Food is having a cultural moment. As America marks its 250th anniversary, new cookbooks celebrate endangered culinary traditions, UNESCO calls recipes “living heritage,” and chefs are rediscovering centuries-old techniques. But preserving food culture takes more than cooking—it takes preserving the books, handwritten recipes, community cookbooks, and stories that carry this knowledge from one generation to the next. That’s the focus of this week’s Future Knowledge episode with Katie Livingston.
Why preserve a cookbook? In the second episode of our special six-part series on Vanishing Culture, host Vida Vojić speaks with Katie Livingston, a doctoral researcher at Stanford University who studies domestic culture and women’s literature. Through the lens of family cookbooks, recipe collections, and food traditions, Katie explores why everyday cultural artifacts deserve preservation and what they can teach us about history, identity, and community.
From church cookbooks and handwritten recipe notes to the rise of food blogs, Katie explains how recipes capture regional traditions, social values, and forms of knowledge that are often overlooked by traditional preservation efforts. The conversation examines how domestic culture—particularly culture created and maintained by women—has historically been undervalued despite its importance as a record of lived experience. As cooking increasingly moves online, Katie also considers the risks of digital ephemerality and what may be lost when personal archives give way to disappearing websites and search-engine-driven recipes. Together, Vida and Katie explore how preserving food culture helps us preserve the stories, communities, and histories embedded within it.
Vanishing Culture is a special six-part series from the Future Knowledge podcast, produced by the Internet Archive and Authors Alliance, exploring what happens when our shared cultural heritage disappears, and what we can do to preserve it. View the full series.
The series is inspired by the Internet Archive’s new book, Vanishing Culture, a collection of essays by scholars, artists, librarians, and preservationists examining why culture disappears in the digital age, and what can be done to save it. Together, the book and podcast offer complementary perspectives on one of the defining challenges of our time: preserving humanity’s cultural record in an increasingly fragile digital world.
As more of our cultural heritage moves online, a troubling question is emerging: what happens when the things we create, share, and cherish simply disappear? In the first episode of our special six-part series on Vanishing Culture, host Vida Vojić speaks with researcher, book historian, and literary sociologist Luca Messarra, author of the Internet Archive’s Vanishing Culture report, about the growing threat of cultural loss in the digital age.
From disappearing websites and deleted social media archives to lost films, books, music, and video games, Luca explores why culture vanishes and why it matters. He explains how copyright law, corporate control of digital platforms, and the shift from ownership to licensing are making it harder for libraries, archives, and communities to preserve cultural memory. Along the way, he shares stories that illustrate both the fragility of our digital heritage and the importance of preserving it: from a favorite YouTube recipe rescued by the Wayback Machine to the role cultural artifacts play in memory and identity. The conversation wraps on a positive note, with a look toward solutions and what creators, libraries, and everyday citizens can do to help ensure culture remains accessible for generations to come.
Vanishing Culture is a special six-part series from the Future Knowledge podcast, produced by the Internet Archive and Authors Alliance, exploring what happens when our shared cultural heritage disappears, and what we can do to preserve it. View the full series.
The series is inspired by the Internet Archive’s new book, Vanishing Culture, a collection of essays by scholars, artists, librarians, and preservationists examining why culture disappears in the digital age, and what can be done to save it. Together, the book and podcast offer complementary perspectives on one of the defining challenges of our time: preserving humanity’s cultural record in an increasingly fragile digital world.
Vanishing Culture is a special six-part series from the Future Knowledge podcast, produced by the Internet Archive and Authors Alliance, exploring what happens when our shared cultural heritage disappears, and what we can do to preserve it.
Hosted by musician Vida Vojić, the series features conversations with researchers, archivists, librarians, and creators working to safeguard everything from cookbooks and queer archives to African folktales and endangered languages. Together, they examine how copyright, digital platforms, and changing technologies are reshaping our collective memory, while highlighting the communities finding new ways to keep culture alive. Through personal stories and global perspectives, Vanishing Culture reveals that preservation isn’t just about protecting the past, it’s about ensuring that future generations can access, understand, and build upon our shared cultural record.
The series is inspired by the Internet Archive’s new book, Vanishing Culture, a collection of essays by scholars, artists, librarians, and preservationists examining why culture disappears in the digital age, and what can be done to save it. Together, the book and podcast offer complementary perspectives on one of the defining challenges of our time: preserving humanity’s cultural record in an increasingly fragile digital world.
Vanishing Culture #1: What We Stand to Lose with Luca Messarra
As more of our cultural heritage moves online, a troubling question is emerging: what happens when the things we create, share, and cherish simply disappear? In the first episode of our special six-part series on Vanishing Culture, host Vida Vojić speaks with researcher, book historian, and literary sociologist Luca Messarra, author of the Internet Archive’s Vanishing Culture report, about the growing threat of cultural loss in the digital age.
From disappearing websites and deleted social media archives to lost films, books, music, and video games, Luca explores why culture vanishes and why it matters. He explains how copyright law, corporate control of digital platforms, and the shift from ownership to licensing are making it harder for libraries, archives, and communities to preserve cultural memory. Along the way, he shares stories that illustrate both the fragility of our digital heritage and the importance of preserving it—from a favorite YouTube recipe rescued by the Wayback Machine to the role cultural artifacts play in memory, identity, and human dignity. The conversation concludes with a look toward solutions and what creators, libraries, and everyday citizens can do to help ensure culture remains accessible for generations to come.
Vanishing Culture #2: The Stories Hidden in Cookbooks with Katie Livingston
RELEASE DATE: JULY 8, 2026
Why preserve a cookbook? In the second episode of our special six-part series on Vanishing Culture, host Vida Vojić speaks with Katie Livingston, a doctoral researcher at Stanford University who studies domestic culture and women’s literature. Through the lens of family cookbooks, recipe collections, and food traditions, Katie explores why everyday cultural artifacts deserve preservation and what they can teach us about history, identity, and community.
From church cookbooks and handwritten recipe notes to the rise of food blogs, Katie explains how recipes capture regional traditions, social values, and forms of knowledge that are often overlooked by traditional preservation efforts. The conversation examines how domestic culture—particularly culture created and maintained by women—has historically been undervalued despite its importance as a record of lived experience. As cooking increasingly moves online, Katie also considers the risks of digital ephemerality and what may be lost when personal archives give way to disappearing websites and search-engine-driven recipes. Together, Vida and Katie explore how preserving food culture helps us preserve the stories, communities, and histories embedded within it.
Vanishing Culture #3: Saving Queer Memory with Brooke Palmieri
RELEASE DATE: JULY 15, 2026
Queer history has often been overlooked, erased, or excluded from traditional archives. In the third episode of our special six-part series on Vanishing Culture, host Vida Vojić speaks with writer, artist, and archivist Brooke Palmieri about the vital role queer archives play in preserving memory, identity, and community. Drawing on his work with CAMP BOOKS and his research into LGBTQ+ history, Brooke explores why archives matter—not just as collections of records, but as tools for helping people understand where they come from and imagine new futures.
The conversation traces how queer communities have built their own archives in response to historical exclusion from mainstream institutions, creating spaces where stories of love, activism, creativity, and survival can be preserved and shared. Brooke reflects on the power of community-led archiving, the opportunities digital platforms create for expanding access to queer history, and the challenges posed by disappearing information, online misinformation, and unequal access to cultural heritage. Together, Vida and Brooke explore how preserving queer archives helps ensure that marginalized histories remain visible, accessible, and available to future generations.
Vanishing Culture #4: Keeping African Folktales Alive with Helen Nde & Laura Gibbs
RELEASE DATE: JULY 22, 2026
Folktales are more than stories—they are living records of culture, identity, and collective memory. In the fourth episode of our special six-part series on Vanishing Culture, host Vida Vojić speaks with writer and researcher Helen Nde, founder of Mythological Africans, and folklorist Laura Gibbs about the importance of preserving African folklore in the digital age. Together, they explore how stories help communities understand themselves, pass down knowledge across generations, and make sense of a changing world.
The conversation examines the challenges of preserving oral traditions, from the distortions introduced by colonial collectors to the loss of context when dynamic storytelling practices are reduced to written records. Helen and Laura discuss how digitization can help make folklore more accessible and discoverable, while also opening new possibilities for communities to share and reinterpret their stories online. They also reflect on the importance of trustworthy archives in an era when myths and historical narratives are increasingly used to shape political and cultural identities. Ultimately, the episode asks what it will take to ensure that these rich storytelling traditions remain available—not as relics of the past, but as living resources for future generations.
Vanishing Culture #5: A Language Worth Saving with Peter Scholing
RELEASE DATE: JULY 29, 2026
Languages can vanish just as easily as books, websites, or archives—and when they do, entire ways of understanding the world can disappear with them. In the fifth episode of our special six-part series on Vanishing Culture, host Vida Vojić speaks with Peter Scholing of Biblioteca Nacional Aruba and the Coleccion Aruba digital heritage platform about the importance of preserving Papiamento, Aruba’s creole language, and the cultural heritage it carries.
Peter shares the story of how Aruba’s libraries, archives, and cultural institutions came together to build a digital collection that now preserves hundreds of thousands of documents, photographs, newspapers, recordings, and books. The conversation explores the unique preservation challenges facing island communities, from geographic isolation and climate risks to the legacy of colonialism, which has scattered much of Aruba’s historical record across multiple countries and languages. Peter explains why expanding access to materials in Papiamento is essential for education, cultural identity, and historical understanding, and how digitization is helping unlock previously inaccessible collections. Looking ahead, he discusses the opportunities new technologies offer for smaller languages and why ensuring a vibrant digital future for Papiamento is a crucial part of preserving Aruba’s culture for generations to come.
Vanishing Culture #6: What We’ve Learned with Vida Vojić & Alice Bridgwood
RELEASE DATE: AUGUST 6, 2026
What does it mean to preserve culture in an age of disappearing websites, platform-controlled media, and fragile digital memories? In the final episode of our special six-part series on Vanishing Culture, Future Knowledge hosts Dave Hansen and Chris Freeland sit down with musician and series host Vida Vojić and producer Alice Bridgwood to reflect on the conversations, ideas, and lessons that emerged throughout the series.
Looking back on discussions about cookbooks, queer archives, African folklore, Papiamento, and more, Vida and Alice explore the common threads connecting seemingly disparate forms of cultural preservation. They reflect on how culture is shaped not only by institutions, but by communities and individuals who choose what to remember, share, and pass on. The conversation examines the challenges of living in an “age of platforms,” the risks of relying on technology and corporations to steward cultural memory, and the growing movement toward community-driven preservation efforts. Along the way, the group discusses what surprised them most, how the series changed their own habits and perspectives, and why they remain hopeful that people everywhere can play an active role in keeping culture alive. Rather than ending on a note of loss, the episode offers a hopeful reminder that culture survives when people care enough to preserve, share, and reimagine it together.
About the Future Knowledge podcast
Future Knowledge explores the intersection of technology, culture, and information policy with leading authors, scholars, and experts. From copyright and open access to AI and digital preservation, we discuss the big issues shaping knowledge and creativity in the digital age. Future Knowledge is brought to you by the Internet Archive and Authors Alliance.
From disappearing news articles to lost films, music, and websites, a new book from the Internet Archive reveals how our shared digital record is eroding, and what it will take to preserve it.
What does it mean to live in an era where culture can simply… disappear?
Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record—a new book from the Internet Archive—brings together essays, research, and case studies that document a growing crisis: the erosion of access to the knowledge, media, and history that shape our collective memory. From journalism and government information to music, film, and the web itself, the shift from ownership to access—and from physical to digital—has made culture more vulnerable than many realize.
This isn’t just about nostalgia. It’s about accountability, scholarship, and the public’s right to access information. When news articles are altered or removed, when public information is taken offline, or when creative works are locked behind shifting licenses, the historical record becomes incomplete. What disappears is not just content, but context.
Recent efforts by some publishers to block web archiving services like the Wayback Machine underscore how fragile access to digital history has become. When large portions of the web are intentionally excluded from preservation, gaps in our shared record are structural, not accidental.
At the same time, libraries, archivists, and preservationists are working to push back against this loss. The Internet Archive and its partners continue to build a digital library for the web: capturing, preserving, and providing access to materials that might otherwise vanish.
Vanishing Culture is both a warning and a call to action. It invites readers to reconsider what it means to preserve culture in a digital age, and to recognize that without intentional effort, much of what we create today may not be available tomorrow.
Read the book, explore the essays, and join us in the work of preserving our digital past before more of it disappears.
TL;DR: A Pew Research Center study found that 38% of webpages from a decade ago, and about 25% of pages sampled across the decade, are now inaccessible; our analysis shows that the Wayback Machine has rescued roughly 15% of those otherwise dead pages.
In 2024, the Pew Research Center published a link-rot study, “When Online Content Disappears”. They stated, “38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible a decade later”. They further noted, “a quarter of all webpages that existed at one point between 2013 and 2023 are no longer accessible”. This is not an isolated report that quantified the rate of loss of the online information. Numerous other link-rot studies in the last two decades have reported similar numbers or worse, depending on the context and samples. For example, Ahrefs, an SEO company, reported in the same year, “At Least 66.5% of Links to Sites in the Last 9 Years Are Dead”. In 2021, Jonathan Zittrain published an article in the Atlantic, “The Internet Is Rotting”, in which his team analyzed about 2 million external links from New York Times (NYTimes) articles and reported that 25% of deep links have rotted. They further noted that 72% of the older links from 1998 were dead. A recent longitudinal study on link-rot from the Old Dominion University (ODU), “Some URLs Are Immortal, Most Are Ephemeral”, analyzed 27.3 million URL samples from the Wayback Machine since 1996 and reported that about 65% of the sampled URLs were found dead on the live Web, when checked in 2023. Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive, has been citing numbers from the early days of the Web and stating the average life of webpages to be anywhere from 40 to 100 days. A 2026 book, “Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record”, by Messarra et al. highlights underlying causes of numerous recent cultural digital losses while emphasizing the critical roles libraries and archives must play to maintain our cultural history for the future. Different studies have looked at the problem from different perspectives and contexts, hence it is often difficult to compare them side-by-side, but they all agree that an increasing number of links are rotting with the passage of time. However, some of these studies (not all) have failed to acknowledge the existence of Web archives, such as the Wayback Machine, where a portion of the dead Web might be preserved and can be used as a fallback when a reference leads to a broken link.
In this post we go through some of the link-rot studies and look at them from the perspective of the Wayback Machine to see how much of the dead Web can be rescued. Table 1 shows the status of the dead and rescued Web at a glance as sampled by a few different studies.
Study
Year
Period
Samples
Dead
Rescued
Pew (All)
2024
2013-2023
5.4M
26%
16%
Pew (General)
2024
2013-2023
1M
27%
13%
Zittrain NYT*
2021
2013-2013
88K
40%
38%
ODU NYPW
2024
1996-2021
27.3M
65%
65%
Table 1: Dead links from various link-rot studies rescued by the Wayback Machine. * The NYT numbers are based on our recreated dataset.
Let us begin by looking at the study from Pew Research Center. They have generously shared their dataset with us so it was rather trivial for us (after performing some transformations and extractions, as the original dataset was stored in Parquet files) to check the URLs against the Wayback Machine to see if and when each of those were archived the first time. Their dataset contains 5.4 million unique URLs in general, news, government, and Wikipedia references categories sampled from the Common Crawl archive and Wikipedia pages. They also reported on Tweets in their post, but that dataset was not shared with us due to the restrictions posed by the usage policies.
Before we dive into our findings, below are brief descriptions of some terminologies that we will use frequently:
Alive: URLs that return 200 OK HTTP status code when resolved
Dead: URLs that return HTTP error status codes, TCP connection errors, or DNS failures when resolved
Preserved: URLs that are Alive on the live Web as well as present in a Web archive
Rescued: URLs that are Dead on the live Web, but are present in a Web archive
Endangered: URLs that are Alive on the live Web, but are not present in any Web archive
Vanished: URLs that are Dead on the live Web and also not present in any Web archive
Archived: Preserved + Rescued
Accessible: Preserved + Rescued + Endangered
When we do not take any Web archives into account, about a quarter of all the 5.4 million sampled URLs would be considered inaccessible or dead as illustrated in Figure 1. However, when we leverage the Wayback Machine to access otherwise dead URLs, the fraction of inaccessible or vanished URLs drops from one in every four down to only one in every ten. The Wayback Machine has about 72% of the entire dataset archived, of which 56% are preserved from the URLs that are still alive on the live Web and 16% are rescued from the dead. There are 18% of the URLs from the sample that are still alive, but have not been archived in the Wayback Machine yet, which we call endangered, as they may become vanished if they cease to exist on the live Web ever. It is worth noting that we did not account for any captures of these URLs that might be present in any of the many smaller Web archives other than the Wayback Machine, which if accounted for, might increase the percentage of the accessible URLs a little more. Moreover, we relied on HTTP status codes and did not look into the contents of the pages to check for any soft-404s (i.e., error pages that wrongly return a 200 OK HTTP status code) or other irrelevant content, which might change the numbers further.
Figure 1: Archiving status of all the URLs from the Pew dataset in the Wayback Machine.
A subset of about 1 million URLs from the Pew dataset is a sample of general webpages from the last decade, spanning across 11 years from 2013 to 2023. They noted that about a quarter of the URLs from this subset were dead in 2023, with older URLs having a greater percentage of loss, all the way to 38% for links from 2013. We recreated their yearly graph in Figure 2 in orange color with an overlay of rescued URLs by the Wayback Machine in green color. We found that about 38% of the 38% dead URLs from 2013 (i.e., about 15% of the total) are rescued by the Wayback Machine. Moreover, about a quarter of the accumulative URLs of the general sample which were considered dead, about half of them were rescued by the Wayback Machine. It is worth noting that the last three years in Figure 2 seem to be rescued almost completely, but it is a side-effect of ingestion of Common Crawl data from the recent years into the Wayback Machine, which happens to be the source of the sample of the Pew dataset.
Figure 2: Yearly archiving status of URLs from the general sample of the Pew dataset in the Wayback Machine.
We tried getting access to the dataset of about 2 million URLs from the Zittrain’s NYTimes outlinks study, but we did not get it yet. However, in the interim we created our own dataset by downloading all the NYTimes pages published in 2013 that are present in the Wayback Machine, extracting all the outlinks from them, and excluding all the links to pages from NYTimes itself. We were able to collect about 88 thousand such URLs this way. Then we checked the live Web status of each of the URLs (after following up to 5 redirects, if any) and also checked for their presence in the Wayback Machine. We found that 40% of the external links from NYTimes pages from 2013 were found dead on the live Web, but 96% of those URLs are archived in the Wayback Machine. This means, only about 2% URLs from this sample have vanished. However, this impressive number needs to be taken with a grain of salt because we do not have the original URL sample and our own sample is derived from pages present in the Wayback Machine, which has an inherent bias of outlinks from those pages being more likely to be archived than the outlinks of the pages that are not present in the Wayback Machine. That said, we will be keen to revisit these numbers if and when we get access to the original sample of URLs used in Zittrain’s study.
A recent, and perhaps the most comprehensive, longitudinal link-rot study from ODU, to which we are a collaborator, analyzed 27.3 million URLs sampled from the index of the Wayback Machine spanning over more than two and a half decades. They reported about 65% of the sampled URLs from 1996 to 2021 were found dead in 2023. A significant number of these samples were not even resolving the DNS, indicating that many of those domain names were not registered anymore. They found that most of the URLs die rapidly in the first few years of their existence, but some of the longest living sites are not dead yet. Luckily, all of the dead URLs in this sample are rescued by the Wayback Machine by the virtue of it being the source of the sample in the first place. This also means, the ODU study would not be able to tell the percentages of endangered or vanished URLs, because its dataset contains no URLs that were never archived.
In summary, all of the link-rot studies, with varying numbers, indicate that the Web is brittle and an increasing number of Web resources die with the passage of time. However, we found that Web archives like the Wayback Machine play an increasingly important role in rescuing the dead Web and minimizing the fracture of the knowledge graph on the Web, but there is a lot more to do. For example, the Turn All References Blue (TARB) project has fixed more than 30 million broken links (and counting) on hundreds of wikis with the help of the InternetArchiveBot, the WaybackMedic bot, and the Wayback Machine.
While there is not a lot that can be done to resurrect the vanished Web other than attempting to find alternate locations where the content might have moved to (via projects like FABLE), we are determined to minimize the percentage of the endangered URLs. However, there are some internal and external factors that limit our ability to make it ZERO, such as, resource limitations, JavaScript-heavy pages, bot blocking, loginwalls, paywalls, deepweb, lack of timely discovery, etc. We strive to narrow down the potential loss of our cultural heritage via different means such as ingesting feeds from MediaCloud, GDELT, Wikipedia EventStream, and more recently, becoming part of the IndexNow initiative for link discovery soon after corresponding page creation or update on the Web. Moreover, we have the Save Page Now (SPN) service and urge that when you “See Something, Save Something!”. Your continued support will help us preserve the Web more and better.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: We thank our friends at the Pew Research Center and the Old Dominion University and our colleagues Jake LaFountain, Stephen Balbach, Chris Freeland, and Mark Graham for their help and support in this work.
— Dr. Sawood Alam Research Lead, Wayback Machine Internet Archive
The following guest post from free-range archivist and software curator Jason Scott is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age. Read more essays online or download the full report now.
At the Internet Archive we have a technical marvel: emulators running in the browser, allowing computer programs—after a fashion and with some limits—to play with a single click. Go here, and you’re battling aliens. Go there, and you’re experiencing what a spreadsheet program was like in 1981. It’s fast, fun, and free.
We also encourage patrons to upload the software that affected their early lives, and to then encourage others to play these programs with a single click. And so, they do—many, many people working through an admittedly odd set of instructions to make these programs live again.
But of the dozens of machines and environments our system supports, one very specific one dwarfs the others in terms of user contributions: thousands and thousands of additions compared to the relative handful of others. And what is that environment?
Flash.
Created in the 1990s through acquisition and focusing its playability within then-nascent browsers, Flash (once Macromedia Flash, later Adobe Flash) was a plug-in and creation environment designed to bring interactivity to websites and provide a quick on-ramp to making some basic applications across various machines. Within a few years, it was something else entirely.
Originally, it was something as simple as a website where rolling your mouse over a button made it light up or play a sound. Soon it became little animations playing in a splash screen. Some machines had their resources taxed by this alternate website technology—but soon many major sites couldn’t live without it.
Flash flew across the mid-2000s internet sky in a blaze of glory and unbridled creativity. It was the backbone of menus and programs and even critical applications for working with sites. But by 2009, bugs and compatibility issues, the introduction of HTML5 with many of the same features, and a declaration that Flash would no longer be welcome on Apple’s iOS devices, sent Flash into a spiral that it never recovered from.
But thanks to the Archive’s emulation, Flash lives again, at least as self-contained creations you can play in your browser.
What emerges, as thousand of these Flash animations and games arrive, is what part it played in the lives of people now in their twenties and thirties and beyond. “Almost like being given a moment to breathe, or to walk into a museum space and see distant memories hung up on walls as classic art,” our patrons wrote in.
For a rather sizable amount of people using computers from the late 1990s to mid 2000s, before Facebook and Youtube pulled away the need for distractions of a simpler sort, Flash was many people’s game consoles. There were countless people, at work and at home, using Flash sites to play to pass the day and night. Games, animation, and toys to flip through and enjoy. And what there had been to enjoy!
A reasonable tinkerer of Flash’s construction and programming environment could create something functional or straightforward in a day or two of playing around. Someone more driven could, across a week of work and lifting ideas and tutorials from elsewhere, emerge from their screens with an arcade-quality game or a parody movie that got an immediate, heartfelt reaction from a grateful audience. Even when the audience wasn’t quite so grateful, it was easy enough to whip up another experimental work and throw it into the public square to see how it landed.
Without some extensive surveying and research (maybe a future Doctorate of Flash History is out there) we may never know exactly what combinations of ease, nostalgia, and variety have left so many people with such a fondness for Flash. But one thing is clear: its preservation is vital.
Recent events have strengthened the need to keep Flash preserved—for example, shutdowns of the Cartoon Network’s website wiped out hundreds of Flash games and animations that only existed on the site, and will never show up on a DVD or streaming service.
It is everywhere, and nowhere—an easy enough thing to explain, but an impossible thing to transfer over as to the depth and variety of what the garden of creation was. Flash, while under the purview of a single company, became, in contrast to the hundreds of other languages and programs for video and sound, the home for everyone. And now it has a home with the Internet Archive.
About the author
Jason Scott is the Free-Range Archivist and Software Curator of the Internet Archive. His favorite arcade game is Crazy Climber.
The following guest post from journalist and computer historian Josh Renaud is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age. Read more essays online or download the full report now.
Mom and Me (Atari ST, 1985) (color) by Yaakov Kirschen, preserved and playable at the Internet Archive.
Whether it’s Pac-Man or Pikachu, Link or Lara Croft, Master Chief or Mario, we love playing video games.
But what about preserving them?
Data shows we spend big money on video games: more than $200 billion globally. By some reports, gaming is now bigger than the global film industry and the North American sports industry combined.
Despite all this growth, data also shows the industry has done a poor job stewarding its heritage and history. In fact, a recent study shows classic games are in critical danger of being lost.
Only 13 percent of all classic games released between 1960 and 2009 are currently commercially available.
Survey of the Video Game Reissue Market in the United States (2023).
Only 13 percent of all classic games released between 1960 and 2009 are currently commercially available, according to the “Survey of the Video Game Reissue Market in the United States,” published in 2023 by Phil Salvador for the Video Game History Foundation and the Software Preservation Network.
Worse, this percentage drops below three percent for games released before 1985, “the foundational era of video games,” the study found.
The study considered a random sample of 1,500 games from the MobyGames database, as well as the entire catalog of the Nintendo Game Boy—4,000 games altogether.
The commercial unavailability of so many classic games leaves few viable options for playing them today. People can attempt to track down and buy increasingly-rare vintage games and hardware, visit a few specialty institutions, or resort to piracy, the study noted. Terrible options all around.
But what about cases where a game was never archived in the first place?
Journalist and computer historian, Josh Renaud.
That was a situation I ran into when I wanted to find copies of “Mom and Me” and “Murray and Me,” two graphical chatbots created in 1985 by Yaakov Kirschen, the Israeli artist best known for the “Dry Bones” cartoon in the Jerusalem Post. Kirschen died on April 14, 2025, at the age of 87.
These “artificial personalities” were among the earliest entertainment software released for the Atari ST computer, and they got splashy write-ups in newspapers including the London Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Los Angeles Times. Even three-time Pulitzer prize winner Thomas Friedman wrote a profile in the New York Times.
Despite that publicity, and the advantage of getting in on the ground floor of a brand new computer platform, probably fewer than 2,000 copies were sold. Apparently I was one of the very few who had copies, which I received from my uncle Jim when he handed down his old Atari 520ST computer to my family in the early 1990s. I remember being amused as my brothers and I conversed with “Mom” and “Murray” back then.
When nostalgia hit me decades later, I began searching online for disk images of these old programs. But there weren’t any, except for one obscure German translation of “Murray” in monochrome.
It was a startling realization: not all software has been preserved in an archive.
I wrote about this predicament in 2014 on my blog, Break Into Chat, which put me in touch with Kevin Ng, who also had some copies. We each made digital images of our old floppy disks, preserving several original versions of “Mom” and “Murray.” But the monochrome version of “Mom” remains lost.
In the years since then, I have continued researching Kirschen’s other lost software, ranging from multiple Jewish and secular educational games for the Apple II computer, to his “artificial creativity” autonomous music composing technology for the Commodore Amiga and the IBM PC. Like “Mom” and “Murray,” none of it sold well, nor was it preserved despite good publicity.
With the help of three fellow retrocomputing enthusiasts in St. Louis, I recovered many of Kirschen’s games and programs from floppy disks Kirschen sent to me. Keith Hacke imaged most of the Apple II and the IBM PC disks, while I imaged the Commodore Amiga disks using hardware loaned by Dan Hevey and Scott Duensing.
I published the disk images with summarized histories on Break Into Chat. Then I uploaded them to the Internet Archive, making them playable in web browsers—but more importantly, preserving them for posterity.
I’m proud to have played a part in bringing this dead software back to life, and restoring a part of Kirschen’s legacy. I think this work is worth rediscovering today.
Take “Nosh Kosh” from 1983, for example. Essentially a Jewish take on Pac-Man, this is an action game designed to teach children about kashrut, Jewish dietary law. It was one of three games modeled on existing arcade classics made by Kirschen together with Gesher Educational Affiliates in Israel.
In “Nosh Kosh,” the player moves a kippah-wearing character named Chunky around the screen, trying to eat all the food items while avoiding three non-kosher bad guys: Peter Pig, Larry Lobster, and Freddy Frogslegs. There are three kinds of food—ice cream, meat, and carrots—but the player must wait a bit between eating the meat and ice cream, otherwise Chunky will yell “Oy!” and lose a life.
Or consider Kirschen and Gesher’s more ambitious “The Georgia Variations,” a choice-based narrative game about Jewish history, identity, and migration, introduced the same year as “Nosh Kosh.”
In this game, the player takes on the role of Boris Goldberg, a Jewish boy in Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century who must make decisions about school, work, marriage, and even what to do in the face of persecution and pogroms. The player’s decisions affect the storyline, but in the end, all the threads eventually lead to the same ending: Goldberg immigrates to Atlanta, Georgia.
Niche educational games like these were far less popular than mainstream action and adventure games. The hobbyists and amateur archivists who preserved software of that time often skipped this genre entirely. And today, these sorts of games may not hold much interest for the general public.
So why bother preserving them?
The prolific Apple II preservationist “4am” gave a great answer in Paleotronic magazine:
“This was how we taught math and science and grammar and history to an entire generation of children. That seems like something worth saving.”
That’s certainly true of Kirschen’s work. In the Apple II games he made with Gesher, we see Jewish educators’ early steps learning to use a new medium to reach kids. And Kirschen’s later work with “artificial personalities” and “artificial creativity” foreshadows the promise and pitfalls of today’s AI craze.
I’m glad to have played a part in bringing this software back to life so others can have the opportunity to play it and study it.
About the author
Josh Renaud is a journalist at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. He publishes computer history research on his website, Break Into Chat. He is interested in recovering lost or obscure software, and telling the stories of the people who made and used it. In 2024 he received a Geffen and Lewyn Family Southern Jewish Research Fellowship from Emory University to study papers related to Gesher’s educational computer games.
The following discussion between writer Caralee Adams and book historian Allie Alvis is part of ourVanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age. Read more essays online or download the full report now.
Like many in the early days of Instagram, Allie Alvis shared what they had for dinner or funny things they encountered on their personal account. It was in Edinburgh, Scotland, when pursuing their master’s degree in book history that they were inspired to post about the university’s incredible book collection, library and items from the used and antiquarian bookshop where they worked.
“To my surprise, people really, really enjoyed it,” said Alvis, of videos and photos they curated of delicately paging through rare books. “I started getting questions from friends and family. And then it just sort of picked up steam with institutions and bookish colleagues following me. I have no idea how I ended up at 255,000 followers now.”
The self-described “pink-haired book historian” mainly posts on Instagram (@Book_Historia), but also is active on TikTok, X, Bluesky, Tumblr, Threads and Facebook. Alvis aims to share something new at least once a week, in addition to working as curator of special collections at the Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library in Winterthur, Delaware.
Alvis said they never set out to become a super popular influencer, but they enjoy sharing their passion for rare books and educating the public.
“It’s been a crazy ride that my followers have grown to such an extent,” they said. “It really has been a grand experiment.”
Among the most popular items they’ve recently shared: a French sample book of foil ornaments from the late 19th century. “It’s just delicious—sparkly, metal. It’s just to die for,” they said.
Alvis’s posts are filled with descriptive narration and an authentic reverence for the historic books they present. They maintain that there’s more to a rare book than what’s on its pages. There’s history behind the author who wrote it, the place where it was made, and the materials used to make it.
“Because that history remains, you want to preserve it,” Alvis said. “You want to keep it in the best possible condition so other people can learn from it.”
Having materials online means that people from all parts of the world can view them without having to travel, which is good for the environment. It’s also useful in knowledge sharing and teaching to have access from beyond your local library, said Alvis, who has a bachelor’s degree in linguistics from the University of Kansas, a master’s of science in book history at the University of Edinburgh and master’s of science in information management from the University of Glasgow.
“I approach digital initiatives from an access standpoint,” Alvis said. “I love that digitization and the Internet Archive gives more people access to materials—and that helps to preserve it.”
Whether putting together scholarly articles or a social media post, Alvis turns to many sources in their research—including the Internet Archive. They especially appreciate the ephemeral material that it has preserved, digitized and made freely available, along with the vast collection of books.
“I have my library reference books at home and in the office, but sometimes that one book you need that one page from is just out of reach,” Alvis said. “The short-time lending option on the Internet Archive has saved me so many times.”
In their work curating decorative arts and art history, some objects are easier to capture through scanning than others. For example, it can be challenging for digital preservation to reflect the dimensionality of button samples, metal ornaments, or perfume labels. But it is useful with wallpaper samples or other flat objects. There are also limits because of the sheer volume of material and limited resources.
Alvis said librarians, academics, booksellers, and book collectors are embracing digitization and social media as tools to both further knowledge and highlight collections. Many also now understand that access is an important part of preservation.
“It would be amazing if everything could be scanned—but there is just so much of it,” Alvis said.
Still, as a librarian, Alvis said, much has been saved—and for that, they’re thankful: “It is only because previous generations have preserved this material—to the extent that they have—that I have work.”
The following guest post from digital librarian and founder of the Internet Archive, Brewster Kahle, is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age. Read more essays online or download the full report now.
I would never have thought I would see the day when the library system itself is under attack.
At home I had a couple of shelves of treasured kids’ books while my parents had walls coated with books. The books and periodicals of my writer and publisher grandfather were on a special bookshelf in the room next to the kitchen—maybe not consulted often, but proudly protected and displayed. But the delight of first going to the White Plains Public Library is indelibly imprinted in my mind—the bookshelves seemed to go on forever. There was book after book after Alice in Wonderland in the card catalog, books about mathematical recreations I could not imagine finding anywhere else, and record albums I could borrow. And I still remember the librarian saying, “You can read any of these books you want, and if we don’t have the one you want, we can get it for you [through the magic of interlibrary loan].” And this was all for free, which was the only thing that worked for a child. And available to everyone who could get their bones through that door of that magic place.
As a child, I did not know how special libraries were—I thought it was just how society worked—I thought there always were and always would be public libraries. I did not realize how fragile this system was until I became a digital librarian in order to make this promise come true for the next generation, a generation of digital learners. I did not think that in my lifetime this offer, this seeming human right, would be threatened by the people that made the fantasy-land of the White Plains Public Library possible: the corporate publishers.
Based on a simple but catastrophic business decision, the big publishers are making it impossible for libraries to do their core functions of preservation and enduring access in the digital era. Netflix, for instance, recently changed its terms of service to explicitly prohibit archiving, therefore allowing them to remove or change any movie for all subscribers at once.1 The decision of the big publishers that is so threatening to the mission of libraries is to stop selling their products. Their books, music, and videos—as the world moves digital—are only available for temporary access by library patrons from databases the publishers control.
At the dawn of the Internet age, we dreamed of a different future, a future where authors got paid for their work, where writings would find their natural audience, where small publishers would flourish supporting a wider range of authors, where new publications and services would democratize production and access to information. The Internet could have been used to create this future, and many of us have worked hard to make it come true, but the lack of antitrust enforcement led to rapid consolidation of publishers, Internet technologies allowed successful online publishers to become dominant worldwide, and an advertising model that made for very few commercial winners. This toxic brew of the collapse of independent publishers and limited commercial platform controlling distribution has made the decentralized Internet seem like a lost opportunity.
But there is hope for libraries and a public seeking alternatives to the flood of disinformation and promoted materials coming from online and offline information producers. Libraries are still funded and staffed with smart, caring professionals. Readers are becoming more media-aware and discerning. Best of all, people are still free to create and publish quality works with the remaining distribution and compensation structures. It is still possible to have a game with many winners, but maybe this window is closing.
To preserve the library system’s ability to help create an informed citizenry, we need libraries to buy, preserve, and offer free public access to the broad public. Our libraries have traditionally supported local authors and local publishers, and preserved a broad range of text, audio, and moving image materials. Libraries, when not stopped, have moved with the times, through microfilm and CD-ROMs, and now to the Internet in order to provide preservation and access. Our collective budgets in the United States support over 5% of all trade publishing revenues8—enough to cause a leveraged buyout firm, KKR, to find buying major publisher Simon and Schuster a good investment.9 Our libraries are a captive market for a shrinking number of academic and trade publishers.
The best case is that large publishers see the value in selling their digital products through multiple marketplaces, including to libraries. The next best is that independent publishers sell to libraries, and libraries eagerly buy, preserve, and lend from their owned collections. Authors, musicians, filmmakers and creators of all kinds could choose publishers and websites that sell to libraries.10
Our evolving digital age can be our next Carnegie moment or it can be a Library of Alexandria moment. It is up to us.
References
Netflix. 2025. Terms & Conditions. https://www.netflix.shop/pages/terms-conditions “You agree not to archive, download (other than through caching necessary for personal use, to complete a product purchase or submit a customer service request), reproduce, distribute, modify, display, perform, publish, license, create derivative works from, offer for sale, or use content and information contained on or obtained from or through the Shop without express written permission from Netflix and its licensors.” ↩︎
The following guest post from artist and writer Brooke Palmieri is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age. Read more essays online or download the full report now.
As a writer and artist that draws on the long history of gender nonconformity in my work, a driving force behind my practice is the idea that a longing for history will always be a fundamental aspect of humanity, so long as memory itself serves as a foundation for human consciousness. Everyone has a history, but the majority of people are not taught how to look back in order to find it. One problem is the depth and breadth of our losses. People and their prized possessions are destroyed by accident and by design throughout history: armed conflict, invasion, willful destruction, natural disaster, decay. Then there is the fantasy of destruction, a destructive force in its own right, the perception that nothing survives. That fantasy begets a reality of its own: because I don’t go looking for what survives, I don’t find it, or I don’t recognize it when I see it. This is true across subcultures and among historically marginalized or oppressed groups, and for the queer and trans subjects whose histories I am interested in recovering in particular. In the twenty-first century, access to queer and trans history is an accident of birth: knowing someone in your family or neighborhood, living in a place where it isn’t legislated against, going to a school that dares teach it, affording admission into one of the universities that offers classes on it.
My research process tends to triangulate between the archive of my own weird and imperfect human experiences and the debris I collect around them, small collections amassed by and for queer and trans people, and larger institutions that also contain relevant material that begs to be recontextualized. Or to make it personal: to write my upcoming book Bargain Witch: Essays in Self Initiation, I used my journals and the Wayback Machine to look at old websites I’d made when I was 14, the archive of the William Way LGBT center in Philadelphia where I grew up, and special collections at major institutions like the Fales Library at NYU, the Digital Transgender Archive at Northwestern University, and the British Library in London. All my adult life I’ve made pilgrimage between the intimate domestic spaces where people preserve their own histories, to local collections set up on shoestring budgets as a labor of love, to the vast, climate-controlled repositories of state and higher education that have more recently begun to preserve our histories, each enhancing what it is possible for me to know, delight in, or mourn, about where I have come from, the forebears by blood and by choice that imbue my life with its many possibilities.
It’s a creative act to find and make sense of my own history, one that requires a leap of faith in order to fill in the silences, erasures, omissions, and genuine mysteries that old books and documents, records and artifacts, represent. A lot is left to the imagination. Much of what survives from the past asks more questions than we can answer. This is true for queer and trans archival traces, as it is for other aspects of humanity that are poorly accounted for in public records, or actively discriminated against through surveillance and omission in equal parts.
Classically, archives are brutal, desolate places to find humanity; they were never meant to record the nuances of flesh and blood existence so much as they originate as a way governments keep track of their resources. It has taken millennia for us to conceive of records as places where humanity might be honored rather than betrayed. This is an epic change: I am in awe of the fact that I live in a time where the heft of documentary history—clay, parchment, paper, and now pixel—is shifting paradigms from records kept by anonymous paid laborers to flatten life into statistics, to records kept by people who dare to name themselves and their subjectivity, who collect something of themselves and their obsessions, for other kindred spirits to find. From archives as places meant to consolidate power, to places containing mess and sprawl, places for heated encounters.
In the past few decades of “living with the internet” these places and encounters have multiplied exponentially, as queer and trans subcultures have relied on message boards, blogs, and personal websites to share information. I personally relied (and still rely on) on reddit, and the classic, Hudson’s FTM Resource Guide (www.ftmguide.org), and TopSurgery.Net to navigate the healthcare system in both the UK and USA in order to access hormones and surgery—part of a much longer tradition of “the Transgender Internet” that Avery Dame-Griff chronicles in his book The Two Revolutions (2023). To say nothing of AOL in the early 2000s, the culture on Tumblr in the early-to-mid 2010s and printed publications like Original Plumbing andarchived copies of the FTM Newsletter. Digital environments informed me of physical places, and vice versa, and each expanded and embellished my appreciation of the other. From reading books and trawling the internet, I knew places like San Francisco, New York, London, and Berlin would be where I could find other trans people. When I moved to London, I knew to go to Gay’s the Word, a queer bookshop that first opened in 1979, to make friends, and eventually, to get a job. When I started my own queer book club, or wanted to find zine fairs or club nights, I often found information about them on tumblr or instagram. When traveling to new cities, a gay friend tipped me off that any place recommended by BUTT Magazine would show me a good time.
But in my queer and trans context, both digital and paper-based archives and libraries are often labors of love, made from scratch, published with a “by us for us” ethos that is under-resourced and so always in danger of disappearing. Most queer publishing from the 1960s onward was issued in small, independent presses that have disappeared. An interesting model for documenting this is the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme, where resources and expertise is shared to catalog and digitize collections materials in a centrally kept database. This is mutually beneficial to the places where the materials are kept—accurate cataloging is crucial to using and developing any archive—as well as to interested audiences further afield. And this feels also like a pragmatic approach to the reality of loss: we might not be able to predict what will survive over time, but keeping abundant records in multiple locations of what has existed will at least allow us to mourn our losses.
A culmination of my interests in hunting and gathering queer history is my imprint and traveling installation: CAMP BOOKS. I started CAMP BOOKS in 2018 as a way to highlight the places I’d most enjoyed meeting queer and trans people–independent bookshops, which have a rich, radical history throughout subculture–and as a way to keep the focus on making and distributing publications about the obscure histories I was unearthing in my research. Before libraries sought to cater to an LGBTQIA+ readership, specialist bookshops like the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop, Giovanni’s Room, and Gay’s the Word were the only places you could find concentrations of queer, feminist books with positive portrayals of queer lives. These shops were hubs of culture: places where community events were held and publicized, activists groups were able to meet, and friendship and romance could blossom in broad daylight. CAMP BOOKS sets up pop-up bookshops, tables at art and zine fairs, and also builds installations in galleries and community spaces to continue this tradition. I also sell rare books and ephemera related to queer history through CAMP BOOKS in order to fund our efforts, including new publications, zines, and posters related to queer and trans history. The CAMP BOOKS motto is: “Queer Pasts Nourish Queer Futures,” and this extends to our model of generating funds from past efforts to fund new writing and work. I also believe this logic can extend to anyone: preserving what interests you about the past brings a particular pleasure of connection into the present. Most of the people I have loved in my life, I have met and known through shared obsessions with the past, and it has brought a lot of pleasure and adventure into my life.
An abiding concern I have had about cultural preservation—in my case, subcultural preservation, because the people I love across time existed in a myriad of DIY subcultures that often cross-pollinated art, music, and literary influences—and have heard from others, revolves around the question of inheritance and access. You can inherit books and papers, art and artifacts, but you can’t inherit e-books, and born digital archives require specialist care and technology. My hope is that this divide is bridged by reconsidering the nature of inheritance itself: rather than an individual’s gain, queer and trans history is something that we are all heir to, and can all benefit from accessing. Large institutions, and large digital repositories in particular, play a crucial role in rewriting the meaning of inheritance by offering freely accessible, and accurately cataloged, information. But ultimately, archives that document human experience begin at home, and rely on people whose love for their lives, their friends, and their scenes inspire them to save posters, photographs, and other receipts–online and offline–that document their experiences. I hope after reading this, you start saving something of your life now.
About the author
Brooke Palmieri is an artist and writer working at the intersection of memory, history, and gender-bending alternate realities. In 2018, Brooke founded CAMP BOOKS, promoting access to queer history through rare archival materials, cheap zines, and workshops/installations. His book, Bargain Witch, comes out in Fall 2025 by Dopamine Books. You can find out more at http://bspalmieri.com.
