How the internet s memory infrastructure developed averting a digital dark age and introduced a golden age of historical memory In early 1996 the web was ephemeral But by 2001 the internet was forever How did websites transform from having a brief life to becoming long lasting Drawing on archival material in the Internet Archive and exclusive interviews Ian Milligan s Averting the Digital Dark Age explores how western society evolved from fearing a digital dark age to building the robust digital memory we rely on today By the mid 1990s the specter of a digital dark age haunted libraries portending a bleak future with no historical record that threatened cyber obsolescence deletion and apathy People around the world worked to solve this impending problem In San Francisco technology entrepreneur Brewster Kahle launched his scrappy nonprofit Internet Archive filling tape drives with internet content Elsewhere in Washington Canberra Ottawa and Stockholm librarians developed innovative new programs to safeguard digital heritage Cataloging worries among librarians technologists futurists and writers from WWII onward through early practitioners to an extended case study of how September 11 prompted institutions to preserve thousands of digital artifacts related to the attacks Averting the Digital Dark Age explores how the web gained a long lasting memory By understanding this history we can equip our society to better grapple with future internet shifts Averting the Digital Dark Age How Archivists Librarians and Technologists Built the Web a Memory