Archive Team Explained
Archive Team is a group dedicated to digital preservation and web archiving that was co-founded by Jason Scott in 2009.
Its primary focus is the copying and preservation of content housed by at-risk online services. Some of its projects include the partial preservation of GeoCities, Yahoo! Video, Google Video, Splinder, Friendster, FortuneCity, TwitPic, SoundCloud, and the "Aaron Swartz Memorial JSTOR Liberator". Archive Team also archives URL shortener services and wikis on a regular basis.
According to Jason Scott, "Archive Team was started out of anger and a feeling of powerlessness, this feeling that we were letting companies decide for us what was going to survive and what was going to die." Scott continues, "it's not our job to figure out what's valuable, to figure out what's meaningful. We work by three virtues: rage, paranoia, and kleptomania."
Warrior/Tracker system
Archive Team is composed of a loose community of independent contributors/users. Their archival process makes use of a "Warrior", a virtual machine environment. Individuals use the Warrior in their desktop environments use to download content without requiring technical expertise. Tasks are allocated by a centrally-managed Tracker that networks with and allocates items to Warriors. The tracker also monitors user upload activity and displays a leader board.
Projects
There are several projects currently running:
- Imgur: The image host Imgur updated their terms of service on April 19, 2023. This update focused on removing old, unused, and inactive content that is not tied to a user account, along with NSFW content.
- Blogger: In May 2023, Google announced that inactive accounts would be deleted starting on 2023-12-01 across their platform, including Blogger blogs.
- Reddit: Banning communities that generate bad PR for Reddit Inc. Restricting access to APIs and data on June 19, 2023.
- Russian invasion of Ukraine: Archiving various .ua sites in the wake of the Russian government's invasion.
- Telegram: Archiving public messages in various newsworthy and/or otherwise notable Telegram channels.
- GitHub: When it was bought by Microsoft in 2018, many archivists and users were worried the site would become more restrictive. This project archives the UI parts of GitHub and the code of each repository.
- Mediafire: On 2020-12-18, users reported that they began receiving emails from MediaFire how they plan to classify accounts as abandoned if they fail to meet certain criteria, starting in January.
- Coronavirus Outbreak: Documenting and preserving data, events, and impacts of COVID-19 on society.
- YouTube: Saving metadata, thumbnails, comments and selected videos. Videos and channels are to be limited to: Channels that may be deleted because company went bankrupt, channel owner died, YouTube banning certain content, and channels related to world events and politics.
- Wikiteam: Saving wiki xml dumps.
- Urlteam: Saving URL shorteners.
- URLs: Archiving URLs from various sources.
, the largest project on ArchiveTeam is Reddit, with over 3.37 petabytes archived.
See also
External links
