Mark Graham
speaker
99 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard Feb 2025
Mark Graham’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Sure, yeah. Hi, my name is Mark Graham, and I am the director of the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive.
Where do I begin? It's like walking into a very large library and saying, show me your favorite book. Well, for example, last year, it was a big news story that MTV News was shut down. And the founding editor of MT News wrote about it on LinkedIn. And there was a lot of other editors talking about it. It was like, oh, my God, all of our articles are gone. They're missing.
And I just casually, you know, waded into the conversation and go, hi, check here, Wayback Machine. And they were like, oh, my God, you guys, like, got it all, pretty much, yeah. And they said, well, you know, people say, well, what did you do? What did you do when it went down? I say, we didn't do anything. when it went down because we've been doing our job all along.
We've been working to archive the public web as it's published on an ongoing and continuous basis. So if we have to start paying attention to something after it's gone down, That means we screwed up.
So for any one of a number of thousands of reasons, we set our web crawlers and archiving software out on a mission every day to identify and to download web pages and related web-based resources. We bring in millions and millions of URLs every day that are signals to us, signals of where new material is being published on the web.
And we make sure that we archive all of those URLs, all the web pages associated with those URLs. And then we look at those pages and we identify links to other pages. And then we go to those pages and we archive them. etc., etc., etc. That's where you get this metaphor of crawling like a spider throughout this web.
And the net result of it is that we add more than a billion archived URLs to the Wayback Machine every day. And this material, as it's added to the Wayback Machine, is indexed and it's immediately available to people who go to web.archive.org, enter in a URL, and then are able to see a history of archives that we have of the web page that was available from the URL at any given time.
Well, as an American, my tax dollars help pay for some of this stuff. And then much of it is maybe a benefit to people. Certainly, my first reaction is, hmm, that might not be such a good thing. I do want to underscore that there is the National Archives and Records Administration that does do archiving as well.
But for whatever reason, we seem to be like one of the main players in the space of trying to archive much of the public web, including and right now especially U.S. government websites and making those archives available in near real time.
This is pretty normal in some respects. It's normal and expected and it's what's happened, frankly, for each administration in the time that we've been working on this effort. Look, it's under new management, right? For example, you wouldn't expect the WhiteHouse.gov website under any new presidential administration to be the same as it was before.
So we go out of our way to try to anticipate the frequency in which web pages should be archived so that we got a pretty good shot at getting those changes.
No, that's true.
It's different. It's certainly different in terms of the number, seemingly. I mean, we're still in the early stages of this administration. But yeah, I'd say on the face of it, you're right. Historically, we haven't seen major U.S. government websites taken offline like we did, say, for example, with regard to USAID. But...
And I'm going to leave that kind of analysis to others and really just focus on trying to archive the material.
Enough is a very subjective term. Okay. Well, as an archivist, for me, it's never enough because you don't know. No one knows what is going to be of use, value, importance in the future, maybe even the near future of tomorrow, much less like the very far off future. And since millions of people use our site on a daily basis, we get a lot of feedback from them.
It motivates us, but it also helps direct us And inspires us to continuously try to do a better job at being the best library that we can be. Godspeed.
You know, okay, so it kind of caught me up with that question. I'll just say... I don't know right now. I can't say that thing. Gosh, I wish, okay, I got one. I mean, this is just in recent history. Apparently there was a page up on the CDC website about bird flu last week. It apparently was only up for a few minutes and no one got it.
Well, we're losing part of the story, right? We're losing part of our understanding of the evolution of arguably a significant health crisis. issue, concern. We don't know where this is going to go. I don't know. I guess that's the other point, right? I mean, you don't know necessarily now that which is going to be very important in the near or longer term.
In the time of Martin Luther, there was a raging, raging debates. And much of that debate took the form of things that were written on pamphlets. The pamphlets at the time were considered Of little value. I mean, people read them and they shared them, but they didn't necessarily save them.
So today, a scholar of that time or someone like me who's just kind of strangely curious, what I would give for a collection of those pamphlets?
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