The Internet Archive has received some good press over the last few months. It started with The Hustle’s post in September, then Ars Technica posted in October.
I have used the Internet Archive Wayback Machine before on the Harvey Mercheum website, when websites I link to disappear. An example is on the Larami manufacturer page, I had linked to the Battlestar Wiki to show their inclusion of the toy safety warning in their interpretive information. When the Wiki went offline, I changed the link to the copy stored in the Wayback Machine and noted that I did so. Unfortunately, there was no copy of the website depicting the Casper Halloween bucket in the Wayback Machine, so I had to remove that link completely.
Seeing the two above posts about the Internet Archive and reflecting on my past experience with it got me thinking about the second part of the Harvey Mercheum mission statement: to make this information accessible to collectors present and future. The Harvey Mercheum is not big enough to subscribe to Archive-It, so I have started manually going through all pages and posts that make up the website and using the Save Page Now feature.
If you have any thoughts on this, or other ways to preserve the data accumulated so far, please leave a comment below. Posting of the mini-maquette guest exhibits should resume next week.
