Delete comment from: DSHR's Blog
I should have used Google earlier. It turns out that a team at the University of North Carolina is in fact selecting and collecting YouTube video of the 2008 Presidential campaign. They describe their system in this paper (PDF).
However, their focus is on the process of identifying and selecting suitable videos. Their paper ignores the issues of preservation.
The paper also fails to make the economic case for expending resources on collecting and preserving video that there is no convincing reason to believe won't be available from YouTube indefinitely. To steal Eugippius's words from the comment above, they don't think the snowman is lucky. I should stress that I believe the case can be made, but it is not a slam dunk and it does not depend on knowing whether Google will continue to make the video available. Maybe you trust a single archive to control history. Or maybe you are worried about future Winston Smiths, whether corporate or governmental.
Oct 16, 2007, 1:49:00 AM
Posted to Who's looking after the snowman?