Last Saturday it was the Prime Minister himself, Pedro Sanchezthe one who during his interview with La Pija y la Quinqui took out the famous meme of sanxe dog. “¿Pedro Sanchez o sanxe dog?”, he said sardonically when Carlos Peguer He told him that he had a right-wing boyfriend who described him as a “geek” for changing the Moncloa mattress. Although Sánchez assured “not being aware” of the phenomenon of the famous meme of sanxe dog Yes, he was proud of how the meme that began in 2020 with the phrase of a child had evolved, it evolved into sanxe dog and it has ended up being one of the memes of these elections. “There is a meme that I love: More knows sanxe dog by dog than by Sanxe“.
It was one of the anecdotes of the interview, although in reality in his ironic moment with memes, Sánchez revealed a fact unknown to many: “The National Library has stored memes for 10 years”. La Pija and La Quinqui were stunned by the discovery that the socialist candidate had just made. The reality, as they assure this newspaper from the National Libraryis that memes are a grain of rice within one of the largest web archives in the world.
just like he said Pedro Sanchez10 years ago the management at that time in charge of the National Library made a decision that they were taking a long time to make: a lot of digital information was being left behind, which, moreover, if it is not collected and saved, is ephemeral.
“It’s not like maps, books or newspapers that, even if digitized, you can always turn to the original, even if the digital file is lost. In the case of websites, digital content, if it disappears there is no way to recover it,” he explains. Mar Perez Morillo, director of the Division of Digital Processes and Services of the National Library, which in 2009 took charge of the Spanish Web Archive. She started by herself, without anyone, and now there are five full-time people dedicated to keeping all the “documentary heritage” of the Internet, plus several part-time people, more computer technicians, documentalists from other departments of the National Library and also specialists from all the Autonomous Communities.
The collection of web pages is done with crawler robots that walk the selected URLs previously and save everything they find linked, with the frequency, depth and size that is determined. The result of these web collections are web archives, where the collection is stored and can be consulted. And there are the memes, but not as a specific file as Sánchez said, but as one more part of the thematic search.