By, Blaine Richardson, Editor in chief 

On Oct. 16, the Internet Archive’s domain was hacked and the entire site was taken down. For those unaware, the Internet Archive is a massive online digital archive that houses various different books, movies, software and of course, the Wayback Machine. 

If you had tried to access the site during this period, instead it would’ve popped up a message saying “Have you ever felt like the Internet Archive runs on sticks and is constantly on the verge of suffering a catastrophic security breach? It just happened. See 31 million of you on HIBP!”, implying that if you had an account with Internet Archive, your information just got leaked. 

As someone who had an account, this isn’t what concerns me—the only personal information that an account needs is an email address, and after being on the internet for about 10 years now, I just automatically assume that my email has been stolen, an assumption that my spam folder seems to confirm. No, what concerns me is the content within the archive itself. Hundreds of years of preserved physical and digital history, gone in an afternoon, and uncertainty about when and what will be able to be restored.  

This isn’t something that just affects me because of my passion for preservation. No, this affects all of us, even if you don’t personally use the archive. Speaking from personal experience, the archive is a fantastic resource for research or just personal enjoyment, with 3.8 million books that can be checked out for completely free. A lot of these books were older, and therefore harder to get ahold of physically, whether that was due to scarcity, price or both.  

And the archive didn’t digitally recreate books; it took the effort to scan and upload every page of those 3.8 million novels, so it was easy to use in classes or otherwise follow along with the correct page numbers or paragraph sections. What’s more, since these books were all scanned, it means the Archive actually has a physical copy of all these books at their headquarters in San Francisco (I have a personal goal to at some point in my life visit this physical location). So at the very least, this means if all of these digital versions are lost to the hack, they will be able to restore most of them. It’ll just take some time.  

But obviously this doesn’t just affect the books, as the archive had other things saved within its database. This included articles, journals and old websites that are no longer accessible except via the Wayback Machine. Even The Alabamian itself is affected by this hack. Our digital archives are hosted through Internet Archive, and with the website down you can no longer reach those older issues digitally. Thankfully, we have our own physical archive within Carmichael library, but it’s much harder to access these physical copies as compared to the digital ones.  

As of writing this article (Oct. 22), the archive is still down but has some functionalities restored. If you try to access the site currently, it will only display links to their blog, the Wayback Machine and Archive-It, while also apologizing for the inconvenience. 

I think they’re being too cordial—this isn’t their fault, and it definitely isn’t just an inconvenience. Years of history being wiped isn’t an “inconvenience.” But this is no burning of the Library of Alexandria; I have hope that the archive and most of the content on it will be restored.  

I know it’ll take time, but all library work takes time. Whether or not you want to help contribute, whether financially or by archiving work for the archive yourself, is your prerogative. But when the archive comes online, I implore you to use it. Because if this past week is anything to go by, it can all go away in an afternoon.