It’s been a whirlwind for Bay Area digital archivists amid the Trump administration’s war on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs
Archivists with the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, housed in an old Christian Science Center in San Francisco’s Richmond District, are working to figure out how much of the web they were able to capture before the Trump administration forced government agencies to scrub their sites of anything related to DEI.
Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine, told Gazetteer SF on Friday that he was “kind of kicking [himself]” for not being able to anticipate that the Trump administration would take down or scrub content from sites with mentions of DEI, and delete the Jan. 6 Capitol riot database published by the Department of Justice.
That “should’ve been obvious,” he said.
Had he thought of it, Graham said he would’ve directed his team to take a careful look at the database, paying particular attention to the case histories of people who were charged and sentenced for their role in the insurrection.
“We didn’t do that,” he said. “Now, does that mean we didn’t get all of it or a lot of it? No. It means that we’re not really sure right now.”
The Wayback Machine has been archiving the web since 1996, but recent events have thrust the organization into the public eye once more. Waldo Jaquith, a technologist and former Biden and Obama-era appointee, told Gazetteer that tools like the Wayback Machine have immense value during times when the government is maliciously removing information.
We have “every reason to believe that under a Trump administration, medical information that supports vaccines or supports the existence of climate change — they’ll just vanish that,” Jaquith said. “And without a third party who is known to have best practices for data storage, we have no way of knowing what is accurate.”
The escalation of censorship and erasure by the White House reinforces and confirms the importance of the Internet Archive’s work, Graham said. It also validates the role of libraries and memory institutions that enable us to “remember and access our past, even our past of last week or last month,” he said.
In addition to the Wayback Machine, Graham is working on the End of Term Web Archive, a collaborative project between the Internet Archive; Stanford University Libraries, Environmental Data & Governance Initiative; and other institutions to crawl and catalog government websites during presidential term transitions. The project began back in 2008, at the end of the Bush administration, and as of Friday, end-of-term archival efforts for the Biden administration were about two-thirds done, Graham said. The team has already archived more this term than all previous terms combined, in part due to the simple fact that the web just keeps getting bigger and archivists are casting a wider net, he said.
James R. Jacobs, a federal government information librarian at Stanford University working on the End of Term Web Archive, told Gazetteer that many people assume that if something is on the internet, that “it’ll be online forever and ever.”
“And, you know, that’s not true because the web changes pretty quickly these days,” Jacobs said. Meanwhile, “the amount of actual preservation of information has eroded and fallen by the wayside.”
He fears that researchers may shift focus due to a lack of funding in certain areas, he said. “And it could be cancer research, but if it was cancer research based on, ‘Does this sort of cancer affect African Americans more than white people?’ Well, that could be perceived as DEI, which, to my mind, is insane. But that’s this administration.”
Meanwhile, Graham wondered how he can better anticipate what may be at risk of getting removed this week.
“So maybe that’s the question that I should be asking myself right now, is ‘how can I even answer that question?’ I guess one way is looking back at what has happened, and then trying to use that as a model to project forward. Another might be just paying more, better attention to what’s going on in the world, asking for help.”
That’s when Graham had an idea about archiving government web pages with mentions of Universal Design for Learning guidelines, a framework for education that is designed to improve access to education. Graham said he “wouldn’t be surprised” if some of those pages go down, “so I might have some effort put into trying to identify web pages that have the phrase UDL in them.”
These first couple of weeks of the Trump administration have certainly been chaotic, but Graham is reminded that despite political turmoil, archiving human history takes patience.
“It feels like a sprint and there are times when you go faster than others, but this is really a marathon,” he said.
