This session I was joined by two fellow students, one graduating this semester and the other has a couple more semesters to go. The Internet Archive (IA) is on all information professionals’ minds these days, so we were talking about how our ePortfolios could be archived by IA. Then we were looking up ePortfolios made by alumni, some of which we found one the second page of Google results. All of the ones we found were not updated and didn’t even look like they had been touched.

I mentioned how tragic it is to think about all of the digital space wasted due to folks not maintaining their websites, ePortfolios or not. One of these students then posed an interesting question:

“What happens to a webpage when we delete them?

Do the 1s and 0s just fade away?” What a fascinating topic! What a fantastic way to think about a webpage dying, too. I like it because it emphasizes the time it takes to actually, fully delete a webpage. Today, we think about digital action in such small time increments: a second, a nanosecond. In fact, if a webpage doesn’t load within 3 seconds, I get annoyed. How dare this technology that’s supposed to help take my precious time away?

In reality, when webpages are deleted, they are removed from servers, removed from search engine results, and hypothetically yes, erased from the Internet. Anyone that’s taken LIS 889: Digital Curation (or LIS 759: Digital Libraries, or LIS 775: Intro to Archives) knows, though, that there are many Internet archives out there working to maintain deleted webpage integrity for generations to come–whether that’s through screenshots, downloads, or archived websites that are fully functioning years after they’re taken down.