Perhaps the best known is the Internet Archive, which has been crawling and preserving the open web for more than two decades. Its not just web archives - across disciplines historical data just doesn’t seem to capture the interests of academics or journals as much as realtime contemporary data. Why aren’t more of these volunteers working on web archives? In comparison, to perform an analysis over the entirety of the Internet Archive’s 20-year record of the public web would require scanning through more than 15 petabytes. At the end of the day, web archives are our only record capturing the evolution of human society from the physical to the virtual domains.

Source: Forbes January 13, 2017 20:39 UTC