The idea of an online library of all pages that are on the internet is something that comes up quite often in popular culture, though not in the same terms. It’s something that most people seem to believe already exists; most of the time, conversation centers on the privacy issues that naturally come with such a library. Lack of understanding aside, legal issues are something that definitely will come up with the Archive. As noted, it operates under an opt out policy, unlike the LOC’s opt in style. Additionally, the crawlers don’t seem to take copyright into account, which begets an array of legal questions. Examples like the UK Conservative party’s speech clearing makes these archives sound like they could spur the government to make copyright laws catch up with the internet age. I think that these archives will be subject to a number of legal restrictions that make Kahle’s goal of democratizing access to internet archives seems really idealistic.

One of the more interesting speculations that comes up is how the archives could be used for academic study, both now and in the future. There are a number of roadblocks up now and the current archive is more useful for one-off webpage lookups than any structured work. The sheer amount of information out there has two main effects on the usefulness of the archive. Organizing it would be very difficult and could take multiple forms, each with its own limitations. Simultaneously, there would be very real research benefits from having this many unchanging resources at hand. I’m curious to know how Europeana was organized and how widely used it is.