The Two Gardens: Cultivation Versus Conservation in Web Archiving
Imagine two gardens. The first is a meticulously curated botanical garden, where every plant is labeled, pruned, and arranged to tell a specific story of horticulture and history. The second is a vast, protected wilderness, a nature reserve where ecosystems are left to evolve with minimal human intervention, preserving not just individual species but the complex, often chaotic, relationships between them. These two gardens are not just landscapes; they are philosophies. And they mirror a fundamental, often unspoken, divide in how we approach the preservation of the web.
On one side, we have the Cultivators. Their approach to web archiving is one of active curation and collection development. Like the botanical gardener, they select specific seeds—websites, themes, events—deemed to be of enduring value. They build collections around elections, natural disasters, or specific cultural movements. The goal is to create a coherent, researchable corpus, a polished exhibit of digital history. This is the methodology of many national libraries and institutional archives. It is a practice of discernment, of making deliberate choices about what is worth saving for future generations. The strength here is narrative clarity, but the inherent risk is that the curator’s perspective—their biases, their blind spots—becomes permanently baked into the historical record.
On the other side are the Conservationists. Their ethos is one of broad, automated capture, aiming to preserve the entire ecosystem of the web as it exists, not as we wish it to be. This is the approach of initiatives like the Internet Archive’s broad crawls, which attempt to sweep up vast swathes of the web, capturing the magnificent alongside the mundane, the profound next to the profane. Like the wilderness reserve, this method seeks to preserve the context, the hyperlinks, the pop-up ads, the forgotten blogs, and the fleeting social media posts that, together, form the true texture of digital life. Its strength is in its raw, unvarnished comprehensiveness, but it presents a different challenge: an overwhelming, undifferentiated mass of material where significant moments can be nearly impossible to find without powerful tools.
This isn’t a debate with a right answer. The Cultivator’s curated archive provides focus and intellectual access, but can never represent the whole. The Conservationist’s broad archive promises a more complete record, but one that is often too vast and unstructured for any single person to comprehend. The truth of our digital memory likely lies in the tension between these two gardens. We need the focused collections to make sense of the wilderness, and we need the wilderness to ensure we haven’t accidentally curated out something vital. The most resilient approach to preserving our digital present may be to tend to both gardens with equal care, recognizing that each alone tells only half the story.
Notes & further reading
A few pages I came back to while writing this: