Obviously, libraries are important institutions. Why else would civilizations have one and why else would new rulers destroy them? I'm talking about a slightly different library though - a digital one. This is the one created by the Internet Archive Project (http://archive.org). I distinctly remember that a few years ago, when I mentioned the Internet Archive at a committee meeting, the idea was scoffed at, and as one member put it "Haven't they heard of the Library of Congress?".

Well, there's more to the world than printed books and ISBN. There is a lot of digital material on the Internet which is not considered worthwhile and therefore will never show up in traditional libraries. On the other hand, there is this notion that stuff lives on the Internet forever. Someone has a copy. Someone's indexed it. Even after its gone from the original site. Is that really true?

I was looking for a utility - a collection of scripts called "createusers", written by Phil Jones and Nigel Pauli and made available under the GPL at http://lfsp.org/. Its something I've used for a while now to create and delete accounts for my students every semester. Considering its usefulness, I never really thought that it would go away. Well, it just did. lfsp.org is now a domain available for purchase. It went away for interesting reasons. I looked everywhere for the page or the utility, but all references led to the original site. Phil and Nigel did not put it up on sourceforge.net either. I was out of luck.

Then I remembered Brewster Kahle's talk at University of San Francisco (USF) during the Flashmob Computing event. He was showing off the Internet Archive's new homegrown servers and was talking about data centers in shipping containers, which have since become a reality. I went to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine and looked for lfsp.org. I found all the older copies and was able to get createusers-1.3.4 from 7 May 2005. That was the last version released by Phil and Nigel. I also got a copy of their web page from "wayback" then. I've attached all that stuff here so that someone may find it useful. The Internet Archive is wonderful. It saved me a lot of work. Createusers works as advertised and lives on well beyond what its creators had decided. That's how FOSS is supposed to be anyway, and Internet Archive has saved the day. Sorry, Library of Congress, but you couldn't help me with this one.

By the way, the Internet Archive is a registered member of the American Library Association, and is not an ISP, and Brewster Kahle is a librarian. This apparently has worked out in his favor.