Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe: Digital Archivists are Saving Public Information from the Memory Hole

In the three decades since Brewster Kahle spun up the nonprofit Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, it has scaled up to include government websites and datasets—many of which are essential to the engineering and scientific communities. U.S. government agencies like the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, and NASA are critical sources of research data, technical specifications, and standards documentation in pretty much every area where IEEE Spectrum's audience works—AI & computer science, biomedical devices, power and energy, semiconductors, telecommunications…the list goes on.