Rogue Librarian

Thanks to Josh Greenberg, Alison Headley, Colin Wells, Mike Linksvayer for participating in the Digital Preservation and Blogs panel.

I’ll leave the description of the talk to more objective minds. Let me instead tell you about my two big SXSWi takeaways:

1. A pair of Old Gringos from Allen’s Boots
2. The belief that the future of the historical record, especially the documentation of blogs, the web, and the emergence of new media, is largely in the hands of the individual collector.

The Boots

My new favorite shoes are a pair of bench-made cowboy boots from Mexico in bone, brown, mint, rose, and coral. They are surprisingly well paired with my pearl Stam bag.

The Historical Record

I started the panel with a story about the durability of paper and traced a Malcolm X manuscript collection from a Florida storage locker, to an online auction site, to The New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research and Black Culture. To learn more about the details of this particular collection see articles by the BBC’s Tony Phillips and Race Matters’s Emily Eakin.

I used the history of this collection to demonstrate the durability of paper. It turns out to be possible to haul a box of tree bark from state to sate, home to storage locker, cold to heat and humidity, without incurring much damage. Zeros and ones are not as tough. Had Malcolm X’s collection been created on a personal computer rather than paper, it likely would not have survived decades of neglect.

The Malcolm X story also demonstrates the importance of the individual (sometimes unwitting) collector in the preservation of our cultural heritage. Many great library and museum collections come from individuals with the foresight or good luck to gather objects and records that will tell future generations what life was like in their time.

On our panel, I think it was intellectual historian Josh Greenberg who asked about the personal history of president of the United States in 2040. She certainly will have had a had a rich social life centered around text messaging and email. She may have had a blog or have been influenced by a blogger. She will have participated in online communities like myspace or flickr. When she completes her second term in office, will her personal digital collection have survived? How will her presidential librarian collect the documentation of her early life? What primary source materials will her biographer use to uncover the story of her coming of age?

We don’t know who this teenager is now. We don’t know who among her contemporaries will rise to prominence in politics, the arts, the sciences, and so on.   Because these people are not known yet, no agency is preserving their output.

Unless individuals are given the tools to preserve their own digital collections, future historians will have only secondary sources like textbooks and newspapers to tell them about the past. Our sense of history will be spotty, flat, biased, and unverifiable.