Creators need to consider how they might preserve their content for the future. Over the summer, GameStop made headlines for the wrong reasons when it announced that it was shuttering Game Informer. Although they’d just published a high-profile cover story about BioWare’s forthcoming RPG Dragon Age: The Veilguard and their next issue was almost 70% complete, Kotaku reports that staffers were summarily laid off during a Friday-morning meeting with GameStop’s vice-president of HR. 

Game Informer’s closure isn’t just a professional tragedy for its many hardworking journalists. Because their website has effectively been taken offline (visitors now see a bland, corporate message about the closure), the lion’s share of their past content has now vanished into the ether. It’s not an isolated incident, either. In June, Paramount Global did something similar with MTV News, causing 20 years of music-related journalism to disappear. This sad state of affairs highlights one of the paradoxes of the digital age. The Internet provides us with titanic quantities of content, but it can end up being as ephemeral as a soap bubble.

From ancient Egypt to the French revolution: a brief history of archives

There’s nothing new about preserving content. While the ancient Egyptians were maintaining collections of their diplomatic correspondence as early as the 14th century BCE, the modern archive didn’t emerge until the French Revolution. Today, archives are a familiar sight across the world, and many countries require certain types of published material to be deposited with their state archives. In America, for example, the mandatory deposit policy established by the Copyright Act requires two copies of every copyrighted work to be provided to the Library of Congress.

The challenges of digital preservation

Policies like mandatory deposit are a great way to preserve things like novels and newspapers, but most of the content on the Internet won’t be covered by its provisions. There’s also the question of how to preserve digital content. Printed material such as books can survive for a very long time. Future generations will face few barriers to accessing that information since the medium isn’t going to be rendered unusable by technological obsolescence. Conversely, we’ve seen a dizzying array of digital storage solutions come and go over the past several decades. However, if you put your magnum opus on an iOmega Zip drive, there’s no guarantee that people in the future will be able to access that information. 

Cloud storage has alleviated these issues somewhat, for although the servers that power the cloud will eventually become obsolete, that’s a matter for the companies that provide the storage rather than the consumer.

Thankfully, there have been a number of efforts to systematically preserve digital content. The most famous one is probably the Internet Archive. There are also a number of national initiatives such as the Australian Web Archive. Why should creators care about digital preservation?

Many creators use third-party content distribution platforms, whether they’re hosting a blog on WordPress, uploading videos to YouTube, or posting to social media. One of the drawbacks to relying on third-party platforms is that you are entirely at their mercy. They can usually delete your content at any time and for any reason. They might also cease operations–think of how Yahoo pulled the plug on GeoCities in 2009. Of course, you can host your own content, but this isn’t feasible for everyone, and your content can still fall victim to technical issues. 

This is why it’s important for creators to think about archiving their content. Even if you don’t care about preserving your content for future generations, having an archival strategy ensures that you always have a record of what you’ve created. This can be particularly helpful if your content has evolved significantly over the years. You might not want the old material taking up space on your site if it no longer aligns with the needs of your current audience, but at the same time you probably don’t want to consign it to the memory hole, either. Archiving can help.

How can creators archive content?   

There are many different ways that creators can archive their content. For example, if you produce written content, you can simply save the original texts in a secure location. Alternatively, many CMS platforms allow you to download an export file that can be useful for preservation purposes. 

Looking over your past work can also help you come up with ways to repurpose your content. Maybe that blog post you wrote three years ago could be reborn as a video, or perhaps a video could be transformed into a blog post that provides additional context. 

There are more technical options, too, such as the ones identified by Shreya Bose of Authory: 

• Authory itself lets you backup content across a range of different locations. This can be particularly useful if you do a lot of guest posts as you can simply enter the site or platform where your content is published and it will automatically archive everything under your byline. However, this is a paid service. 
• Internet Archive doesn’t just scrape content. They also allow creators to upload material, though this can be an incredibly time-consuming process. But the upside is that it’s free.
• Stillo works by taking screenshots of your site at regular intervals, though this kind of archive is intended for more specialized purposes such as website compliance and brand image management. This is also a paid service.

Syndicating your content through Newstex can also help you preserve your content. Because the material we syndicate is provided to leading content databases such as LexisNexis and ProQuest, your content will be preserved in their system.

Preserve your content for peace of mind

The Game Informer debacle illustrates how quickly content can vanish from the Internet. Many creators depend on third-party platforms to host their content, and if something goes wrong with one of those platforms, you could lose all your hard work. That’s why creators need to think about maintaining an archive for their own peace of mind. Fortunately, there are a range of strategies that you can use to do this, from saving copies of your work to a dedicated location to bespoke services like Authory or Stillo. By archiving your content, you’re ensuring that your hard work is protected for years to come.  

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