An interesting web search pulled up this site:
OC Removed is a storage site containing all the remixes that were removed from Overclocked Remix (www.ocremix.org) for various reasons (artist request, submission violations, content violations). OC Removed catalogues all these tracks. Which is interesting, because OC Remix only keeps a record that the files existed – not the files themselves.
While a lot of these tracks just aren’t that good, there are some incredibly good pieces that were removed by artist request that resulted over a breakup of site management – all this history was recorded on Wikipedia:
What we have here is an interesting case of data archival. First off, we have arcane historical information about a famous remix site that most people would think is really not that important – mainly, the history of the website. However, from a historical perspective, knowing about the history of the site will explain a lot of things – such as why particularly famous remixers like Virt and JD Harding had their work removed. Turns out, they didn’t agree with how the site was being managed and so split off to form their own page, vgmix.com, another (now largely defunct) site for remixers.
Second, we have the storage of information that some people didn’t want stored any longer. While I’m not going to decide whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, information gets purposefully lost and altered all the time, and it’s only through data preservation sites like the Internet Archive and Wikipedia’s internal storage structure that leaves a digital record of what actually happened. Which is incredibly valuable when it’s needed.
The Internet, of course, finds interesting ways of archiving information that would otherwise have disappeared. This is where OC Removed comes in – without OC Removed, a lot of these files would have simply disappeared. Not only are the files still alive and kicking, but they’ve been retagged to reflect the OC Removed moniker! While it may not matter much if some of these files disappeared, it just goes to show how resilient electronic information can be over a network, particularly in an age where digital storage and bandwidth is relatively cheap and in large quantity.
Just like the work of the Internet Archive, OC Removed and Wikipedia are a product of data preservation culture, whether they are purposefully working for it (like the Internet Archive) or not. One thing is for certain though and that is if somebody thinks the information is worth preserving and has the ability to do so, it will get saved somewhere on the Internet (and individuals’ hard drives). How long it stays there will ultimately depend on how many other people deem it worthy of preservation.
Desert Hat 