Web Information Has Lasting Value Over Time
By Kim Se-jeong
Staff reporter
We now look at The Colosseum in Rome, Machu Picchu in Peru and Egyptian wall paintings to grasp how people back in previous centuries lived.
What would people 200 years from now think our lives were like in February 2010?
Reference to the Internet can't be avoided, as so much information is created and spread online. Digital information offers so much more than what offline newspapers or books can represent, reflecting the social phenomena.
But, at the same time, as American inventor Daniel Hills described, people are now living in a "digital dark age" where information comes and disappears quickly without being kept.
So the question is whether the current digital information, especially Web pages will still be available in 200 years. Will one be able to pull up today's online headlines of The Korea Times? Where would one go to find them?
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization's (UNESCO) Korean office earlier this month gave three Korean non-profit Web sites the "Digital Heritage Award," bringing this very issue to light.
Chun Taek-soo, secretary general of the Korean National Commission for UNESCO, said that it is important to raise awareness of online information as valuable assets similar to a tangible heritage, and that's why Korean UNESCO came up with the idea of the digital heritage award.
Out of nearly 200 entries, the UNESCO Korea selected three winners: https://insect.snu.ac.kr, an image archive of insects; www.opengirok.or.kr, a site disclosing government information; and www.koreahealthlog.com, a site to share health-related information between users and a group of voluntary medical doctors.
The selection committee said during an award ceremony that the quality of the content and its accuracy, openness to the public and its rarity were taken into consideration in the selection process.
All three sites do not require a visitor to register nor to pay to navigate the Web site.
The award conforms to the UNESCO's charter on preservation of digital heritage adopted in 2003. The charter acknowledged the "risky" nature of digital information in the Internet era and urged member states to come up with measures to preserve what's necessary.
The award is believed to be among the first of its kind among nearly 193 national commissions around the world, since the adoption of the charter.
UNESCO headquarters will eventually do the same to digital assets as it does with tangible assets, Chun said, and the three Web sites will be submitted as Korea's entry. UNESCO selects the World Heritage Sites in order to preserve tangible cultural assets around the world.
UNESCO Korea's initiative reflects how little attention Koreans and the Korean government are paying to preserving the digital heritage, which refers to the digital format of text, image and multimedia.
Why would one need to care for a Web site that's become outdated?
As to that question, Min Kyung-bae, the chief member of the selection committee, who teaches at Kyung Hee Cyber University, answered with a question: "Why would you keep Sambuk Yusa (a collection of legends and folktales from the Three Kingdoms of Korea)?"
Just as stories from the Three Kingdoms era is a window to people's lives at that time, so Web pages mirror the lifestyle and interests of people in this same era, Min added, and he was disappointed by the fact that neither the government nor the private sector acknowledges the necessity of accumulating Web pages for their records.
"Kim Young-sam was the first president to make a Web site for the presidential office. However, if you want to see one of the Web pages from his time, you can't find it," Min said, saying he himself had tried.
Instead, he could find it on the U.S. International Archive Web page, which means, "There might come a day when we have to pay to see the page that we once created."
The U.S. Internet Archive, a non-profit organization, since its inception in 1996, is a stockpile of Web pages that are both American and non-American.
At the beginning of 2000, Min said he was writing his thesis for a doctorate degree. The subject was an online civil group movement, for which he was monitoring one specific non-government organization's Web site on a daily basis.
"One day, for some reason, the Web page shut itself down, and all the information evaporated," he said, adding how frustrated he became.
Min called for a government-led initiative to preserve Web pages.
Beside the Internet Archive, which is private, the United States has the National Archives and the Library of Congress make extensive digital archives, funded by tax-payers' money. In the private sector, academic institutes and corporations are adding their efforts to preserve Web information.
Lee Seung-hwi, a professor at Myungji University's Department of Records and Information Studies, said in the modern era, interest and efforts for archiving documents up to Chosun Dynasty was much more invigorating.
Although technology has simplified the process of filing, contemporary governments pay less attention to keeping things on file.
During Kim Young-sam's presidency, for example, the size of the presidential archive remained at 100,000, he said.
In particular records from times of political unrest were largely missing.
For example, "much of the information regarding the Students Uprising in 1960 had been discarded. You have to go to the national archive in the U.S., which has kept a vast number of documents, filed by the U.S. Embassy in Korea.
Lee O-ryoung, Korea's first minister of culture, suggested that the metropolitan government create a digital archive of Seoul's landscape.
"I have insisted the metropolitan government film a few sites in Seoul, for example Gwanghwamun on a regular basis. When you play it two or three years after, images will tell you what had happened on a certain day and what placard was hung.
"When something is available as information, it's no longer information. It is already old," Lee said, reinstating the potential of digital data as a record of history.