As an avid reader of almost anything and everything I can lay my hands on, I am both pleased and a little disturbed by the amount of content being added to the World Wide Web. Google it seems has plans to digitize the world as the following piece testifies. Does anyone else have any concerns? What about the problems we have had with digital obsolescence? And that problem does not get any smaller as the rate of technology changes have shortened dramatically over the last decade. Whilst it could be argued that the Internet will always be around, the information made available to the Internet and the global community via the many search engines and search interfaces we use today, this information still sits on servers somewhere. And servers can and do die, can and do get replaced. They are no different from any other piece of computer equipment we own and use. So why then are we so keen to archive to the Internet ether cloud?

“November 18, 2008 (Computerworld) Google Inc. today said that it plans to archive as many as 10 million photos and digitized images from the Life magazine archives. Some of the images date back to the 1750s, and many have never been published.

Google today announced that it will add the images from Life photographers to its Google Image Search pages. Only a small percentage of the images — including newly digitized images from photos and etchings — have even been published, Google said in a blog post. The rest have been “sitting in dusty archives in the form of negatives, slides, glass plates, etchings, and prints,” Google said.

“This effort to bring offline images online was inspired by our mission to organize all the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” according to Google. We’re digitizing them so that everyone can easily experience these fascinating moments in time.”

The announcement comes in the midst of a ambitious Google effort to add offline content like newspaper archives to its site. In September, it launched an effort to digitize millions of pages of news archives, making millions of old newspaper articles accessible and searchable online. Google has also been digitizing books since 2006.” Google to archive 10 million Life magazine photos