever. How does one publish a numismatic website forever even if not updated? Keep the domain name registered and the website hosted forever. Could an Institution undertake to do that for a financial deposit? It can't be an IT company as it may not exist long-term. It can't be a bank account paying the fees via a deposit as the hosting server may need to be changed."

"Does anyone know Oleg Leyderman of Germany who had a fabulous Banknote Website www.notescollector.eu that he took offline in 2024 February? I had made lots of links to it from my notes.lakdiva.org site as he had done detailed illustrated descriptions of many Ceylon and Sri Lankan Banknotes in his World Collection.

"He did not reply why, but it is sad if such websites go offline. They should be properly archived. It is saved in archive.org, but that is not as easy to navigate within or link to like a proper website.

"Does the Newman Numismatic Portal archive it like a proper website that you can link to and read?"

NNP uses Internet Archive's Archive-It tool to crawl numismatic websites and add pages to the archive.org Wayback Machine. It's sad when useful sites go away, and navigating pages in archive.org is not a proper website experience. NNP does not host copies of websites in their original form, but does have one means of archiving a complete site.

With one command on their computer server, webmasters can bundle up every page of their websites into a single compressed file, and that file can be archived on the Newman Portal for future access in .pdf format. All the text and images are preserved, and in the future could be unpacked, reviewed or repurposed for a new audience.

One example is the website of the diary of Dr. Charles E. Boyle, which Gerry Tebben preserved on NNP. -Editor

This is the diary of Dr. Charles E. Boyle, a Columbus physician who was one of 60 adventurers who left Columbus, OH on April 2, 1849, to seek their fortune in the California gold rush.

Compiled from a series of web pages originally built by Gerry Tebben.

"I'm grateful that the Newman Numismatic Portal is able to preserve it. It was part of a companion website I created about 25 years ago to accompany a story I wrote for The Columbus Dispatch about two groups of Columbus 49ers. I had hoped the Wayback Machine (Internet Archive) had stored the website, but I couldn't find it there."

Please do get in touch with NNP Project Coordinator Len Augsburger or me if you or your company or hobby organization would like to archive a .pdf copy of an at-risk website.

We should all get our individual online assets in order. Here's a recent Wall Street Journal article on why everyone needs a ‘Digital Death-Cleaning' plan and a Time magazine article on the aging and afterlife of the internet itself. -Editor

Packrats like us are the fodder for Swedish death cleaning, a decluttering trend based on the idea of thinning your material possessions in life, so you don't burden your survivors in death. But many people now burden their survivors with nonmaterial possessions, too, in the form of countless digital files and online accounts. (Especially those who believe in archiving every email and file.)

That's why you need a digital death cleaning plan—one that gives you the full benefits of retaining your digital history while you're alive but thinks ahead to what your children are going to do with all that when you're gone.

The internet is aging. As soon as the 2060s, there may be more dead than alive users on Facebook. Many of the platforms that are now part of society's basic infrastructure face a similar prospect. What happens to these platforms—and their users—when they die, will become a critical battleground for the internet's future, with major implications for global power relations. Yet we have done virtually zero preparation for it.

We know that everyone using the internet will die, and that hundreds of millions, or even billions, will do so in the next three decades. We also know that this poses a serious threat to an economy based on targeted advertisement (the dead don't click on any ads, but require server space nevertheless). Yet the tech giants appear to have no plan for what to do as their (undeniably material) servers are filled with dead user data. Since dead people generally lack data privacy rights, it may gain a new commercial value as training data for new AI models, or even be sold back to the descendants in a kind of heritage as a service deal. But the ethical aspects are thorny, and the financial bearing shaky.

Experience (and sheer logic) also tells us that the platforms that dominate tech today will sooner or later fail and die. What will happen to the user data? Can it, like other assets, be auctioned to the highest bidder? Will it be used to train new algorithms to trace the users, or their descendants? A hypothetical failure of a DNA testing company that stores our most personal information on their servers is a chilling example. These questions show how the fate of our digital remains is inextricably entangled with the privacy of the living. Yet, as of today, their answers are few and vague, as if the thought of a tech giant dying were beyond our comprehension.