It started a few years ago when the Pirates of the Caribbean became a box office success. Then there were the sequels, with Captain Jack becoming a favorite new character. Don’t forget the periodic news stories about Somali pirates kidnapping people over the past several months. Later Michael Crichton’s last book, the posthumously published Pirate Latitudes, is all about those sea-loving rapscallions. But there is a faction of pirates in Sweden that have been making waves the past few years as well.

In 2003, an anti-copyright group, Piratbyran or The Piracy Bureau, began to run a website filled with television programs and movies, among other digital media. Although it changed ownership a couple times, the site primarily has been overseen by a few people including Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neji. The purpose is to make digital material available to all, much of it under copyright. People are free to download what they want from the site after they register. The material is shared in bittorrents, or torrents, which is a cloud network of peer-to-peer distribution system for the sole purpose of transferring large files. The Pirate Bay bills itself as “the world’s most resilient bittorrent site.” Users need to have a software program to send or receive the torrents which download small bits of files from other computers that are connected to the same cloud.

But as “fun” as sharing movies and other media may be, the ramifications are real for the entertainment industry. Movie and music studios have been trying for several years to end the illegal download of copyrighted material. A British publication, Legal Week, cited a 2008 study of 16 countries stating the more than 40 billion files were illegally shared, making the piracy rate 95%. And if you think about the thousands of people who may buy DVDs and then want to share them with others, the ramifications could be great. This is especially true since there also are categories for audio books; games for the Xbox 360, the Wii, and Playstation 3; and computer applications like the Microsoft Office products and Mac applications.

The financial implications, however, mean little to the perpetrators. In fact, The Pirate Bay puts many of the legal threats it receives on the site to mock those who send threats. For instance, a 2004 e-mail from DreamWorks Studios requested its movie Shrek 2 be removed from the site since that is in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Not only did the response from The Pirate Bay make it perfectly clear that Sweden does not follow U.S. law since it is not a part of the United States, but the pirates suggested the originator of the legal threat do bodily harm to himself in no uncertain terms. Those pirates sure use colorful language. They claim that since the torrent files are saved on thousands of individual computers, no illegal or copyrighted material is actually stored on The Pirate Bay site; this is one of their main assertions of innocence.

Nevertheless, the entertainment industry has continued to work at ending the reign of the violators. And more European countries are working toward ending copyright violations which may help since there is closer proximity than those in Hollywood sending threats. In addition, Sweden introduced a law in April 2009 requiring Internet Service Providers (ISP) to release the Internet Protocol (IP) addresses of suspected copyright violators. Around the same time, four of the founders were convicted of helping Internet users download copyrighted films, computer games, and music. They were sentenced to one year in jail after a local Swedish law firm helped convince a local court to do so. So perhaps the pirates may be a little less cocky these days. The litany of lawsuits from various countries has to be a little tiresome. But with an estimated 25 million users, or “peers,” the pirates have a lot of fans.

In the summer of 2009, The Pirate Bay was sold to the Global Gaming Factory which said it will try to work with entertainment studios in the future. Time will tell if the pirates can be tamed, or if lure of free audio books and Xbox games is too great for those swimming in the bay.

Oh, I get it. “IT” – of course, the acronym for Information Technology. The name of the computer departments where I used to work. The place where all the “computer guys,” as I fondly referred to them, were busy working their techie magic.

However, when it comes to this particular blog format, a resource for archivists and librarians, “IT” takes on different connotations. What occurs to me is this concept, the quest for high-tech answers to make all our jobs, nay, our lives, easier and cooler, perhaps that is it. Having been teased about how uncool librarians and archivists are (by those not in the profession, natch), it is nice to be able to talk knowledgeably about computer use and social networking applications. It almost proves we are cool.

Certainly technology has made accessibility of library and archival material easier, and that is good. But all this computerization and the need of “computer guys” to create the next big thing is a little overwhelming. What are they trying to prove? Aren’t the existing tools enough? Many of them do similar tasks like helping people reconnect or share ideas. But how helpful are they? Sometimes I think these technology developers just want to come up with catchy names. Delicious, del.icio.us? Really?

Moreover, what is really daunting about the search for “IT” is that it probably will never be found, at least in its entirety. All of this reminds me of my obsession with the news and reading the paper. Many years ago a few people began discussing some current events, and I didn’t know what they were talking about. So I made it a mission to read the newspaper every day, as well as listen to the news on the radio, so I would always know what is going on. But the news is always going on; it will never end. Trying to know all the news is both productive and futile.

So it seems that the quest for “IT,” too, is both ends of that spectrum. Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, ad nauseum have been interesting and useful tech tools. However, new technology will continue; some applications may be created that cause current tools to become obsolete. Will any of this ever be enough? Like chasing the wind, perhaps it is unattainable. But the quest certainly makes the work more interesting. And all these incarnations of technology should be documented for future researchers to study. Perhaps this will create a few jobs for archivists who have the foresight to collect and preserve it.

As an archivist and student of history, I am curious about the past and how things have evolved. When looking through some journals, I was reminded of when I first was learning about the Internet and e-mail in the early 1990s. Being new to the archival profession, I recall being in a session at a Midwest Archives Conference (MAC) meeting. Although I don’t remember the topic, I do remember sitting next to a more experienced archivist who seemed to want to share his techie knowledge with a neophyte such as myself. You could send a note to someone on your computer? You could look for information and post material on your computer? How did that work? It was very befuddling. So this friendly, helpful archivist proceeded to jot down a bunch of letters and punctuation, and supposedly, when you put this into some program in your computer, you would be able to send and retrieve information. I thanked my more experienced colleague for trying to explain this gibberish. I know shortly after when I started a regular, full-time job, I got a computer and e-mail and learned what it was all about.

I recollected this long-ago episode when I was looking through an IEEE journal Annals of the History of Computing from 2004. There was an article about Gopher. Ahhh, it was all coming back to me — that little animal that actually had to do with some early type of searching on a computer. Apparently the software was introduced in 1991, and instead of being an acronym for something, the Gopher got its name because it retrieved material (like a go-fer), it dug deep (like an animal), and it was the mascot for the university where it was created (University of Minnesota Golden Gophers). It was developed in part to assist colleges with CWIS, campus wide information systems. It also was an early attempt to instruct regular people, not computer techs or information professionals, on the capabilities of the Internet. Since it was relatively easy to install the software, more people used it, and that meant more information would be available on the servers, so even more people would want to use it.

While Gopher may not have been an acronym, there were other computer-related terms that stretched plausibility to try to be both clever and memorable. “Archie” was introduced as part of Gopher software to search anonymous FTP files for information. By some accounts, it was a shortened form of “archiver.” To go along with “him,” “Veronica” was created, Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Netwide Index to Computerized Archives. It was built into Gopher to allow searching on files, directories, and other resources. As if that were not enough, “Jughead” was introduced, Jonzy’s [creator Rhett Jones] Universal Gopher Hierarchy Excavation And Display. It was a software program to help find directories on Gopher.

By 1992, Gopher was one of the most popular things on the Internet allowing users to find answers to many questions. However, it was around this same time that Tim Burners-Lee and his team were developing the HTTP protocol, a web server and browser, and HTML. By 1994, the World Wide Web had surpassed all other Internet protocols. The rise and fall of Gopher is interesting, but too long to detail in this posting. But one of the main theories of why the web won is because it displayed and linked together information on the Internet, but Gopher primarily had an inflexible hierarchical, file-like structure of data display, i.e., the web showed graphics (“pretty pictures”) much more readily. This, too, allowed for more graphic advertising and therefore more revenue.

Although now mainly defunct, one lasting legacy of the Gopher craze was from the team leader for the project, Mark McCahill. Apparently he was a windsurfing enthusiast and he first used the phrase “surfing the Internet” in a 1992 Usenet post.

Since the advent of the Internet, floodgates have opened with people creating all forms of documents put on the web. And with open source and proprietary software, the proliferation of websites and blogs has been nearly overwhelming. But will all that material be around a year or five from now? What will exist in the future? How will it be archived? Internet content creators cannot be certain that their material will be around for years to come. A lot of people might be OK with that, but if they do want their sites around for posterity, they should be proactive in saving their works.

Although “good-faith relationships” typically exist between users and the Internet service providers, the records actually belong to the latter, and most of them do not archive all the websites in perpetuity. In 1997, Tom Hyry and Rachel Onuf wrote in Archival Issues, “From multimedia projects to personal homepages and beyond, new expressive digital media proliferate. Since content in these formats, too, can be easily altered over time, the past forms, looks, and contents of these documents become replaced, and normally lost, with the developments of their replacements.”

Another consideration is when “sponsoring organizations” of Internet sites cease to exist, like for political campaigns, so the digital contents may depart as well. This happened to Al Gore’s website after the 2000 election was finally called. Of course there is the Internet Archive and its Wayback Machine to view various websites, but it does not have everything, nor are all the links active. Brewster Kahle created the Internet Archive in 1996. According to its website, it contains almost two petabytes of data and is currently growing at a rate of 20 terabytes per month. “This eclipses the amount of text contained in the world’s largest libraries, including the Library of Congress.” But Kahle acknowledges, in a 2007 American Archivist article, that “digital technologies erode very quickly. The current digital technologies only last about three years. In the last ten years, we’ve moved – transitioned – our materials three times.”

There continues to be concern about whole companies’ sites disappearing. For example, Driveway.com, a provider of free web-based digital storage, had approximately two million users. The company then announced its “demise” giving people a two-week notice to move their files. If those customers did not see the notice, they lost all their material.

There is a risk of disappearance for even the more prominent websites. For instance, on January 20, 2001, Inauguration Day, the White House website had changed completely with the incoming president. However, the previous contents of the Clinton administration’s site, and its searchable archive companion site, were “completely wiped clean.” Called “link rot,” thousands of links within other websites were broken. Not only did this create issues for the general public who may have wanted to research material from and about Clinton’s tenure, but archivists and historians know such material is vital to analyze a presidency. Fortunately, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) took action to preserve various “renditions” of those sites which were taken down. This is recounted in the article “Digital Preservation: Paradox & Promise” by R. Wiggins in Library Journal Net Connect from 2001.

Some computerized material and electronic records are difficult to preserve and access since they are “born digital.” As more documents are authored in a digital form, some of that material cannot be reduced to print, at least not without “substantial loss of content or function,” according to Clifford Lynch, Executive Director of the Coalition for Networked Information. These documents also create other issues for archivists such as making sure works like digital photographs that might be accessioned into an archival database have metadata added to them so correct cataloging information can be kept.

The Internet Archive, amongst all its electronic pages of information, warns that when it comes to preservation, “any medium or site used to store data is potentially vulnerable to accidents and natural disasters.” And with the news reported on October 12 that a division of Microsoft, called Danger, had a server crash leaving users of its Sidekick device without their photos and other personal information, this just reinforces the vulnerability of all the electronic material that deluges the Internet.