If there is one thing that still sucks about the online world is that it can be so transitory – data here today may disappear tomorrow. At least other info-storage formats degrade on scales measured in years. Whether it be due to site closure, redesign, or (blech) registration compulsion, it’s always sad when I link-check this site and discover what’s no longer there.
This particular run-through made me weep because some significant “primary source” material, especially relevant to the history of microradio, has given up the ghost: Radio4all.org and its news archive; microradio.net; all of the microradio briefs written by the National Lawyer’s Guild Committee on Democratic Communications; and the UK info-trove Y2Kpirates.
Fortunately the Wayback Machine catches a lot of stuff, but can’t be counted on to catalog depth. Projects like the Internet Archive exist for this very reason, yet very few take the trouble to preserve the information they create. It’s frustrating when bits of the virtual world vanish.
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