ABSTRACT
Collecting content and curating what people find are other ways of encouraging wider engagement with people's personas. The desire to collect is a core human drive. In the modern era, that desire is still present, even if the need that lay behind it no longer is. During the colonial period, this desire manifested itself in the controversial gathering of artefacts from occupied countries and their acquisition and display in the museums of the colonisers. Personal collecting was actively encouraged through the late twentieth century in parallel with the rise of consumer culture. The technology used to collect the websites for the archive is the same as that used for creating the database that sits behind search engines, including Google. The difference between the Internet Archive and Google is that the archive can be searched by a website address and then by its snapshot in time.
