The shellac discs in the Archive’s Richmond, California, warehouse are the precursors to the 12-inch vinyl records that became popular in the mid-20th century.
Wayback archive archive#
We may someday lose the ability to digitally play back certain file formats (though the Archive is working on that, too), but we’ll always be able to cobble together a machine with a needle and a horn that can play a record, if you can keep that record in good shape.
Storing and preserving the physical media behind all of that information-if it exists-is one way to future-proof the archive. “When information disappears digitally, it’s gone forever.” If you’ve ever had a hard drive crash, you know this all too well. George, the sound collections curator at the Internet Archive. “We’re trying to make sure the physical object is saved, as well as the digital, because we don’t know which will last longer,” says B. The nonprofit digital library has an impressive collection millions of books and about 200,000 shellac discs engraved with rare music from the early 20th century.
Sure, it’s preserving large swaths of the internet with its Wayback Machine and you can still play Oregon Trail online with its MS-DOS emulator, but it’s also archiving physical media that never lived on any server, even as it transfers the contents into its massive digital bank. The Internet Archive’s name can be a little misleading.
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