Jean Armour Polly—better known as the Net-mom, and the person who helped popularize the phrase “surfing the internet” in 1994—adds her voice to the celebration of the Internet Archive’s 1 trillionth webpage preserved.

In her message, Polly reflects on the ephemerality of the web—how sites appear, vanish, change, or are censored—and why the Archive’s ability to reveal these shifts is essential to understanding not just events, but who was speaking, who wasn’t, and whose voices history might otherwise forget. Drawing on her own work digitizing fragile Civil War pension files, she compares the care of digital preservation to rescuing stories from dusty barns and bringing them back to life. Polly honors not only creators, but also the librarians and archivists who ensure that our cultural record endures.

Hi, I'm Jean Armour Polly, also known as the Net-mom. 

It's because in the early days of the internet, I helped a lot of people take their first baby steps on it. But I'm here today to help congratulate and celebrate the Internet Archive's 1000000000000th webpage archived. 

That's just an amazing number. Wow. Because websites are ephemeral. They come up, they go down, links are added, links are deleted. Sometimes they're even censored. The archive reveals all these changes though, and that's important. 

It's important for us to not only see how events were covered, but who was talking about them, what they were saying, and sometimes it's even as important or maybe more important about who wasn't talking and whose voices weren't heard. 

The archive might even become the Rosetta Stone for future digital archeologists trying to decipher the hieroglyphs of emojis or inscrutable memes. 

I have some experience with digitization myself. In recent months, I've been a volunteer at the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society's Digitize New York project. Here where I live. We've been scanning and digitizing a huge cache of Civil War pension documents that had formally been in a lawyer's office, but since 1930, they've been stored in Campbell's soup boxes in a dusty old hay barn. 

When I scan something, I think of the soldier and the story that I'm helping to preserve, because it wasn't just about grievous war wounds or diseases he had picked up, but also about his family history, about camp life, about troop movements and battles, things you just can't find in a history book. 

And I think about his family, I think about him when I scan these documents, but I also think about who had the forethought to save this stuff, and not just toss it or shred it or burn it, but to keep it in hopes that some day somebody would come along and rescue it, digitize it, so the stories would live. 

And that's what the Internet Archive has done and will do. It's so important. Without it, we risk not only losing the websites themselves, but the story of how society and culture has been shaped by them. 

So many kudos to the content creators, but also don't forget the critical work of the librarians and the archivists who have preserved them. 

Save our stories, protect the past, and help shape our future. 

Congratulations.