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Saving Digital History
Gavinsblog writes "The Washington Post
is reporting that the Library of Congress in the U.S. plans to initiate the $100 million National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP). It is hoped that the project will lead to the preservation of data that is constantly changing on the Internet. But I wonder who will choose what is worth saving?" This may remind you of the LOC's effort to preserve and digitize the audio collection in the National Recording Registry.
is another persons treasure.. I'd say just save it all and allow others to sift through and decide what is worthwhile and what is worthless.. just like the library..
The irony is that, while digital files could be preserved indefinitely in absolute perfection, many are being completely lost in much less time than it would take a book to turn to dust.
Kudos to the folks at the Library of Congress, and other projects like the Wayback Machine who are working to preserve a surprisingly ephemeral media.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Plus not all the data can be saved anyway... sites such the Internet Movie Database, Amazon.com, and even Multimap are database-driven. Even assuming you get access to the underlying database you still need to preserve the code which gets used to generate the pages. And for what purpose?
Add to that the problem of accessibility. If the data isn't laid out in an easy-to-browse fashion then it's as good as dead anyway. I prefer to browse a library by topic, not searching for keywords and hoping a nice book pops out.
Sorry, but my karma just ran over your dogma.
Geocities web pages may be exactly what a future historian is interested in. They tell you something about the common culture and people. Why do you think archaeologists are so fond of ancient trash dumps?
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
In Nineteen Eighty Four, The Party embraced the digital revolution because they could easily control what the news said about them. (Who controls the past controls the future...)
Anyway, the point is the government may not be the best to be in charge of this.
</rant>
The actual cost of storage is not that high. The highest costs are involved when human intervention enters into the equation.
"The important information will save itself without outside help."
That's whistling past a pretty big graveyard.
The problem is that time changes the definition of interesting. Would you be interested in the ads from a copy of the NYTimes.com from 1998? Probably not, unless you wanted to chuckle at the 667Mhz Pentia selling for $2500.
Would you be interested in the ads from a copy of the New York Times in _1898?_ Those ads are a view into a world you never inhabited, and expose the preoccupations of the era in a way that the articles don't.
We can look at the 1898 ads, not because the important information saved itself, but because archivists did. Someday the ads from 1998 will have the same interests for historians and anthropologists. Who will do the archiving there?
If we leave it to the present to sort the good from the bad, the future will never know what we considered unimportant. If you'd asked anybody in 1960 what that era's biggest technological revolutions of the time were, they'd have all said atomic energy and space travel. The real answers turned out to be the transistor and the birth control pill.
We are just about the worst possible people to ask what's important now, because we're too close, and it would be hubris to pretend otherwise.
-clay