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IELTS PRACTICETASK
The Internet Archive

Brewster Kahle is the founder of the Internet Archive, a not-for-profit digital library dedicated to preserving the
Internet's past for the use of future historians. ' In the past, if you wanted to study the evolution of language for
a PhD or the roles of women in different eras, you had to do all the groundwork with references and citations
all done by hand,' he says. 'Now it can be done by machine at an astonishing rate.' Kahle explains that one of
the biggest drivers behind the idea was his fear that culture and history would be lost to future generations if
they were not preserved online. 'The web is locked in the perpetual present. It's what people want you to see
right now and that's not good enough - that's not how you run a society or open culture,' he says. 'The best
of the web is already not online.' Clearly, this is a golden age for librarians. historians and scholars and it is the
work of men such as Kahle that ensures the extensive data posted on the web is not lost.
The archive is located in a quiet corner of San Francisco. Flashing servers are stacked high, not unlike old
books, each blue blink a signal that someone somewhere is trying to reach a webpage frozen in time in
its archive. It's one of just a handful of institutions, including parts of the British Library and the Library of
Congress in the USA. trying to ensure that what is online now is saved for the future. It does this by capturing
more than a billion web pages a week, though it doesn't try to archive every page of every website - on the
fast-n-1oving web the average page is changed every hundred days - or any social media. This snapshot of the
web has been taken every two months since 1996 and the gateway to the archive, the 'Wayback Machine', is
deservedly one of the most popular sites online.
Niels Brugger, director of the Centre for Internet Studies at Aarhus University in Denmark, recalls his frustration
at the way the object of his study used to disappear before his eyes. Now, using the Danish national web
archive, which takes a snapshot of all '.dk' websites four times a year, he can track how the Internet as a whole
is developing in his country, from the different types of websites to the balance between text and images.
He is surprised at how few historians make use of the Internet as a source but expects that to change rapidly
in five or ten years as a new generation of scholars better understands its potential and acquires the tools for
rigorous data analysis, which are required to study such an ocean of information. 'It really is an astonishing new
source for future historians,' he says. 'It gives us a great opportunity to study the daily life of people. It is as if
we had a tape recorder on the marketplace in the fifteenth century.' It's a most intriguing parallel.
At the University of Leicester in England, Ruth Page, a lecturer in linguistics, has already made sources such
as Wikipedia central to her work. She studies how entries in the online encyclopedia are edited as a particular
event unfolds. Page believes that h istorians will have to transform the way they work. 'I'm an empiricist so I
like data. It is like being let loose in a very large sweet shop,' she says. 'But the days of the lone scholar are
gone; in my personal opinion we really need to embrace creative ways to work collaboratively.'
The Long Now Foundation, an organisation founded in 1996 to promote long-term thinking, wants to create a
space to persuade people to stop and think about how the decisions they make now will affect the next 10,000
years. Laura Welcher, the foundation's director of operations, says for years they have feared a 'digital dark
age' where resources kept only online disappear. Initially, the project looked at ways to help people constantly
migrate their files to ensure, for example, old Microsoft Word documents were still readable in the newer
versions. Then, they got much more ambitious, building a new version of the Rosetta Stone, a silicon disc
inscribed with thousands of pages documenting human languages. 'We were very purposeful about creating a
future artefact, even if the intentional migration of information into the future is much harder digitally,' she says.
Yet she, too, is refreshingly positive about the chances of being able to both create and preserve your own
space online. ' I think keeping a story of an individual or of a cultural group is more egalitarian because access
to archiving your stuff is easier.' she says. 'It is a very new thing to have your voice out there like never before.'

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Questions 1-6
Choose the correct letter, A, 8, C or D.

1 Brewster Kahle originally founded the Internet Archive

A as a by-product of an onlino business venture.
B in connection with his doctoral research project.
C as part of a study of social interaction on the web.
D as a way of safeguarding data for future researchers.
2 From the second paragraph, we understand that the I n ternet Archive
A is just one of a large number of similar initiatives.
B is edited to remove outdated content on a regular basis.
C is an attempt to keep a comprehensive record of all webpages.
D is designed to provide a representative sample of available data.
3 Niels Brugger predicts that historians will soon begin
A paying more attention to the visual data available online.
B making a study of how the Internet has developed in Denmark.
C developing the skills needed to take full advantage of the Internet.
D using the resources on the Internet to understand past centuries better.
4 According to Ruth Page, future historians will need to
A spend more time contributing to popular websites.
B make more of an effort to co-operate with each other.
C be willing to change their view of past events more often.
D be prepared to analyse the language used to record past events.
5 The overall aim of the Long Now Foundation is to encourage
A the keeping of key data in a non-digital format.
B a move away from short-term decision making.
C people to manage their data files more effectively.
D the long-term retention of data in a variety of languages.
6 In the text as a whole, the writer reveals that she feels
A optimistic about the future potential of online data.
B concerned about whether lost data can be recovered online.
C frustrated at the difficulty of monitoring online data effectively.
D convinced that enough is being done to preserve onlin e data indefinitely.

Which statement best describes how you feel about Multiple Choice tasks?

I feel confident about doing Multiple Choice tasks.

I did OK, but I still need to do more work on Multiple Choice tasks.
I need more practice with Multiple Choice tasks. I need to focus on . . .

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