The Kenny Rogers principle of dead websites

Thanks to Chris Coyler for spotlighting the Internet Archive’s new book Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record (available in print and as a free e-book). Going right to the top of my to-read list. Chris reflects on the report’s findings about how many websites have and have not been preserved by the Wayback Machine, and the ethics of letting websites “go dark” rather than “static-izing a site and putting it somewhere inexpensive to live as a viewable time capsule”. It’s a good question, and one I wrestle with a lot, both as a history lover who understands the value of preservation and as a person who is and has been responsible for the fates of various websites. I don’t plan on ever retiring from this website, but if I do a static-ized approach paired with a Wayback Machine snapshot and offline duplicate would probably be its ideal fate. And yet, I totally understand the impulse to just totally nuke a site. There is a weight to managing them that’s partly financial…