Rogue Librarian

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.

I’ve needed a new podium for some time, and now I have one. 

Things I Learned the Hard Way is a new community/content blog where women share life lessons about home, family, friendship and work. 

Our first staff writer, Sandra Dalka-Prysby, is a veteran whose work has appeared in Family Circle and Fitness magazines. After losing 170 pounds Sandra wrote Slow But Sure, and became certified by the American Council on Exercise (ACE) as a Lifestyle & Weight Management Consultant.

I hope you will join us at my new web location, and that you will send us stories about things you have learned the hard way.

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.

The New Media Consortium (NMC) has released a report on media literacy. They describe A Global Imperative: The Report of the 21st Century Literacy Summit as a call to action to people working in any aspect of education. They talk about 21st century literacy as

the set of abilities and skills where aural, visual and digital literacy overlap. These include the ability to understand the power of images and sounds, to recognize and use that power, to manipulate and transform digital media, to distribute them pervasively, and to easily adapt them to new forms.

They say that one-way relationships, like that of the reader and author, will give way to conversations. In the spirit of that dialog, I am tracking visitors with another brilliant Google Maps tool.