A few weeks ago I was honored to attend the National Digital Stewardship Alliance meeting. The NDSA was planned by the Library of Congress as part of their NDIIP project.  There were more people there than I expected and it was a humbling experience to hear some of the brightest and most creative brains in Digital Preservation speak.

The high volume of information was overwhelming.  I spent more than six hours at the end of the conference compiling a PowerPoint of the important research highlights.   A small sample of this information is included below.

There were many wonderful presentations giving case studies on how institutions used their own creativity to try and enhance the longevity or migratability (new word?) of their digital files.  The amazing work often was done on a shoestring which though unfortunate, also forced a certain level of imagination and invention.

A few examples are:

Jack Brighton, of campus radio station WILL, gave a wonderful presentation on what a small station is doing to make their civil rights collection more accessible.

Kickstarter.com did a great presentation on how they are helping arts projects get funded and we hope that as they branch into community work that digital preservation might fit into that.

The UK Web Archiving project covered some of the complexities and true effort that it takes to try and tackle capturing the online history of its nation.   http://www.webarchive.org.uk/ukwa/

- As of December 2010 – 9 million sites with .uk, probably 1M more

- 10,027 websites archived

- Need skills in Linux, Java, Hadoop, and SOL

5 keys processes to web archiving

- Selection

- Harvesting

- Storage

- Preservation

- Access

http://www.webarchive.org.uk/ukwa/ngram/

So after taking in all this good information, what is it that I have left the conference with?

People just like us are doing some wonderful problem solving out there.  There is some potential being unlocked, but there is so much to do.

As I see it the Action Items are:

1)    Greater broadcasting of the successful case studies for migration and open solutions.

2)    Training classes in how to boil this down for each type of format/issue.  The NDSA Outreach group held a session called “Digital Preservation in a Box”.  This is the beginning of standardizing the tools that we need.

3)    Overarching education to information and production professionals, as well as, the general public about the dangers of digital fragility and the need for migration (at the least).

I have mentioned to my classes for years that future anthropologists, sociologists and historians will have little to sift through from the late 20^th century.

Some of it is being worked on by archivists now but much is gone.  Let’s keep making progress so that the future of our current history is not lost, like the way of silent films.

More informational tidbits from NDSA:

Other Great Projects

—       ThatCamp.org

—       http://www.scola.org/scola/sampledigitalarchive.aspx

NYPL Labs

—     http://search.creativecommons.org/?q=nypl+map+rectifier&sourceid=Mozilla-search

—     http://menus.nypl.org/

Archiving Facebook

Grad student designed Firefox add-on for individual archiving of Fb.

www.Bit.ly/archivefb

Preserving Virtual Worlds

—      www.ideals.illinois.edu/handle/2142/17097

Cool Tools

—  http://www.google.com/landing/historypin/

—  http://blogs.yu.edu/cpa/2011/02/23/open-source-video-platforms-kaltura-vs-entermedia/

Great Quotes

—    JackBrighton”(DAM) is more like an appliance than an Ecosystem.”

—    Michael Nelson “We need to raise the level of user expectations.”

—    Michael Nelson “In all good computer science functions you solve the problem through indirection.”

—    Wheatley and Frieze “The world does not change one person at a time.  It changes as networks of relationships form among people        who discover they share a common cause and vision of what’s possible.”

—    Tim O’Reilly(?) “Teach preservation as a mindset.  Bake this into the tools.”

New Phrases

—    Social Curation

—    Metadata Ecologists

As an archivist and student of history, I am curious about the past and how things have evolved. When looking through some journals, I was reminded of when I first was learning about the Internet and e-mail in the early 1990s. Being new to the archival profession, I recall being in a session at a Midwest Archives Conference (MAC) meeting. Although I don’t remember the topic, I do remember sitting next to a more experienced archivist who seemed to want to share his techie knowledge with a neophyte such as myself. You could send a note to someone on your computer? You could look for information and post material on your computer? How did that work? It was very befuddling. So this friendly, helpful archivist proceeded to jot down a bunch of letters and punctuation, and supposedly, when you put this into some program in your computer, you would be able to send and retrieve information. I thanked my more experienced colleague for trying to explain this gibberish. I know shortly after when I started a regular, full-time job, I got a computer and e-mail and learned what it was all about.

I recollected this long-ago episode when I was looking through an IEEE journal Annals of the History of Computing from 2004. There was an article about Gopher. Ahhh, it was all coming back to me — that little animal that actually had to do with some early type of searching on a computer. Apparently the software was introduced in 1991, and instead of being an acronym for something, the Gopher got its name because it retrieved material (like a go-fer), it dug deep (like an animal), and it was the mascot for the university where it was created (University of Minnesota Golden Gophers). It was developed in part to assist colleges with CWIS, campus wide information systems. It also was an early attempt to instruct regular people, not computer techs or information professionals, on the capabilities of the Internet. Since it was relatively easy to install the software, more people used it, and that meant more information would be available on the servers, so even more people would want to use it.

While Gopher may not have been an acronym, there were other computer-related terms that stretched plausibility to try to be both clever and memorable. “Archie” was introduced as part of Gopher software to search anonymous FTP files for information. By some accounts, it was a shortened form of “archiver.” To go along with “him,” “Veronica” was created, Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Netwide Index to Computerized Archives. It was built into Gopher to allow searching on files, directories, and other resources. As if that were not enough, “Jughead” was introduced, Jonzy’s [creator Rhett Jones] Universal Gopher Hierarchy Excavation And Display. It was a software program to help find directories on Gopher.

By 1992, Gopher was one of the most popular things on the Internet allowing users to find answers to many questions. However, it was around this same time that Tim Burners-Lee and his team were developing the HTTP protocol, a web server and browser, and HTML. By 1994, the World Wide Web had surpassed all other Internet protocols. The rise and fall of Gopher is interesting, but too long to detail in this posting. But one of the main theories of why the web won is because it displayed and linked together information on the Internet, but Gopher primarily had an inflexible hierarchical, file-like structure of data display, i.e., the web showed graphics (“pretty pictures”) much more readily. This, too, allowed for more graphic advertising and therefore more revenue.

Although now mainly defunct, one lasting legacy of the Gopher craze was from the team leader for the project, Mark McCahill. Apparently he was a windsurfing enthusiast and he first used the phrase “surfing the Internet” in a 1992 Usenet post.