New digital home for old pics

Many small museums and historical groups, including here in Fairbury, face the same nagging question: where do we safely store our most valuable scanned documents and photos so they will still be around decades from now?

When the only copies live on a small local website or on someone's personal computer, the long-term risks are surprisingly high.

If the key volunteer who runs a website dies or moves away, nobody may know the passwords or how to maintain the site. Sometimes the company that hosts a site decides to get out of the website business, and everything disappears in an instant. That is exactly what happened to the early Fairbury Echoes Museum website, which began with a low-cost, non-local supplier that later closed up shop. In each of these cases, years of careful scanning work can vanish overnight.

One elegant way around this problem is to separate "where people click" from "where the images live." A local museum can still have a normal website, but that site only contains text and links, not the actual image files. All the high-resolution images are stored on a very large, stable, nonprofit service whose full-time job is preserving digital information.

If something ever happens to the local website, it can be rebuilt; the precious images have never been moved or disappeared. For Fairbury and Livingston County, the long-term digital vault is a nonprofit called Archive.org, also known as the Internet Archive.

The Internet Archive was founded in 1996 by a computer engineer and "digital librarian" named Brewster Kahle with a simple but ambitious mission: to provide "universal access to all knowledge." The organization operates as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit library based in San Francisco and offers free access to digitized books, audio recordings, videos, software, and copies of websites from all over the world. In 2019, its annual budget was on the order of $ 37 million, funded by a mix of donations, grants, and fees for services such as web archiving and book digitization.

Major philanthropic supporters over the years have included the Kahle Austin Foundation, the Knight Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, Open Society Foundations, the Hewlett and Ford foundations, and others who see long-term preservation of knowledge as a public good.

Most people first encounter Archive.org through something called the Wayback Machine. This is the part of the Internet Archive that quietly takes snapshots of websites and saves them, year after year.

If you want to see what Amazon.com’s very first website looked like back in the mid 1990s, you can type “amazon.com” into the Wayback Machine and click on a date in 1996 to see the simple, early page that helped launch one of the world’s largest companies. The Wayback Machine has now saved well over a trillion web pages, giving future generations a way to see how the internet—and our culture—looked at different points in time.

To do all of this, Archive.org has to store a staggering amount of data. Several years ago, the Internet Archive reported that it had stored over 30 petabytes of unique content and was adding 13 to 15 terabytes per day; more recent estimates put its storage capacity around 200 petabytes, or about 200 million gigabytes, spread across roughly 20,000 hard drives.

Those numbers are hard to visualize, so here is one way to think about it: the Library of Congress holds tens of millions of books, and technologists estimate that you could fit the text of that entire collection into a few dozen terabytes. A single petabyte is 1,000 terabytes, so 200 petabytes is enough room for the text of many, many “Libraries of Congress” stacked on top of each other. In round terms, the Internet Archive’s storage is easily large enough to hold far more than 100 times the information in all the books ever printed, especially because plain text is tiny compared with today’s photos and videos.

The Fairbury Echoes Museum and the Livingston County (Illinois) historical website both take advantage of this giant digital library. Together, they have uploaded over 1,250 rare historical images from Fairbury and the surrounding county to Archive.org, where anyone in the world can view or download them.

When you visit the Fairbury Echoes Museum site or the Livingston County history site and click on a historic item, you are really following a link to Archive.org, where the original high-resolution file lives. If the local website ever needs to be moved, redesigned, or rebuilt from scratch, the links can be recreated—but the historic images themselves never have to be touched.

Using Archive.org also avoids a common problem many people do not realize they have with sites like Facebook. When you upload a photo to Facebook, the image is automatically compressed to save storage space, which means much of the fine detail is lost. Later, if you download that picture and zoom in to read a small sign on a storefront or see a face in the back row, the details may be too blurry to make out.

In contrast, images stored at Archive.org can be preserved at their original high resolution, so when you zoom in on a Fairbury street scene from 1910, you can still read the lettering on a window or the number on a railroad car.

Archive.org also works hand in hand with the tools people already use to hunt for history. The documents and images uploaded there are scanned and indexed so that they can appear in ordinary Google searches. That means someone sitting in another state—or another country—who types in “Fairbury Illinois history” may stumble across a rare Livingston County item stored in this digital vault. In that way, Archive.org works like a global card catalog, quietly pointing researchers, genealogists, and descendants back to our local story.

In the last few years, ordinary people have also begun using AI tools to help with historical research. As those AI systems improve, more of them are learning to access trusted digital libraries like Archive.org, retrieve relevant documents, and summarize or translate them for users. A future great-grandchild doing a school report on Fairbury may never visit the museum in person, but an AI assistant could still guide them to 100-year-old photos and documents safely stored on Archive.org.

For small museums and historical societies, this combination—a simple local website on the front end and a giant nonprofit digital library in the background—offers an unusually durable solution. Archive.org has already been operating for three decades, with substantial financial backing and a clear mission to keep expanding its collection of human knowledge.

No one can predict exactly what the internet will look like 100 years from now. An organization like Archive.Org provides communities like Fairbury with a practical way to preserve rare historical images for many decades.

You can browse the Fairbury-related items on Archive.Org using this link. You can browse all Livingston County-related items using this link.

Dale Maley's weekly history feature on Fairbury News is sponsored by Dr. Charlene Aaron