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  3. In the digital realm, things seem always to happen the wrong way round. Whereas Google has hurried to scan books into its digita

In the digital realm, things seem always to happen the wrong way round. Whereas Google has hurried to scan books into its digita

admin2012-08-05  69
问题     In the digital realm, things seem always to happen the wrong way round. Whereas Google has hurried to scan books into its digital catalogue, a group of national libraries has begun saving what the online giant leaves behind. For although search engines such as Google index the web, they do not archive it. Many websites just disappear when their owner runs out of money or interest. Adam Farquhar, in charge of digital projects for the British Library, points out that the world has in some ways a better record of the beginning of the 20th century than of the beginning of the 21st.
    In 1996 Brewster Kahle, a computer scientist and internet entrepreneur, founded the Internet Archive, a non-profit organisation dedicated to preserving websites. He also began gently harassing national libraries to worry about preserving the web. They started to pay attention when several elections produced interesting material that never touched paper.
    In 2003 eleven national libraries and the Internet Archive launched a project to preserve "born-digital" information: the kind that has never existed as anything but digitally. Called the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC), it now includes 39 large institutional libraries. But the task is impossible. One reason is the sheer amount of data on the web. The groups have already collected several petabytes of data (a petabyte can hold roughly 10 trillion copies of this article).
    Another issue is ensuring that the data is stored in a format that makes it available in centuries to come. Ancient manuscripts are still readable. But much digital media from the past is readable only on a handful of fragile and antique machines, if at all. The IIPC has set a single format, making it more likely that future historians will be able to find a machine to read the data. But a single solution cannot capture all content. Web publishers increasingly serve up content-rich pages based on complex data sets. Audio and video programmes based on proprietary formats such as Windows Media Player are another challenge. What will happen if Microsoft is bankrupt and forgotten in 2210?
    The biggest problem, for now, is money. The British Library estimates that it costs half as much to store a digital document as it does a physical one. But there are a lot more digital ones. America’s Library of Congress enjoys a specific mandate, and budget, to save the web. The British Library is still seeking one.
    So national libraries have decided to split the task. Each has taken responsibility for the digital works in its national top-level domain (web-address suffixes such as ". uk" or ". fr"). In countries with larger domains, such as Britain and America, curators cannot hope to save everything. They are concentrating on material of national interest, such as elections, news sites and citizen journalism or innovative uses of the web.
    The daily death of countless websites has brought a new sense of urgency—and forced libraries to adapt culturally as well. Past practice was to tag every new document as it arrived. Now precision must be sacrificed to scale and speed. The task started before standards, goals or budgets are set. And they may yet change. Just like many websites, libraries will be stuck in what is known as "permanent beta".
It can be inferred that the preservation of websites is a______task.
选项 A、good
B、profitable
C、long neglected
D、multiple
答案C
解析 推断题。根据题目中the preservation of websites可定位至文章第二段。第二段从Brewster的工作叙述起，他成立了一个非盈利组织致力于网站保存，因此可以排除B选项。而且他使其他国家图书馆开始意识到这些问题并开始着手此类工作，因此可以推出这项工作在这之前是被人忽视的，故答案为C。
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