EDMONTON - It is history created at the click of a mouse and gone in the blink of an eye.
That's why Marc Weber's team is running to catch up to as many Internet artifacts and as much information as it can in a field in danger of collapsing inward like a black hole from the sheer volume of data.
"A lot of people say the Internet is as important as the invention of the printing press," said Weber, a collections specialist and co-founder of the U.S.-based Web History Center, based in Indiana.
"There's a very good chance if we don't act now this will be a Dark Age for future historians."
"We could end up with far less than in the age of paper."
Weber and his colleagues were in Banff, Alta., earlier this month to beat the drum on preserving web history at the World Wide Web Conference and to look for a Canadian point person to pass along leads and contacts on the best and the brightest of Maple Leaf e-work through the years.
They want historical software, programs, data, correspondence, photos, videos and screen shots.
E-preservation can be challenge, even for web giants like EBay, said Weber. He noted that the online auctioneer recently wanted to post in its lobby screen shots to show the development of its web page through the years.
"They did find them but they found it was a really, really difficult internal path, finding tape backups and storage space. And this is EBay finding its own sites, much less the average person."
Without the past, developers are in danger of having to repeat it.
"Maybe 25 per cent of the ideas for how to use information network systems developed since 1960 are actually used on the web," he said.
"There is 75 per cent sitting out that most people aren't aware of."
Early hypertext systems from the 1960s and 1970s before the web were in fact more sophisticated, he said. They displayed links that actually previewed what the viewer was going to see along with more in-depth cataloguing systems and easier ways to navigate a site.
Some innovations in e-commerce were actually pioneered a lot earlier, then had to be rediscovered years later.
"People tend to keep on trying without knowing what their predecessors did."
Sean Gouglas, a humanities computing professor at the University of Alberta, calls catching the Net in a net a laudable goal, but a daunting task.
"On the Internet the knowledge base grows exponentially. It's extraordinarily difficult to keep up and collect an accurate view of what has transpired."
"There just aren't enough hard drives."
Gouglas said representative samples of political, educational and corporate websites can deliver not only a technical history but also a social history of the embryonic mass communications medium.
One prime example is Facebook, he said.
"Facebook looks like a website should. It has a standard design that has come to take the place of how websites should look," he said.
The Web History Center recently joined forces with the California-based Computer History Museum to preserve and educate on the information age. Their researchers also seek tactile artifacts such as mugs and clothes.
One prize find was a T-shirt from Netscape shortly after the lawsuit that forced it to change its name from Mosaic.
The shirt said Netscape but still has the old Mosaic logo. "An artifact," Weber said proudly. "From the first browser war."
