My new colleague, Jacob Nadal, points out an important difference between the preservation and prservability of blogs and other objects.

Helping someone make their blog (or anything) preservable is a matter of using well-documented and doggedly implemented standards, and creating effective safety nets against catastrophe…

He then goes on to outline the requirements for truly preserving a digital object.

Nadal, who just came to NYPL from Indiana University, and I came up with a question/thought exercise that might help define some of the requirements for documenting and preserving (aspects of) the early web. If you were to create an exhibition about the history of web design, what objects would you want to include, and how would you want to display them?

I would start the show by talking about the introduction of internet protocols and hypertext languages. The show would begin in the 1960’s and quickly sweep through the70’s and 80’s. I am not sure if I could tell the story by presenting significant correspondences and articles on paper, or if I would need to find a way of presenting early digital work on forgotten-platform emulators.

Later, in a discussion of the professionalization of web design, I would want to display books by people like Linda Weinman and Roger Black. Digital representations of those books would not do; I would want to show the physical book.

So, in addition to web browsers and pages, my show would certainly contain paper and other pre-web technologies. It would be a hybrid show about a hybrid era.

What would you want to include in this exhibition, and what do your curatorial instincts tell us about the nature of the web?

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.

Here are a few URLs for my Digital Preservation and Blogs panel. See some of you in two hours.

Archive-It

A tool from the Internet Archive that allows institutions to preserve their own web-based collections.

NDIIP

Congress is working through The Library of Congress to create a national digital preservation infrastructure.

Digital Preservation Coalition

An organization dedicated to securing the preservation of digital resources in the UK.

My SXSW panel, Digital Preservation and Blogs, will take place on Monday, March 13 from 10:00 - 11:00.

Josh Greenberg, Alison Headley, Colin Wells, Mike Linksvayer and I will be presenting at SXSW this year.

The Short Version

The web is a fragile medium, subject to digital decay. A new blog preservation effort at The New York Public Library shows how librarians might save our digital heritage.

The Long Version

How will tomorrow’s historians understand the development and impact of blogs? What evidence will future researchers turn to when they want to examine the influence that blogs had on Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign, or how a blog post disgraced 60 Minutes by revealing that what was believed by Dan Rather to be a legitimate memo about George W. Bush’s military service was a forgery? What primary source material will show that it was a blogger who filed a Freedom of Information Act request and posted 361 snapshots of coffins of solders killed in the US war in Iraq?

The emergence of the early web, and of blogging, stands to be like early film; if the preservation of blogs does not begin soon, most of the initial output of this new medium and genre will be lost, and future understanding will be limited to the scraps that survive.

This fall, a group of students in the Library and Information School at Pratt worked on a small project to preserve a handful of blogs. SXSW will be hosting a panel discussion with to discuss this project, and the larger set of technical, social and legal problems posed by the preservation of blogs.

It was easy to miss Literary Letters, Lost in Cyberspace by Rachel Donadio in the Times on September 4, 2005.

Biography, straight up or fictionalized, is arguably one of today’s richest literary forms, but it relies on a kind of correspondence that’s increasingly rare, or lost in cyberspace. This year alone Farrar, Straus & Giroux published ‘’The Letters of Robert Lowell'’ and a biography of the critic Edmund Wilson that draws on his letters. But that doesn’t necessarily mean the company is saving its own communication with writers. ‘’I try to save substantive correspondence about issues concerning books we’re working on, or about our relations with authors, but I’m sure I don’t always keep the good stuff — particularly the personal interchanges, which is probably what biographers would relish,'’ Jonathan Galassi, the president and publisher of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, said (via e-mail, of course, like most of the editors and writers interviewed for this story). ‘’I don’t think we’ve addressed in any systematic way what the long-term future of these communications is, but I think we ought to.'’

I present a draft syllabus for Projects in Digital Archives for comment and consideration. The fall semester at Pratt starts next week. We are shifting our attention from digitization to digital preservation this time. Students will work on a real-world website preservation project. Most of the readings are specs and standards, but we are reading The Social Life of Information to ground our thinking.

A few blogs focusing on digital preservation:

• The Ten Thousand Year Blog
• Digitization Blog
• UCSD Digital Library Planning Working Group (DLPWG)
• The Digital Archives