Preservation

The lack of standardization and the move toward customized electronic books that live within networks will present new challenges for librarians, curators and archivists. These professionals will have to sort through a vast amount of digital material and decide what should be archived. They will also need to develop strategies for managing hardware and software obsolesence. In a February, 2005 if:book blog post Collecting and Archiving the Future Book I described the approach to preservation instituted by curators of the Digital Crafts.org project.

The project set out to document digital craft as a cultural trend. Digital crafts were defined as “digital objects from everyday life,” mostly websites. Collecting and preserving these ephemeral, ever-changing objects was difficult, at best. A choice had to be made between manual selection, or automatic harvesting. Curator, Franziska Nori and her associates chose manual selection. The advantage of manual selection was that critical faculties could be employed. The disadvantage was that subjective evaluations regarding an object’s relevance were not always accurate, and important work might be left out. If we begin to treat blogs, websites, and other electronic ephemera as cultural output worthy of preservation and study (i.e. as books), we will have to find solutions to similar problems.

The pace at which technology renews and outdates presents a further obstacle. There are, currently, two ways to approach durability of access to content. The first, is to collect and preserve hardware and software platforms, but this is extremely expensive and difficult to manage. The second solution, is to emulate the project in updated software. In some cases, the artist must write specs for the project, so it can be recreated at a later date. Both these solutions are clearly impractical for digital librarians who must manage hundreds of thousand of objects. One possible solution for libraries, is to encourage proliferation of objects. Open source technology might make it possible for institutions to share data/objects, thus creating “back-up” systems for fragile digital archives.

An alternate approach to preservation is taken by the The Internet Archive. This organization uses automatic harvesting to archive everything on the web. Their goal is to provide "Universal Access to All Human Knowledge." Founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle, this organization is creating, "an ‘Internet library,’ with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format." The Internet Archive maintains copies of the collections at multiple sites in order to guard against possible loss. It regularly migrates data to upgraded hardware. And it collects data formats (software and emulators) in order to preserve access.