BG Staff
Donald Trump’s aggression towards press and dislike against major news outlets is making journalists increasingly concerned about the consequences after elections. According to many journalists, Trump’s presidency would create an unprecedented threat to press freedom and the Internet Archive.
To pursue litigation against press, Trump has at time suggested a ban on various parts of internet. Such actions will have extreme negative effects on a digital library. Brewster Kahle who is renowned for his digital library in Canada, does not want his internet archive to end up and loose a significant portion of knowledge and history just on the basis of political issues.
This is the first time ever that efforts are being made to back up the collection of digitized books, television broadcasts, newspapers, and website. This internet Archive cannot be accessed in China and was previously blocked in India and Russia. Archive’s second copy will help preserve valuable content from getting harm in case Trump decides to get something removed.
According to Kahle, this is a good way to keep data safe. Keeping large-scale collection alive is actually hard work but it is for the universal access to knowledge. This is the reason it has been decided to dedicate efforts for this purpose from now on.
The sole inspiration behind backing up the Internet Archive in Canada is not just Trump’s selection; work has been going on for many years and has been accelerated with this election cycle. Kahle stated that now this work has got a direction and is much easier to understand the purpose of making copies of the internet data. Internet Archive Canada is not working alone; many partner libraries are involved with it. The latest project involves creating a complete copy of San Francisco-based library’s data. The project can cost up to $5 million therefore funds are being raised currently for a successful completion. There is an extreme amount of data available on the Canadian servers and this cost is not much for such a bigger purpose.
As efforts are being made around the world to stop the spread of fake news, this project can be a good source for people to understand the real happenings during Trump’s presidential campaign. For checking up in future, it will help to find complete text-searchable transcripts of Trump’s television interviews from 2008 to 2012 along with other data stored on the Internet Archive.
Via: Tech Crunch
