Kira Pollack, a former editor at Time and Vanity Fair, is a distinguished fellow at the Starling Lab for Data Integrity, a research lab co-anchored by Stanford University’s School of Engineering and USC Libraries. Professors Tsachy Weissman and Dan Boneh supervise the Starling Lab.

"As photographers try to find homes for their work, traditional archives are also vanishing, especially in local journalism, where generations of photographers built shared visual records of community history. Newspaper photo morgues — once vast collections housed in newsroom attics and basements — have been disappearing at an alarming rate as publications downsize, shut down or sell off their buildings. Copyright law adds another hurdle: Though independent photographers own their work, staff images typically belong to the publications, leaving photographers unable to reclaim their own archives. Some photographers have resorted to dumpster diving — I know one who salvaged his box of negatives from the trash."

Excerpted from the Washington Post, 'Photos are disappearing, one archive at a time'

• Note: The Washington Post article is available through Stanford University Libraries, Online U.S. newspapers (Stanford-wide access), using Stanford credentials.

Brandon Tauszik, a fellow at the Starling Lab, is developing a low-cost way for journalists to preserve their work.

Like those of us who came of age with the internet, freelance multimedia journalist Brandon Tauszik viewed the web as permanent — once something was on the internet, it was always on the internet.

But now he’s realized it could be gone tomorrow.

“A publication could just go out of business and take down whatever content they want. Your writing is not permanent. Your photography is not permanent. Anything you’re putting online is short-lived and will probably vanish.” Tauszik said. “If I were to pass away tomorrow and my credit cards stopped, a lot of these projects of mine would just vanish, be gone for good and never come back.”

Excerpted from Poynter.org, "As websites disappear, link rot threatens journalism. One Stanford fellow is working on a fix."

The Starling Lab for Data Integrity is an academic research lab innovating with the latest cryptographic methods and decentralized web protocols to meet the technical and ethical challenges of establishing trust in our most sensitive digital records.

Starling uses open-source tools, best practices, and case studies to securely capture, store and verify digital content. With applications across news media, historical preservation and legal accountability, the potential use cases for the Starling Framework are numerous.