This posting today by the Internet Archive’s Brewster Kahle – Help Us Keep the Archive Free, Accessible, and Private, is significant for all of us who use this resource, be it as as educators, librarians, attorneys, advocates for civil liberties, students, or as citizens or residents of the United States.  Brewster states: “We are building the Internet Archive of Canada because, to quote our friends at LOCKSS, “lots of copies keep stuff safe.” This project will cost millions. So this is the one time of the year I will ask you: please make a tax-deductible donation to help make sure the Internet Archive lasts forever…The Internet Archive is a non-profit library built on trust. Our mission: to give everyone access to all knowledge, forever. For free. The Internet Archive has only 150 staff but runs one of the top-250 websites in the world [emphasis added]. Reader privacy is very important to us, so we don’t accept ads that track your behavior.  We don’t even collect your IP address. But we still need to pay for the increasing costs of servers, staff and rent….” The Internet Archives and Way Back Machine are integral to learning and scholarship across myriad fields and are a critical free, comprehensive, sustainable model for ensuring that web sites and their content do not disappear along with our print libraries, book stores, and superceded technologies which provided games, videos, television programs, music and audio archives (to name some of the site’s content). Change occurs yes, but more often than not, with no back-up plan. The photos, videos and music we cherished were stored on devices that are now considered obsolete. Archiving knowledge is a huge lift folks, and the challenges to doing so go beyond cost, location and server storage space. There is no replacement for civil liberties – they do not become obsolete, they are not fungible, and once destroyed, what is the threshold for their restoration, if at all possible? Getting off tiny soap box now, and adding that I am in no way affiliated with the Internet Archive, but my blog which is tiny by comparison, represents 14 years of research and knowledge sharing, and it too is brought to you, via Canada. So thank you for joining me in supporting this effort, and for your continued support of BeSpacific.

• Robots.txt Files and Archiving .gov and .mil Websites – “The Internet Archive is collecting webpages from over 6,000 government domains, over 200,000 hosts, and feeds from around 10,000 official federal social media accounts. Some have asked if we ignore URL exclusions expressed in robots.txt files.”