Google ambitions ignore digital ephemera of yesteryear

Wired recently had an article critiquing Googles ambitious reach into digital curation of books with a reminder of the last large digital library it undertook and all but abandoned. Usenet.

First Google rescued post-1995 Usenet (a dial-up message board system founded in 1980) from Dejanews in 2001. Google later was able to add millions of posts to this from the magtape of an old Unix guru, Marc Spencer. This gave Google a digital library from over 2 decades of 700 million articles from 35,000 newsgroups.

Wired interviews the Unix guru whose archive supplies a bulk of Google groups (and can't seem to get his name right - is it Marc or Henry Spencer?). Speaking on behalf of his community of Usenet users, Mr. Spencer is very disappointed with the poor searchibility of the material he provided Google.

I would ask: Where are the finding aids? How are things catalogued? Does Google use any of the methods that have worked for traditional archives spanning hundreds of years? No, Google can't even retrieve the legendary alt.gothic flamewars of 1993.

Well, perhaps the world is a better place for that.

But in all seriousness, if anything required professional curation, Usenet could be that. Many from my generation compiled subject knowledge in the early 90s in the form of F.A.Qs, discographies, videographies, and many other encyclopediac collections of unpublished popular (or not very popular) material. Did we save it all? Probably not. There were news-groups for great swaths of information that probably did not carry over to the world wide web post 1995, or even post 2001.

Granted, an enormous amount of Usenet one would not want to have see the light of day, for reasons legal and sundry that could make Craigslist pale in comparison. Still, there are volumes of music, film, and sub-cultural anthropology I have in my file cabinets printed on dot-matrix printers in 1992 that I have yet to see mirrored online or in zines, magazines or books. As I get older and de-clutter, and deem certain material unnecessary or not keeping in with my current interests or values, that information will most likely be lost.

I think a great idea would be for there to be a way to feed and properly code Usenet material (i.e. Usenet group "such and such" date: 1996) and feed the archive anonymously into Wikipedia.

I think the anonymous Wiki framework would be the best platform to mine and add Usenet knowledge and curate it in a central way that would be searchable. Usenet entries would be date-logged as historical data, and contestation, edits and updates would need to follow the historical Usenet information. This would give Wiki a valuable historical layer that I currently find missing. There are times when Wiki feels to me like urban Las Vegas, where the old is torn down and forgotten to make room for the new. What is Wiki kept historical layers to their entries? I think it would be interesting to see a Wiki article from 7 years ago on a given topic.