Why is digital preservation so confusing?

In The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation Trevor Owens discusses the history, definition, support, methods, and best practices for engaging in preservation of digital materials. Owens takes the reader through the scope of digital preservation in a small scale rural library up through a large scale public or research institution. He explains everything, and he explains it well, but why is it still so confusing? As someone who is in the process of completing a terminal degree in librarianship, has experience working with archival and digital collections, I still feel a little lost.

In order to engage in digital preservation, you first need to understand what it is and what it isn’t.  It is the ongoing collection and facilitation of access to materials, it is not a singular process or simply backing up data. And while preserving fragile materials digitally is beneficial, there is no point if the materials are not accessible. It is a lot to digest, but once you know what it is, then the bigger obstacle becomes how do you do it?

Owens argues that no one simply “does” digital preservation. There is no magic tool that just takes a physical or even a born-digital item through the preservation process. Instead, there must be a plan for engaging in the process and an awareness that the process is never fully complete. With the constant change in technology, digital preservation must be constantly changing too. And new materials are constantly being created. It sounds complicated for a reason. It is.

So where is the best place to start? The section of Owen’s book that resonated the most with me was the need for a solid preservation intent and collections development policy prior to beginning the ongoing process of digital preservation. A digital collection policy should be integrated with the collections policy for physical items as well. And just because an organization may be looking to collect digital items relating to a topic, that doesn’t mean they need to collect ALL of those items. Owens gives the example of how several different entities with varying collections intents may be interested in various aspects of the same resource. He uses the video game World of Warcraft as an example and how one entity may be interested in aesthetic materials, another in design materials, and another in its corporate records (p.97).

So now we come to the truly confusing part, we have identified items but what do we do now? You need to make sure you have more than one copy of the item, in a format that will hopefully be around for a while, and you want to make it broadly accessible. Ideally, you should put in minimal work processing the materials, but maximize discoverability and access. Great! You have successfully engaged in the process of digital preservation!

And now, you get to do it all over again because the technology you used is obsolete.

We Can Avoid Crisis Conservationist Tells Group

Page view, Tallahassee Democrat, November 4, 1969

 

Article, Tallahassee Democrat, November 4, 1969

 

Prior to the first Earth Day event in 1970, there was growing concern among professors at Florida State University for the potential environmental dangers to Florida’s ecosystem. Water pollution from chemical plant discharge and sewage waste, as well as water temperature rise due to power plants, were identified as a contributing factor to damaging marine life. Pesticide runoff was also a growing concern. At that time, however, State Coordinator Joe Kuperberg assured people gathered for an environmental briefing that “Florida for the most part has no serious pollution problems”.

Does Emotion Make a Story More Human?

In his chapter, “Listening Intently: Can StoryCorps Teach Museums to Win the Hearts of New Audiences?” (2011), Filene heralds the work accomplished by the StoryCorps team in collecting personal interviews from everyday people around the United States. Aside from collecting the interviews and submitting them for posterity to the Library of Congress (LOC), StoryCorps curates interesting pieces for a popular weekly radio show. The curated interviews are distilled from their original 40-minute length down to a 3-minute “best of” clip that highlights the pivotal story conveyed in the interview. These pieces are chosen specifically because they elicit emotions from the interview participants as well as the listeners.

But are the interviews facilitated and collected by StoryCorps true oral histories? Filene points out that trained historians are often advised to present their work neutrally while avoiding emotion. StoryCorps is actively facilitating stories that are fraught with emotion, but does that make them any less historically significant? The possession and ability to display emotions is one of the defining characteristics of humanity, it would be a disservice to divorce it from our history.

Filene compares the work done by StoryCorps to the work of Studs Terkel, noting the differences in which the material is marketed and presented.  Both focus on a participatory, bottom-up effort to record history, however, Terkel’s books are presented with Terkel as the focus and voice while StoryCorps attempts to put the power in the hands of the participants.

This is where museums and digital collections can glean inspiration for collecting history online. StoryCorps is effectively crowdsourcing history; people are participating in the creation of interviews, the interviews are submitted to the LOC to become a piece of human history, and the juiciest bits are made available for quick consumption via the radio show. This model brings the emotions to the forefront, piques the interest of the audience, and encourages further participation. If emotion doesn’t make a story more human, it at least makes it more interesting.

Filene, B. (2011). Listening intently: Can StoryCorps teach museums to win the hearts of new audiences? In B. Adair, B. Filene, & L. Koloski (Eds.) Letting go? Sharing historical authority in a user-generated world (pp. 174-193). Left Coast Press, Inc.

Earth Day turns 50: a History of Environmental Activism and Research at Florida State University

April 22, 2020 marks the 50th anniversary of the first celebration of Earth Day. In the past 50 years Earth Day has grown to include over 192 countries and more than 1 billion people united in a single cause to spread awareness of current environmental crises (“The History of Earth Day”, n.d.).

Earth Day is a call to arms to bring awareness of the negative effects of human actions on the environment. The first Earth Day was fueled by the energy of anti-war protests and as a reaction to the growing concern of air and water pollution. 20 million Americans, including students at thousands of colleges and universities, came together to demand action (“The History of Earth Day”, n.d.). Students, faculty, and community members convened on Landis Green at Florida State University (FSU) on April 22, 1970 to observe the first Earth Day celebration.

Schedule of Events at Florida State University in Celebration of Earth Day, April 22, 1970. Florida Flambeau, April 22, 1970

The Big Idea (Serrell, 2015) of my digital history project is to demonstrate how Earth Day has been  celebrated at FSU over the past 50 years as well as the historic impact of environmentalism throughout the state of Florida. This will be accomplished through the use of newspaper articles and ephemera to provide context for environmental activism at FSU, the study of environmental issues at FSU and within the state of Florida, and the roles that prominent individuals have played in promoting environmental awareness within the state and university.

This is a lot of information to cover, the difficulty lies within the choice of items that strongly convey the Big Idea without getting lost in the endless possibilities. Possible pitfalls would lie in choosing too many items, or items that are only tangentially related to the themes of the project. Weak materials will dilute the overall message and cohesion of the project and could leave viewers confused about the purpose.

Earth Day. (n.d.). The history of Earth Day. Retrieved February 12, 2020 from https://www.earthday.org/history/

Serrell, B. (2015). Exhibit labels: An interpretive approach. Alta Mira Press.

 

A People’s History of Computing in the United States by Joy Lisi Rankin

Rankin’s description of the early roots of computing in New England in the 1960’s was a revelation. I had always considered (and been taught) that early computer use was the product of the military industrial complex. The development and widespread adoption of the teletype machine and BASIC programming language in the 1960’s at Dartmouth resulted in the creation of many different types of games and facilitated social interactions between geographically separate people. So essentially, college students, and eventually high-schoolers, were creating the precursors to apps and experimenting with early social media well over 50 years ago.  Sure, they were doing it using a novel programming code, but is what they were doing all that different from what most people are using their personal computers and smartphones for now? I had no idea that early computing was a social phenomenon.

Gaming culture persisted in Minnesota at MECC and with Plato in Illinois. It is interesting that PLATO evolved differently at Control Data Corporation (CDC) versus the Computer-Based Education Research Laboratory (CERL). CDC encouraged a gaming culture while CERL discouraged it. Programmers would stay beyond working hours and play games to relax (Rankin, 2018, p.231).

The significance of the growth at Dartmouth stems from the fervant early-onset student involvement in the use of the teletype machines. These early computers were not the sole property of academics, instead they were freely available for the students of Dartmouth to utilize and explore. Early student programming efforts centered around the creation and engagement in computer games, with several different football-style games and a naval battle simulation being the most popular. As the time-sharing network spread to high schools in New England, the most popular uses were still as a means of “gossip” (p.84) and gaming. Of course, students were also utilizing BASIC to create programs for academic use, but these aspects of social computing at this early stage in computer development were a new concept for me.

Rankin seems preoccupied with the concept that early computing was a macho male-dominated activity that supported the “heteronormative Cold War gender roles” (p.49), a phrase she uses throughout the book. She reiterates the fact that women were not early participants in the time-sharing at Dartmouth in several chapters, they only held supporting roles as computing lab assistants or card-punchers. But in reality, it would have been more shocking if women had been early participants. Dartmouth was a men’s-only college until 1972 so it isn’t as if women were purposefully excluded from the computer lab, they were excluded from the entire school. BASIC programming language was taught at Dartmouth beginning in 1964 and the Kiewit Computation Center was opened in 1967, so clearly there was a period of expansive growth that women could not be involved in as participants in the time-sharing network.

Overall, Rankin’s book clarified different facets of computing history that I was completely ignorant of. I am pleased to disavow my previous perception of Gates, Wozniak, and Jobs toiling away in garages in Silicon Valley as the birth of modern computing.

Rankin, J. L. (2018). A people’s history of  computing in the United States. Cambridge: Harvard University press.