Everything old is new again

Since I’ve been working on it for more than a year, it seems appropriate that I should give just a wee plug to the shiny new CBC Digital Archives website.

Known among us archives types as simply “Phase II”, the new site has been completely redesigned from top to bottom - the first redesign in six years. Full details in the press release.

In some regards, the fact that the old site lasted six years is a testament to good design - hell, look at Google.com - a homepage designed by accident that has lasted for years.

Still, the old Archives site was getting creaky. In the YouTube era, people expect more video, and they expect it to be bigger than 240×180. And the new design fixed a few major limitations - bitty little graphics, the inability to properly house and showcase solo clips, no way to present classic CBC programs.

We’ve still got a few wrinkles to iron out (mostly pages that render too slowly, particularly in Internet Explorer) but overall I’m really pleased with the new design. I’d love to know what you think.

FYI, you can check out past iterations of the site at Archive.org’s Wayback Machine - an absolutely invaluable site, if you haven’t seen it.

On a similar note, I recently did some work with Joe Lawlor, CBC’s original webmaster, to archive the Archives site. I spend all day creating an archive of CBC Radio and CBC Television, but nobody archives CBC.ca.

So now we do. Using a $30 product called Offline Explorer, Joe and I regularly capture all of CBC.ca (well, most of it, not including media) to DVD. Not exactly high tech or professional, but I now have a catalogue of CBC.ca’s evolving site in a case on my desk.

I hope that one day the Archives site becomes trimedial - very few (if any?) corporations properly document their online development, and certainly not publicly.

As I found when I created the CBC.ca 10th anniversary site, even national broadcasters don’t keep copies of their online journalism.

Even today, websites tend to be seen as transient, disappearing into the past the moment they are published.

It reminds me of the early days of radio - broadcasts simply went out into the ether; why would anyone want to *keep* them? In fact, during the early years of the Second World War, CBC Radio recordings were etched on aluminum discs - which were melted down to make fighter planes as part of our contribution to the war effort.

But today, storage is (for all intents and purposes) free. We can, if we choose, keep all data, forever. The hard part is the planning.

Know any websites that catalogue their evolution? Please tell me about them - I’d love to check them out. And do poke around the new Archives site, and let me know what you think.

Posted by: Paul Gorbould | 03-18-2008 | 11:03 AM
Posted in: CBC | Teh Internets | Comments (2)