"...The task of preserving what's put online has proved, to no one's surprise, monumental. And it's only getting more so as the Internet expands, as Web sites become more dynamic, and as concern grows over online privacy. Increasingly, much of what people put online is being diffused across social networks and distributed through personalized apps on smartphones and tablet computers. The classic Web site, it seems, is already starting to slide toward obsolescence. "I'm convinced the Web as we know it will be gone in a few years' time," Illien says. "What we're doing in this library is trying to capture a trace of it." But to do even that is requiring engineers to build a new, more sophisticated generation of software robots, known as crawlers, to trawl the Web's vast and varied content.
"Illien sees himself as a steward of an ancient tradition; he believes he is helping pioneer a revolution in the way society documents what it does and how it thinks. He points out that since the end of the 19th century, the French National Library has been storing sales catalogs from big department stores, including the famous Galeries Lafayette. "Today," he says, "this exceptional collection…is the best record we have of how people dressed back then and who was buying what." One day, he insists, the archives of eBay will be just as valuable. Capturing them, however, is a task that's very different from anything archivists have ever done.
"The Web is regularly accessed and modified by as many as 2 billion people, in every country on Earth. It's a wild bazaar of scripting languages, file formats, media players, search interfaces, hidden databases, pay walls, pop-up advertisements, untraceable comments, public broadcasts, private conversations, and applications that can be navigated in an infinite number of ways. Finding and capturing even a substantial portion of it all would require development teams and computing resources as large as, or probably larger than, Google's..."
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