Ian Milligan is the author of Averting the Digital Dark Age: How Archivists, Librarians, and Technologists Built the Web a Memory, available now from Johns Hopkins University Press. In the interview below, he discusses his book, the origins of web archiving, and the ongoing challenges of preserving digital memory.
Please introduce yourself to our readers.
My name is Ian Milligan and I’m a Professor of History at the University of Waterloo. For the last decade or so, I’ve been working at the intersection of digital history, web archives, and computational methods, and I’m really interested in the big question of how historians will tackle the digital abundance that characterizes our modern world. What skills and platforms do we need to make sure they can? Part of that is understanding today’s memory infrastructure, which inspired Averting the Digital Dark Age.
Briefly summarize Averting the Digital Dark Age: How Archivists, Librarians, and Technologists Built the Web a Memory.
Averting the Digital Dark Age—which is, shameless plug, available open access from Johns Hopkins University Press—tells the story of how a loose assemblage of archivists, librarians, and technologists built the infrastructure that allows the web to remember. I use two main moments to bring this into relief: an argument that in 1994-1996, there was increasingly widespread consternation about the “digital dark age” (I also unpack that term!) and that by September 2001, in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks, that web preservation was a “solved” enough problem that we preserved countless information within days of that moment.
To tell this story, I look at the Internet Archive as well as national library programs around the world, and the decisions that were necessary to “avert the digital dark age” between identifying the problem in the mid-1990s to having well-established programs only five or six years later. The web is not naturally archival, and it takes a lot of time, effort, and thought to make sure there’s a good record of it.
Why did you decide to write this book?
As with many historians, something already bugged me as I read the traditional accounts of web preservation— usually told as a paragraph or two in books or articles, including my own. This canned history goes something like “In 1996 the Internet Archive was founded, and so were some other national library programs, and web archiving developed from there.”
This made me wonder: what was it about 1996? Did national libraries launch programs in response to the Internet Archive, or vice-versa, or were there shared intellectual currents?
I also keep running into people who assume that the internet naturally remembers, that nothing is forgotten, and that this was the natural state of being. I think this is a misunderstanding that has dramatic consequences. And I know from my work with the Internet Archive and other organizations that a lot of archival and librarianship labor goes into these preservation programs, and I wanted to write a history that took that labor, effort, and thought seriously.
As you researched the topic, is there anything that you found particularly surprising?
Two things. First, that so many of the problems that define web archiving today, really came up in the broadest strokes in the mid-1990s: from debates around how selective to comprehensive to be, to questions around what a document is, to some of the vexing technical challenges that we still confront.
Secondly, and most importantly, I think you really read this and realize how close our collective memory came to disappearing. There really could have been a digital dark age – where we wouldn’t have records of this period – had there not been a collective effort of a surprisingly small number of persistent and vision-filled individuals. If things had gone differently—if Brewster Kahle had not decided to take the leap and start the Wayback Machine, for example – our collective memory of the early web would be far more fragmented than it is today. That’s pretty sobering!
What does the history of avoiding the digital dark age have to tell us about what we should be doing now to protect knowledge currently being created?
To me, it’s that none of this happens naturally. It requires intention, especially when it comes to digital objects—preservation does not happen by default. It requires sustained funding and institutional commitment, not just heroic individual efforts or grassroots campaigns. The Internet Archive is successful today not just because they have a great idea, but because they’ve thought about long-term sustainability and have built a business model— something which harkens back to the 1996 decision to found Internet Archive and Alexa Internet on the very same day.
Relatedly, and this is connected to event-based collecting and archiving, the decisions that we make now about what to collect, how to collect it, and who will get access to these collections will shape what future historians, and by extension future societies, know about today.
How should librarians, archivists, and technologists think about the information being created by artificial intelligence?
This is something that keeps me up at night. AI-generated content raises questions around provenance, authenticity, and scale. Will people in the future be able to distinguish the sheer volume of AI-generated slop from genuine human behavior and thoughts? How can we manage volume when content can be generated without limit? I don’t know what we should do, but we should be talking about it.
Is there anything else you would like to share?
Beyond thanks for letting me share my thoughts with your readers, I would just underscore that I think these are big questions: what a society remembers about itself is a critical one.
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