Will it all be digital? Will we all be digital?
Submitted by tiahedmunsonmorton on Wed, 2007-03-14 03:10.
The Archivists have been buzzing this week a bit after an article in the NY Times this weekend entitled History, Digitized (and Abridged). While the article is concerned with what is digitized, it also addresses what is not and why it is not.
"As more museums and archives become digital domains, and as electronic resources become the main tool for gathering information, items left behind in nondigital form, scholars and archivists say, are in danger of disappearing from the collective cultural memory, potentially leaving our historical fabric riddled with holes."
Hm, sounds serious, doesn't it? It gets worse, because "[e]ven with outside help [this would be commercial help], experts say, entire swaths of political and cultural history are in danger of being forgotten by new generations of amateur researchers and serious scholars." Think that's bad? We also learn that, in addition to assuming everything worth seeing is already digitized, "[w]eb surfers and more devoted data hounds simply find it easier to go online than to travel far and wide to see tangible artifacts." At this point in the article, I was starting to puff a bit, rambling incoherently about the value of primary resources and the beauty of the old paper. Then I stopped for a much needed breath.
While I was gathering myself, I started to think about 2 very different things: the prohibitive costs of travel and the content that is born digital-- yes, I'm actually talking about something that has a tangential link to this class! (Soon, I'll have to get my own blog or at least stop trying to make these blurry links to social software.) I've talked about this before, but I wonder again about the value and future of the materials being created in blogs, wikis, Flickr, etc, etc. Are these "web surfers" and "devoted data hounds" just waiting for this medium to really catch hold so they can do all their research from the comfort of their own desk and swiveling office chair? Will a blog post be the diary of the future? Will the wiki be the committee records or meeting minutes of the future? Will a Flickr page be the photo album of the future? (And will we still get the goo that comes on the back of the pictures?) Will a Facebook profile be the new scrapbook?
I really do believe that, the reality is, we're never going to digitize everything in our Archives and Special Collections, nor should we. But, as I've experimented with and used these tools myself, I'm really excited about how permanent the temporal can be. While they are dynamic by definition, they contain information that documents the creation, evolution, and demise of communities: in short, they document history. All we have to do is look at the blogs produced by this 5 Weeks site! We have created a body of knowledge, a conversation, a research experiment, a community.
I haven't done an exhaustive search on this, but I'd like to know if anyone at the NY Times has written a doom & gloom article about the future holes in the cultural fabric of social software technologies!
And now, I am going to join my 3 year old & read books about sticking peas in your ears, red lemons, and mean little girls with green hair.
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Good post, worth thinking
Good post, worth thinking about. As for holes in the social software record, that's already happening and will certainly happen more. I'm finishing up a PoD book that uses blog posts and list posts (lists may be "last millennium" but they're effective conversational tools) as about a quarter of its content, and was creating footnotes with links for all the in-text quotes. One significant quote from a blog couldn't be linked--because the person shut down the blog. Today, a cached copy of the post is available on some search engines. Next year? Maybe not. I've had the same thing happen with cited articles; indeed, whole ejournals have disappeared.
I remember, in another life
I remember, in another life as a librarian, having students come to the desk in a panic because the web site they'd based their entire paper on was gone. Of course, basing an entire intellectual endeavor on one citation isn't a good idea in any case, but it does remind us how fleeting these electronic records can be. Email addresses change, links are broken, people are fired. And what happens to the strings of words they've so lovingly put together? Poof, gone...
It's funny, in week 4 we talked about the permanence of MySpace/Facebook pages, "be careful what you say" & "think about the person you will be in 5 years," and here I am panicking about the opposite!
Free to good home, archives
Free to good home, archives of the archivists:
Here's an interesting tidbit: the Society of American Archivists has decided to delete all the old (1993-2006) listserv archives.
"To: Archives and Archivists Listserv Subscribers
From: The SAA Council
After seven months of discussion - informed by an appraisal
recommendation from SAA's archival repository, the recommendations of a
Task Force, and a communication from Miami University of Ohio, the SAA
Council considered the following motion during a conference call on
March 8:
THAT the Archives and Archivists List Archives that has been maintained
at Miami University of Ohio, representing material created from 1993 to 2006, be
disposed."
My favorite quoite, from the current listserv, comes from Thomas J. Wood, Archivist at the University of Illinois at Springfield: "Wow -- I think this exceeds my minimum daily requirement of irony...."
In case I needed to say it: I guess not everything digital sticks around for those researchers of the future.
Walt- Without giving away
Walt-
Without giving away the ending of your book, what do you think the future of listservs is?
I'm in the business of
I'm in the business of looking after digital materials. We are aware of these problems. All too often, we're hamstrung in doing anything about it. The problem? Rights, as usual.
Well, rights and awareness and funding. NDIIPP was taking a pretty good stab at website preservation. NDIIPP just had its funding zeroed.
Soon, I'll have to get my
Yes, please! I'll subscribe.
I think you already know this but the blog is the diary of the present; Flickr is the photo album of the present. I have hundreds, probably thousands of digital photos that I have taken since my first son was born in 2002. I have maybe dozens of printed photos from that time. I have a few notebooks that I scribble in from time to time, but anything worth keeping goes on a blog.
And I think this is my
And I think this is my reality as well. Actually, not having prints of my daughter's pictures makes me really nervous and is a big source of guilt!
I was astonished at how quickly I became accustomed to writing and working out my thoughts on a blog. Even outside the structure of a classroom (is this screen that I am typing on a chalkboard?), these conversations are happening. And these conversations can be very powerful ways of communicating with our collegues. Let's hope we can all keep the momentum and continue to share our thoughts and ideas!
"While I was gathering
"While I was gathering myself, I started to think about 2 very different things: the prohibitive costs of travel and the content that is born digital."
And yet, when we (librarians) are evaluated, the emphasis is on the places we travel to (conferences) and the content we create in print format. How wonderful (and practical and efficient and cost-effective and equitable) it would be if we could change that paradigm!
Or at least recognize what
Or at least recognize what is happening outside the print format. I suppose, if anyone (we) could figure out how to make it happen, the peer-review process could happen for some of these postings. Because, really, isn't this page, this set of replies, and this forum for comments a place for my peers to review me? Just a thought that probably wouldn't get me a tenure track position!