My panel is going to be good:

Preserving our Digital Legacy and the Individual Collector

Room 8ABC

Tuesday, March 13th

11:30 am - 12:30 pm

Many great art, book and manuscript collections survive because an individual had the foresight or good luck to save the good stuff. Libraries and museums owe a debt to individual dealers, collectors and packrats for saving illustrated Czarist plate books from the Soviets, and WWII letters from the trash-heap. Who are today’s collectors? What are they preserving? How will they manage fragile born-digital collections long enough share with future generations?

Moderator: Carrie Bickner, Director of Education Outreach, The New York Public Library

Josh Greenberg Assoc Dir Research Projects, Center for History & New Media

William Stingone Curator of Manuscripts, The New York Public Library

Megan Winget Professor, UT at Austin

Here are some excerpts from a related paper that I have been working on.

Potential Loss to Scholarship

Without primary source materials, our account of the past becomes fixed, and we lose the ability to question the received narrative. The scholarly dialog, and in turn our popular understanding, requires that multiple eyes pore over all relevant materials. Sadly, digital records may not survive for the next generations of historians.

Imagine a contemporary author whose work will some day join the literary cannon. She lives in a hybrid of print and digital formats. She reads books in their traditional printed format, but may read the news online.

Some of her letters, perhaps those documenting a handful of financial and legal transactions with publishers, may be on paper, but most of her correspondence will be electronic. Portions of her email will be lost when, the weekend before a deadline, her MacBook crashes before she has a chance to back up her work. She rushes to purchase a new machine, and rewrites the manuscript from memory.

As frustrated as she is about the lost work, imagine how sad it will be for us that we will have no trace of the first draft. Various manuscript versions of her earlier work are likely word-processed, some in programs that no longer exist. Perhaps she saves an electronic copy of each draft, but there is a chance that she simply overwrites the same file, novel.doc, each day. Her candid photographs are probably in digital formats; some may be stored on her personal computer. If the Carl Van Vechten of today has photographed her, perhaps some of those images will be published on community websites like Flickr.com. Others photographs will be printed. As her personal papers are created, they are immediately cast to the wind and scattered across an archipelago of physical and digital islands.

Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that our writer rigorously manages her papers. She carefully provides a meaningful file name for each draft of a written work. She makes regular backups. She scrupulously imports old email onto new computers. What happens if she loses custody of the materials before she becomes well known?

Digital Decay

We have already experienced digital decay in a variety of fields. This rapid loss has been documented with telling anecdotes and troubling statistics. NASA records of the 1976 Viking landings on Mars, recorded in an obsolete programming langue and stored on old magnetic tapes, survive physically, but are no longer readable.[1] If a technological historian were to try to research the development of pioneering computer work, for example the origins of the study of Artificial Intelligence work at MIT, those files, programs, and computers are now gone.[2] The problem keeps getting worse; as our lives and work come to increasingly rely on electronic devices like personal computers, hand-held devices like iPods and Blackberries, our records begin to decay almost as quickly as they are born. Scholarly communication is increasingly bound up in a reliance on digital formats that are decaying; it is beginning to rely more and more on materials that are published on the Internet in the form of conference papers, electronic journals, and professional and society websites. There is no print counterpart for these materials. The electronic copy is the version of record for this growing subset of scholarly literature.

The Individual Collector of the Digital Age

Paper is patient, content to live alone in attics, basements and storage lockers for decades, even in desert caves for centuries. It forgives us for our neglect, and like an old friend, resumes a past conversation as though no time has passed at all. Digital records are like petulant children who cry as soon as they are put down, even if it is just for a moment. They require care and feeding from the moment they are born, and continue to demand skilled attention throughout their lifecycle. What kind of person will have the patience, expertise and money to take care of such demanding and fragile beings?

[1] Jesdanun, Anick. “Coming Soon: a Digital Dark Age?” CBS News (AP). 21 Jan. 2003. 30 Dec. 2006 . Jesdanun’s article, often cited by library scientist and digital preservationists, deftly outlines the risk to scientific data, business records, personal papers and the legal, scholarly and financial consequences. [2] Brand, Stewart. “Escaping The Digital Dark Age,” in Library Journal vol. 124. Issue 2, p46-49 6-20-3.

Preserving our Digital Legacy and the Individual Collector

Room 8ABC Tuesday, March 13th 11:30 am - 12:30 pm Many great art, book and manuscript collections survive because an individual had the foresight or good luck to save the good stuff. Libraries and museums owe a debt to individual dealers, collectors and packrats for saving illustrated Czarist plate books from the Soviets, and WWII letters from the trash-heap. Who are today’s collectors? What are they preserving? How will they manage fragile born-digital collections long enough share with future generations? Moderator: Carrie Bickner (aka Mrs Zeldman), Director of Education Outreach, The New York Public Library Carrie Bickner, Director of Education Outreach, The New York Public Library Josh Greenberg Assoc Dir Research Projects, Center for History & New Media William Stingone Curator of Manuscripts, The New York Public Library Megan Winget Professor, UT at Austin

Here are some excerpts from a related paper that I have been working on.

Potential Loss to Scholarship Without primary source materials, our account of the past becomes fixed, and we lose the ability to question the received narrative. The scholarly dialog, and in turn our popular understanding, requires that multiple eyes pore over all relevant materials. Sadly, digital records may not survive for the next generations of historians.

Imagine a contemporary author whose work will some day join the literary cannon. She lives in a hybrid of print and digital formats. She reads books in their traditional printed format, but may read the news online.

Some of her letters, perhaps those documenting a handful of financial and legal transactions with publishers, may be on paper, but most of her correspondence will be electronic. Portions of her email will be lost when, the weekend before a deadline, her MacBook crashes before she has a chance to back up her work. She rushes to purchase a new machine, and rewrites the manuscript from memory.

As frustrated as she is about the lost work, imagine how sad it will be for us that we will have no trace of the first draft. Various manuscript versions of her earlier work are likely word-processed, some in programs that no longer exist. Perhaps she saves an electronic copy of each draft, but there is a chance that she simply overwrites the same file, novel.doc, each day. Her candid photographs are probably in digital formats; some may be stored on her personal computer. If the Carl Van Vechten of today has photographed her, perhaps some of those images will be published on community websites like Flickr.com. Others photographs will be printed. As her personal papers are created, they are immediately cast to the wind and scattered across an archipelago of physical and digital islands. Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that our writer rigorously manages her papers. She carefully provides a meaningful file name for each draft of a written work. She makes regular backups. She scrupulously imports old email onto new computers. What happens if she loses custody of the materials before she becomes well known? If she, like Zora Neale Hurston, were to die in obscurity, what would her Deputy Sheriff Patrick Duval do with her computer? Such a delicate instrument would certainly not survive two years on a front porch. Digital Decay We have already experienced digital decay in a variety of fields. This rapid loss has been documented with telling anecdotes and troubling statistics. NASA records of the 1976 Viking landings on Mars, recorded in an obsolete programming langue and stored on old magnetic tapes, survive physically, but are no longer readable.[1] If a technological historian were to try to research the development of pioneering computer work, for example the origins of the study of Artificial Intelligence work at MIT, those files, programs, and computers are now gone.[2] The problem keeps getting worse; as our lives and work come to increasingly rely on electronic devices like personal computers, hand-held devices like iPods and Blackberries, our records begin to decay almost as quickly as they are born. Scholarly communication is increasingly bound up in a reliance on digital formats that are decaying; it is beginning to rely more and more on materials that are published on the Internet in the form of conference papers, electronic journals, and professional and society websites. There is no print counterpart for these materials. The electronic copy is the version of record for this growing subset of scholarly literature.

The Individual Collector of the Digital Age

Paper is patient, content to live alone in attics, basements and storage lockers for decades, even in desert caves for centuries. It forgives us for our neglect, and like an old friend, resumes a past conversation as though no time has passed at all. Digital records are like petulant children who cry as soon as they are put down, even if it is just for a moment. They require care and feeding from the moment they are born, and continue to demand skilled attention throughout their lifecycle. What kind of person will have the patience, expertise and money to take care of such demanding and fragile beings?

[1] Jesdanun, Anick. “Coming Soon: a Digital Dark Age?” CBS News (AP). 21 Jan. 2003. 30 Dec. 2006 . Jesdanun’s article, often cited by library scientist and digital preservationists, deftly outlines the risk to scientific data, business records, personal papers and the legal, scholarly and financial consequences. [2] Brand, Stewart. “Escaping The Digital Dark Age,” in Library Journal vol. 124. Issue 2, p46-49 6-20-3.