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Are blogs archived history?

In a profile of 15 people who use social media, Time magazine highlighted the work of a military blogger. Captain Lee Kelley writes about the Iraq war. The quote below proves interesting:

Unlike generations of soldiers before them, they’re writing for history. “If they are archived, blogs will give the best account of this war,” Kelley says. “No one knows what’s going on better than the soldiers on the front lines.”

Are blogs the new kind of history keeping?

I remember White House historians complaining during the Clinton administration that even though we had entered an age of technological competence, we also lost a part of history. Clinton’s administration was the first in which his “papers” where documented electronically. This posed a problem especially in the area of email. With the emergence of email, things like memos and documents were electronically filed and in some cases lost/deleted/etc. There was no paper trail of events historians could later gather and organize.

Do blogs offer a solution to this problem?

Can they be an archive of history?

First there is the problem of archiving, the big “IF” in Captain Kelley’s quote. Individual users may make backups of their blogs, but that doesn’t mean they are part of a communal repository for historians to shift through. Blogs that track historical events may very well be lost. Sites crash. Backup data is lost or corrupted. Bloggers don’t necessarily need to share their own archives if they don’t want to. Indeed, history is still trying to cope with the new electronic nature of historical data.

Second , most blogs are also highly personal. Opinion pieces mainly. Does this multitude of opinion serve the cause of the historian or does it make their job that much worse since they could potentially have to wade through larger mounds of data?

I am curious, too, about news sites and the archiving of their news articles. Several times over the last month I have come across a link to an article that was three months or more old. Following the link I came to the new’s sites “Sorry, could not find this page” page. Dynamic linking, as done by major news websites, is often temporary. Are the pages associated with these temporary links stored in some version somewhere else?

It seems to me that Digital Libraries are in order. A digital library would be an accessible and duplicated collection of our digital media. In the current “book based” library system, history is indeed backuped/replicated/copied at the thousands of libraries across the nation. If one library burns down, history is still preserved because chances are the books and documents held in that library exist in several other libraries. I know this doesn’t always hold true. Some books, especially rare books or local collections are not replicated. Do digital libraries exist such as the ones that house our books?

Is the web itself a digital library?

No. Not in and of itself. Not every website is preserved in the same manner or accessible to all.

Maybe I am off base here and there is a systematic approach to gathering and organizing the digital data of our day (and please don’t say “Google”!).