The race to save the first draft of coronavirus history from internet oblivion

As lockdowns, shelter-in-place orders, and social distancing threaten to stretch out into the weeks, months, and even years ahead, there is a scramble to collect, in real time, the overwhelming abundance of information being produced online. Without it, the record of how we lived, how we changed, and how we addressed the global pandemic would be left incomplete and at the mercy of a constantly shifting internet, where even recent history has a tendency to get buried or vanish. The Library of Congress and the Internet Archive both know they’re going to miss broad parts of the covid pandemic playing out online. The LOC has to seek permission from site owners to collect and provide public access to an archived version of a domain, and the Internet Archive is up against a web that might shift more quickly than it is able to capture.

The process is already recording shifts in how powerful institutions are addressing the crisis. For example, the language on the government web page describing the National Strategic Stockpile was altered after Jared Kushner suggested that the store of medical supplies and pharmaceuticals wasn’t intended for states to use. The new description removed language that appeared to contradict this statement. Both versions were captured by the Wayback Machine, which was saving versions of that page every few hours. There may be many other small, but valuable, data points we might miss that could give future historians a fuller understanding of this period.