Late last month Keith Adams (2023) announced that the British website AROnline would be shutting down after a two-decade run. The plan is to stop adding new content at the end of November and unplug the website at the beginning of 2024.
Indie Auto focuses on American auto history, so the departure of AROnline won’t have a direct impact on us. However, I still see this as a big loss because AROnline towers above pretty much all U.S. auto history websites in the depth and sophistication of its historical analysis.
I hope that last sentence elicits some debate, because I think it’s past time that we came to terms with what does and doesn’t constitute high-quality automotive history. My view is that the auto history field here in the U.S. has been all too content to traffic in car porn and cheap nostalgia for gearheads.
U.S. auto history field can move at a glacial pace
To make matters worse, even the more academic writing often fixates on factual minutiae rather than presenting a robust analysis. One result is that historical accounts tend to repeat myths rather than assess whether they are accurate given the information — and historical detachment — we now possess.
This gives the American auto history field a decidedly lethargic quality, where advancing the discussion can occur at a glacial pace — when it happens at all. Indeed, it has increasingly felt to me like a dying field of study. This is tragic given the centrality of an auto-dominated transportation system to addressing contemporary issues such as climate change.
Also see ‘Wheel spinning happens when car buffs and scholarly historians don’t collaborate’
I don’t mean to suggest that AROnline’s historical analysis has achieved sheer perfection, but I do think that it serves as a useful model for at least some what we could be doing better. And once the new year rolls around, it will all be gone.
Adams (2023) makes light of the situation by stating that “there is so much material here that it’s highly unlikely it won’t be used elsewhere or disappear into the ether never to be seen again.” That may be true, but as an American I am not confident that I will be able to easily find it. And, yes, there is the Wayback Machine, but when I have looked up deceased publications most of the photos and graphs were missing (and I couldn’t google specific content). Thus, I wonder if this will happen to AROnline once it is unplugged.
Time to get serious about preserving online content?
This brings me to my big question: Does the automotive history field need new ways to preserve online automotive history? Over the next few years we could very well see a number of other important website publishers throw in the towel.
This is not a new topic at Indie Auto. Two years ago I raised the question of whether the field could better support small-scale publishing (go here). One idea was for a nonprofit auto history association to create an online archive of content from deceased websites.
Relatively few people clicked into that essay and nobody commented, so my assumption was that this wasn’t considered a burning issue. Maybe it still isn’t. However, once a favorite website goes away you might think differently.
The problem is that the longer we wait to respond to this situation, the more historical content we may lose . . . such as AROnline.
Share your reactions to this post with a comment below or a note to the editor.
RE:SOURCES
- Adams, Keith; 2023. “Announcement: The time has come. . .” AROnline. Posted Oct. 30.
I’m sorry to read that AORonline is turning off the lights, even though I am not very familiar with the site. Nevertheless, it is a loss for all of us with an interest in as automotive history.
The reality of maintaining an online presence in such a niche capacity is that you must either possess unlimited personal time and wealth to carry forward or, accept advertising and hope it is enough to sustain your site. Of course, advertising requires click-baiting to draw eyeballs and we know where that can lead. But this loss is, as you suggest, Steve, greater than might be understood. IMO, Indie Auto has been absolutely great and singular in challenging conventional auto history lore. Presenting ways to see the car industry in much less glamorous terms than usual has certainly opened my eyes as a reader and an enthusiast.
I am reminded of the adage, that if a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound… In regards to AROnline, I would suggest you have helped your readers to hear it. Wish that it didn’t have to fall.
I’m curious as to what SAH would have to say on this subject. Once a website is gone, it often becomes a cat & mouse game trying to discover where the info now resides.
I spoke to my brother about this situation. He’s the former technical VP for national PBS television, and before that the Tach VP for Discovery Group. His comment; With ever increasing capabilities for mass media storage, coupled with decreasing costs per byte, we do have the capability of saving websites. He said that there exists enough storage capacity to save everything EVER PUBLISHED in the world, on a continuing basis, with each year’s technical advancements exceeding the amount of material created.
While the US Library of Congress does store everything it’s presented with, if they don’t receive a copy, they won’t have it. As far as I know, only the United Kingdom has a law that requires that anything published [including online] in the UK be sent to the British Library in London. Don’t know if they accept items published outside the UK.
Bill, my guess — and it is just a guess — is that SAH might be the best sponsor of an archives because they approach automotive history as a more substantive field of study but might have fewer technical resources than, say, the Antique Automobile Club of America or the Automotive History Preservation Society.
Besides the Wayback Machine, there’s also other websites where we could archive some datas of Aronline like Archive.today and GhostArchive.
Preserving Internet content is something that I’ve thought about. I’ve got lot’s of magazines in my collections that are over fifty years old, and many more are available from internet vendors. Published material is easily preserved. Producing an internet forum is a lot of work, and as readership grows it gets to be too much for a single person to run as a hobby project. Most enthusiast forums are run by enthusiasts, not supported by an entity like an automotive manufacturer or automotive product manufacturer. Then there is the matter of the internet platform that publishes these sites, there is no guarantee that these platforms will continue into the future and provide these same services.
I produce a small blog of my own, and while my efforts are not great literature,it is my work, and I do value certain passages that I’ve posted. I’ve started printing out these passages so I can preserve them for my own enjoyment. I can imagine how difficult it will be to back up and save larger and more elaborate forums and databases.
I must admit that I DO like “auto porn” and “cheap nostalgic gearhead material”, but I also appreciate more data based approaches like that found on Indie Auto.
Jose, I don’t mean to suggest that “car porn” is fundamentally bad. Indie Auto dishes out a certain amount of it partly because I’m interested in car design and partly because that’s what a goodly portion of readers seem to want. It’s not worth my time to write stories that only 10 people read. There are also times when nostalgia can be interesting to me but I’m not very good at writing about it so I leave that to others. And I really do believe in the value of advancing automotive history in a substantive way; that doesn’t seem to be a universally shared trait of the auto history media, where making that cash register ring can be more important.
This is sad news as AROline is repository for the most accurate and in depth information on post war British cars. At one point I would have visited it weekly, but the demise of the British car industry has ultimately started to kill interest in the cars. In a generation they will be all but forgotten.
He says the final straw was a request for payment for the inadvertent posting of a copyrighted image, and that he’s paid up when this has happened in the past. I received one such request years ago, and responded by taking down the image and telling them the requested amount was excessive and that I wasn’t paying it. Never heard from them again.
IIRC there are firms that offer to pursue such payments for photographers, then keep the bulk of the payment. If I’d been Keith at AROnline the most I’d have done is offered a reasonable amount directly to the photographer. A shame that he has instead decided to shut down.
Asked my wife, and she says that the amount demanded in our case was about $6000. For one photo little more than thumbnail-sized. I hope he didn’t feel his choice was between such a ridiculous demand and shutting down.
Yeah, that’s a ridiculous amount for a thumbnail-sized photo. I’m more familiar with websites being charged somewhere in the realm of $1,000 per photo when caught running copyrighted material. One major photo vendor has gotten quite aggressive in searching out violations.
And that’s not the only potential threat. In recent years some publishers have threatened legal action against even small-scale media outlets for republishing content without permission. That’s why I am surprised when I see a website post entire articles from car magazines that still exist.
The original was probably larger. But I was resizing to something like 300×180. My intent was to use photos provided by the OEMs for media usage, and must have gotten one that was not such a photo.
Given that I did not receive any follow-ups, these requests struck me opportunistic. Use automated software to detect violations and send demands for payment. Sort of like debt collectors who buy up bad debt for pennies then try to collect the full amount. If only a few people pay up, it’s still worth it.