Stop Hoarding Broken Links: The Case for Intentional Digital Forgetting
The prevailing mantra in our field is one of aggressive capture: save everything, hoard every byte, because you never know what might be valuable later. The specter of the 404 error haunts us, and we respond by running bots that endlessly crawl, creating vast repositories of digital stuff. We’ve become the librarians of the broken link, curators of the dead end. But what if this compulsive preservation is not just unsustainable, but actively harmful to the historical record we are trying to build?
My counterintuitive argument is this: strategic, well-documented deletion is as crucial a preservation tool as any crawler. The relentless drive to archive everything creates a noise floor so high that the signal is lost. When a future researcher looks at a web archive containing a thousand versions of a corporate homepage’s minor CSS update alongside the single, fleeting record of a fringe community forum, what narrative will they see? They will likely see an overwhelming, undifferentiated mass, where the trivial is preserved with the same fidelity as the critical. This isn't preservation; it's hoarding, and it obscures meaning more than it reveals it.
The Tyranny of the Sprawl
This archival sprawl creates a practical problem of discoverability, but also a deeper philosophical one. It mirrors the very problem of the live web it seeks to combat: information overload without curation. By trying to save ‘everything,’ we abdicate our responsibility as archivists to make judgements about significance. We outsource it to an algorithm that cannot distinguish between a pivotal political blog and a spam-filled comment section. The result is a false objectivity—a belief that the un-curated archive is more ‘pure.’ In reality, the crawler’s biases (which sites it can access, how frequently it runs) simply replace our own, and the outcome is a far messier, less useful dataset.
Instead, we should champion a principle of intentional forgetting. This does not mean wanton destruction. It means making conscious, documented decisions about what is worth long-term preservation and what can be allowed to fade. It’s about applying the same critical appraisal used in traditional archives—where only a fraction of physical records are deemed worthy of permanent keeping—to the digital realm. We need to accept that a broken link is not always a tragedy. Sometimes, the absence of a thing is part of its story. The disappearance of a government website can be as telling as its presence.
This shift requires us to move from being passive collectors to active interpreters. It means focusing our limited resources on deep, contextual preservation of materials we have judged to be historically or culturally significant, rather than on the shallow, wide capture of the entire digital ecosystem. We must create archives that are less like digital landfills and more like curated museums, where the selection process itself is transparent and part of the public record. By embracing intentional forgetting, we don’t diminish our mission; we sharpen it. We stop being mere hoarders of broken links and start becoming true stewards of meaning.
Notes & further reading
A few pages I came back to while writing this: