Book Notes: Milligan, Averting the Digital Dark Age

In early 1996, the web was ephemeral. But by 2001, the internet was forever. How did websites transform from having a brief life to becoming long-lasting? Drawing on archival material from the Internet Archive and exclusive interviews, Ian Milligan's Averting the Digital Dark Age explores how Western society evolved from fearing a digital dark age to building the robust digital memory we rely on today.  [from the publisher's notice]

Ian Milligan at the University of Waterloo is the historian, and maybe the philosopher, of digital. If you wonder how the hell historians will ever be able to examine and find what matters in the limitless ocean of digitized source material that will survive from the 21st century, well, he's been thinking about it. 

His new book, Averting the Digital Dark Age How Archivists, Librarians, and Technologists Built the Web a Memory explores, well, just what the title says: how all that material came to be preserved in the first place.