I Had a Website: The Practices of Archive Team and the Internet Archive in Archiving GeoCities
Both teams emphasize the historical importance of GeoCities and view their work as a saving of historical records. In the Internet Archive's blog post about the GeoCities collection, they write that “GeoCities paved the way for other sites which would offer a sense of community and networking capabilities” (Kaplan, “GeoCities, Preserved!”). In order to fulfill their work in web archiving, “as goes with the territory of being web archivists, [they wanted] to make sure to gather as many of the pages as possible” (Kaplan, “GeoCities, Preserved!”). In Archive Team founder Jason Scott's blog post announcing the torrent, he describes GeoCities as “the dawn of what one might call 'regular people' joining the World Wide Web” (Scott, “Archiveteam! The Geocities Torrent”). GeoCities is a site of history, “Real, honest, true history. So Archive Team did what it could…and some amount of Geocities was saved” (Scott, “Archiveteam! The Geocities Torrent”).
The Internet Archive still maintains a positive relationship towards Yahoo!, thanking Yahoo! “for their guidance and open communication” as well as directing users to the “valuable advice” available in the Yahoo! help center (“GeoCities Special Collection 2009”, Kaplan, “GeoCities, Preserved!”). The Yahoo! help center also directs to the Internet Archive for questions on archiving GeoCities websites (“Will my site be archived?”). In contrast, Archive Team is antagonistic to Yahoo!'s closure of GeoCities; Yahoo! was “spontaneously combusting [GeoCities] due to a few marks in a ledger, the decision of who-knows for who-knows-what” (Scott, “Archiveteam! The Geocities Torrent”). Yahoo! was “not [just] disappearing history, but in fact history being actively and quickly destroyed on purpose” (Scott, “Archiveteam! The Geocities Torrent”).
Archive Team founder Jason Scott emphasizes the labor and creation lost by Yahoo!'s closure of GeoCities: “[websites] represent countless hours of writings, of editing, or thinking, of creating. They represent their time, and they represent the thoughts and dreams of people now much older, or gone completely” (Scott, “Archiveteam! The Geocities Torrent”). Scott believes that “there is a mental condition to accept the loss of data as the price of doing business with computers”, but “user data is a trust, a heritage, history” that deserves greater care (Scott, “The Splendiferous Story of Archive Team”). By crawling and saving GeoCities websites, Archive Team is returning the labor and creation of users from Yahoo! back to users. Thus Archive Team's work not only saves historical records but also “challenges the regime of private property” (Lavigne).
