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

There has been much written recently about digital fragility. Researchers and archivists have heard dueling longevity and futuristic projections. In trying to push this dire need without appearing like Chicken Little, I have embarked on serious primary research to expose the sheer volume of the problem. The in-depth article will be coming out in a professional journal within the year. Until then, I felt that I needed to speak up a bit about the need for our activism.

Between my teaching digital archiving courses and my work with clients, this issue has been prevalent in each work day. In fact, while re-processing an archives for a client, a case of 5 ¼” floppy discs were found. No one in-house knew exactly if these were of value, what was on them or even if they were created by the organization. When we offered to open them on a computer with a floppy drive, we were told just to throw them out. This is the fear that archivists are living with. Each time an archivist approaches this obsolete media, the questions come: How many others are out there? How many are being thrown out because it is easier? How many are left? How long do I save them? If I am able to find a player/drive/ etc. will I be open the software that the data is formatted in? Will it even be playable? Are we missing decades of human knowledge? How long will this continue? How can archivists slow down the moving train of media change? Can archivists increase re-formatting awareness? Is reformatting my only option? Where does emulation stand? Who do I call? Who do I write? How do I make a difference in this loss that flies in the face of everything my profession holds dear?

A colleague, Tom Featherstone, once told a class “Archivists get paid for throwing things out.” After the horrific silence, he explained that we cannot save everything. Archivists place value on what is received, appraisal occurs and the kernels of importance are retained.

In today’s Digital Age, few are seeing the kernels, the wheat, and perhaps even the farm!

A recent IDC/UC San Diego study estimated that the average American is taking in 34 gigabytes of information per day. As an archivist, let’s think about the volume of data that is being created and disseminated. If even half of one percent were historically significant, we still have a large preservation problem.

The loss of corporate, academic and personal data from the late 1980s to the current time is tragic for future generations of historians, technologists, anthropologists and sociologists. We are nearing twenty-five years with little implementation of preservation processes. This is not to say that Archivists have not offered plans. This is to say that they are not being followed. In pure sales terms, we have NOT “sold” the crisis to the people. This is not to imply that the issue is not real, it means that the dry facts were not enough to convince people of the crisis. More facts had to be gathered. Now a true implementation plan with typical business practices needs to be created.

Here are the options:

1) Do nothing and continue to sweep up after mass dumps of data. Process what passively comes to us. Complain a little (or a lot) and do the best that we can with the little that we receive

2) Be moderately proactive to educate the general public on the loss of human knowledge. Start education workshops at local archives, issue press releases individually and work at the grassroots level to educate your donors and users.

3) Be passionately proactive and begin a coordinated media campaign aimed at the public and the computer industry to work with archivists, historians, sociologists and anthropologists to stop the destruction of electronic records on all media. Work this campaign hand in hand into a reformatting program that is easy. Much like the environmentalists needed to educate consumers (e.g. “Reduce Reuse Recycle”). Catchy phrases work.

One of the biggest complaints leveled against our largest member associations is that they do not get involved in the issues that are most impactful for our day to day work. There is NOTHING bigger to archives than this, right now. Member associations are built on exactly that, their members. We can choose to have a voice.

How each professional decides to act on this data is an individual choice, but a large percentage of archivists and other professionals impacted by this severe and irreparable data loss would be a dominant force in the media, to donors and to the computer industry.

For twenty five years, archivists have been that little chick crying about disaster. It is time we grew up and became the rooster at the farm, crowing for the populace to wake up.

Earlier this month, the Library of Congress announced that it would house every “tweet” ever posted on Twitter. Every 140-character-or-less blurb on the site is now part of the vast LoC archives. This got me thinking: what are the issues at hand in archiving social networking sites? And why is it important?

Recently, while cleaning out my apartment, I found a relic of primitive social networking—a printed-out Facebook message from 2005. Nostalgia instantly struck. Five years ago, Facebook was [thefacebook], with a much simpler interface. A toolbar on the left listed the humble features of the relatively new site: My Profile, My Groups, My Friends, My Away Messages. Clearly, Facebook was trying to emulate MySpace —which was then by far the preferred means of social networking.

The past five years of my Facebook existence flashed before my eyes. I remembered when the site was only accessible to students at selected universities, when users could upload only one photo, when “the wall” was merely a text box that anyone could edit. A Facebook before FarmVille, “like” buttons, and mini-feeds.

With hundreds of millions of users, there are many reasons to archive social networking sites. First, for historical documentation—millions of photos are uploaded to the site every week, capturing the trends of the present era. Additionally, no matter how worthless each status update might seem, taken as a whole they reflect our reactions to modern events. It would be worth keeping a log of Facebook updates from the night of the 2008 election, or as the news broke about the earthquake in Haiti, or even as the Tiger Woods scandal unfolded.

Second, following the history of social networking sites offers insight into the development and perceptions of Web 2.0. What was it that made Facebook become so much more popular than MySpace ? How has Facebook increased the average person’s awareness of internet safety and privacy? Studying the evolution of such sites, web developers can predict future trends in online technology.

Third, social networking sites are paramount to the way we communicate in the 21st century. How do we choose to represent ourselves online? Everyone has that one friend who reveals too much personal information (Matt Maclean: too much vodka + ice cream = the great pukefest of 2010). There’s the perpetual Facebook drama, including my favorite, the Passive Aggressive Status Update (Alexis Cooper thinks some people need to get over themselves!!!) And how has Facebook changed our interpersonal relationships? At some point in their cyber-existence, most people have undoubtedly become angry or hurt or jealous over something said on Facebook. Relationships that may end in real life passively continue online—the psychological implications of which are new to our generation.

But how should sites like Facebook be archived, and to what extent?

The Internet Archive has preserved 150 billion web pages, dating back to 1996. Using web crawlers to archive websites, the IA serves as a publicly-accessible digital library, allowing users to revisit older versions of their favorite sites. Documenting and preserving static websites such as aol.com is relatively easy because they are open to the public. Public profiles on MySpace and Twitter are also easily accessed. But how do web crawlers get inside websites, like Facebook that require login information to view its content?

It’s not easy. The Internet Archive has developed a software application called Archive-It, which allows organizations to make digital copies of their own websites. As more and more universities, corporations, and libraries create their own Facebook pages, they can now archive them. While this is great news for individual organizations, it doesn’t include the interactions of ordinary Facebook users—the cyber chatter that documents our day-to-day lives.

Recently, the White House announced plans to preserve its social networking content. Media capturing is done using software applications and daily screen shots, storing text, graphics, audio and video in the context in which they were originally presented. Once this project gets off the ground, it can serve as a model for other organizations.

But what about the interactions of everyday Americans—how will their voices be recorded? Perhaps the LoC or the Smithsonian could begin a digital initiative to capture people’s online identities. An open call for submissions, asking Facebook users to send in screenshots of their profiles, walls, photos, or feeds, would be a simple and effective start. Similar projects, including the September 11 Digital Archive and the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, were created to obtain Americans’ reactions to history-making events.

It’s difficult to say if a comprehensive range of Facebook users would be willing to submit their personal information to an archive. However, thousands are already sending in their screenshots to blogs, including Failbook and Lamebook, which capture people’s regrettable and embarrassing Facebook moments.

No matter how trivial they may seem, social networking sites are a defining part of our generation—and that’s something worth preserving.

Further reading:

Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, my father brought home our first computer. It was a Mac. I can’t recall which model it was, but it was an all-in-one box with a screen the size of a small Kleenex box (I only wish I was joking!). Initially I was suspicious of this computer: having been raised on a steady diet of science fiction and comic books, I knew what computers were capable of. But my father convinced me that computers are only as smart as the person who programs them, so I gave in, turned it on, mastered the mouse and became addicted to computer gaming.

There was one game in particular that I liked. I can’t remember what it was called, but I created a group of witches, elves and trolls and we went on adventures: slayed dragons, defeated evil overlords, rescued princesses – that sort of thing. It was like a single-player, kiddie computer version of Dungeons & Dragons. I loved it, but I was also very bad at it. The computer won every time.

Then one day I had a brilliant idea: I would save my game, build up amazing gaming skills, go back to the game and beat the computer! It made perfect sense to my 12-year old mind. Pesky questions such as how I would obtain these awesome skills and how long it would take never crossed my mind. So I saved the game and did other things on the computer. Around that same time a relative gave me a book on calligraphy and I took that up, eventually becoming so consumed by it that I forgot all about my saved game on the computer.

Years passed by, Dad brought home a new computer and the computer with my saved game was relegated to the basement. Eventually I went to college, got a job and moved away. But before I did I asked Dad if I could take computer with me. He said sure (and probably though, “Yes! That useless thing is finally out of my house!”). Now it sits in my basement, with a game saved on it since 1986.

What do I do with it? How do I access it? Why should anyone care? I admit, that last one is a great question. But what if you were a researcher of late 20th century pastimes? What if you wanted to study how children spent their free time or how they experienced the first personal computers? Suddenly the box collecting dust in my basement is more interesting.

But what are the chances that the library or archive will have the technology to access, preserve and make available the computer’s data? We all know technology has changed rapidly since the mid-1980s (5-1/4 inch floppies anyone?), but there are also different standards. My first computer was a Mac. So not only must a library or archive be able to handle old data, it must be able to handle data in a variety of formats.

Nor is the issue likely to resolve itself any time soon. Although for many business applications the PC is the only option, many in the arts still use a Mac. Libraries and archives that cannot access Mac data will severely limit the research that can be conducted on late 20th and early 21st century digital art – and that’s just one example.

Yet I doubt any library or archive will “have it all.” There’s simply not enough funding to plan for all the different storage mediums and files. One option may be libraries and archives developing expertise in niche areas – for example, a library may have the technological ability to provide access to IBM AS/400 files from the 1990s but not for digital arts files from the 2000s – but this is unlikely as it is a direct contradiction to current collection development policies. Libraries and archives collect on specific subject matter or people, but most people don’t make technology decisions based on which files will be easier for archivists to preserve and make accessible in the future.

To meet these various accessibility needs, we may see the emergence of a new type of vendor: one that specializes in access and preserving old data in a variety of formats (for a fee, of course). In a way, this is already happening. Small libraries participate in union catalogs, and the host often has digitization capabilities. DALNET is a great example: the Library & Archives of the Detroit Institute of Arts had DALNET convert 45 rpm records to digital format that can now be accessed via the library’s online catalog.

In the meantime, I plan to keep my old computer in the basement. Who knows? Maybe some day I will develop amazing gaming skills.

In teaching multimedia archive,s I think about the future of our content constantly. Like a new mother, I fret for its security, growth and health. What is THE answer for our degrading media, emulsions, for our software obsolescence and our equipment falling down around our ears?

Recent discussions on the AMIA listserv brought new energy to this discussion and I wanted to put my spin on this. The subject line was “What’s Not Cool About Cold?” and it solicited some serious discussion about whether we have made a horrible mistake for a generation of archivists and content.

Jim Lindner argues that the imminent demise of tape players is more important in an archivist’s preservation decision than our focus on the imminent degradation of the media itself. The latter being our big decision to place much of our media in cool or cold storage. The group discussion mentioned the fact that many of our players are no longer supported by their manufacturers and the simple math that the lack of machines and the existing wear on their parts will not even cover the playback of the volume of archival tapes awaiting…migration? This hits a deep reality. Have we lost hundreds of thousands of hours of archival motion under our watch? Maybe even millions or billions of hours?

With the current demand from patrons increasing and the desire to use motion outtakes, news, etc. for historic documentation this is a disappointing state. Motion is powerful, emotional and immediate. It puts patrons in the experience in a way that to the visual human being is dramatic.

This important discussion on the listserv was a strong exchange which took place over several days. Other important points included the argument that the research on degradation and proper handling has made the tape degradation less of an issue and now the issue is playback for migration and access.

Other points included:

1) The need to get these gems a proper venue to be seen (whether due to money or rights issues)

2) The natural evolution of gathering obsolete machines from production facilities and creating some centralized site for archival institutions to use.

3) How to custom make parts so that we can maintain the machines so that we can transfer the content.

4) Wait for a miracle technological innovation to happen in the next 20-30 years so that you can migrate. (Keep them cool until then).

We come back again and again to the complexities of managing archival multimedia. The next generation of archivists will have changed their paradigm and released themselves from the desire to preserve the artifact. I am not condoning refusing to preserve all originals but our focus as far as video tape and digital files will be on content migration.

Other formats still have certain inherent value and that is a different blog posting!

Future archivists will have a much better long-term understanding of what is an artifact and what is intellectual content that needs to be migrated. They will be more adept to the rapid pace of format change and will HAVE to adapt quickly.

Not that I am faulting us. We are the transitory archival generation, the one that bridges the 100 year film format and the thumb drive.

I agree that the great research done in the field has helped us to minimize that problem, but it does seem that we took the eye off the ball a bit on migration. We cite lack of funds, lack of understanding of the urgency by the non-archival world, the frustration with equipment manufacturers, etc. It sounds like we need a development guru to raise funds, awareness and help to join all the key players for a collaboration. Many mention that the creators often do not prioritize preservation as they should. That is true, but our role as professionals is to educate.

Hand-wringing is not allowed! The energy that we have spent on that could have been put forth to an international collaboration with a real potential for migration, managing equipment, and innovation. One manufacturer can not do this alone, everyone needs to get on board and when I say “everyone” I mean:

Archivists
Creators (producers, studios, channels, directors, talent, writers, etc.)
Media
Equipment and Media Manufacturers
Technologists
Professional Associations
Funders

I think all of the above agree that the loss is imminent. The question is can we use our collective economy of scale to work together? Or maybe it is will we?

After teaching so many archival and technology classes, I began to realize the incredible depth and breadth of our loss of data. Over the last three decades billions of discs have been created and sold and presumably used. What has happened to these discs? To the data? If even 5% was worth saving for historical purposes, that is still about one and a half million discs to save and migrate. Has that been done?

We all know that the answer is “no.” So that means that we need to look at what is important and what level of effort is necessary to save it. I know that we can not save everything and I know that we would not want to. As Nik Cubrilovic mentioned in a recent Washington Post article entitled “Letting Data Die a Natural Death”: “Not only is a lot of this data not important, but do we really want to keep it? I certainly would not want a full account of everything I did in my youth sitting on a server somewhere. I am also certain that we do not want the record of our as a society time being documented and discovered by future civilizations based on Twitter messages.”

Yet, how much is lost that we have accepted and are wistful for? Some of my own graduate papers written on 5 1/4” floppies were not salvageable. That is of course, a personal loss that matters to NO ONE else but me.

What about the loss of communication histories in Presidential administrations? It took NARA six years just to process the Clinton presidential emails. (I am not sure how many people they had working on it, but that certainly sounds overwhelming!) Assuming that each succeeding administration will have geometrically more, what effort will it take to separate the diamonds from the coal? Add into that the constant evolution of tools like Instant Messaging, Texting, etc. and where will historians be able to turn to determine how national decisions were really made? Or have we EVER had that, even in a paper driven world of the past? Doesn’t everyone edit trails that reflect badly on them?

In the article “The E-Memory Revolution,” Jim Gemmell and Gordon Bell talk about the new “digital person” that has a “total recall” to their life as it is all in “e-memory.” They talk about patrons asking librarians about helping them to build new connections for them to their content. As an archivist, I ask, “In what format will their 20, 30, 40, or 50 year old history be?” How many of us can access our data from a phone that we had one year ago? These digital tools are wonderful BUT they are transitory.

They are primarily to transmit current records. Whether an email joke to all your friends or a tweet to meet someone at a concert. The problem is that we also have history making decisions ONLY in email form and new marketing ideas only documented on Twitter. So for future researchers, how will they take your 1000 new weekly emails and get the funding to sort through them?

Is it the same way that the 4 billion floppies manufactured by 2003 (according to one site which I can no longer find, how ironic!) and the 200 million Zip discs manufactured in 1999 alone (according to that same site) were handled? My 15 years of experience tells me that only a fraction of a percent might have been migrated. Is that a loss? Maybe we will never know? Because without the data we don’t know what we don’t know. Is everyone comfortable with that?

In the last month, I have had to replace a one year old refrigerator, a 30 day old phone, a two week old portable drive and a one-day old server. Technology is not always our friend!

When I first got involved in digitization (15 years ago!), I was sorely disappointed with the inefficiencies and struggles to get output as promised. I teach my students today that the information world is a difference place. We finally have tools that talk to each other, tools that can be modified through menus as well as hard-coding. This is a wonderful world of possibilities.

Tonight as I sighed and sat down thinking about all the time I have wasted on new products failing, I thought…”Am I right to be telling students that finally the tools are working for us instead of the other way around?”

In getting this blog up and running, we chose a simple template. We wanted it to be clean and easy for users and for us. So far, according to our change document we have encountered five unexpected problems that took a fair amount of time to fix (even with experts on staff). These problems all centered around incompatibilities to get information where, when and how we wanted. As information managers these seemed like simple moves and formats. We thought that we were not doing anything fancy.

I also tell my students to take as many technology classes as they can “stomach”, because the more that you know the smarter your decisions will be on which technology to use.

We are a pretty technical bunch but since each project is so different, and each institution is managing different types of information from any country and any time period in history, how can our information tools keep up to accommodate all human knowledge?

Open source is a start to integrating these tools but I still believe deep down that more librarians and archivists as programmers would make our tools much more common sense based.

I have seen many tools that sell well but their implementations are so short-sighted as to make the product unusable.

Here are some for instances:
1) All fields migrate from one database to another but only a portion are searchable!
2) The new Speech to Text feature gets every single word wrong and yet it is still for sale.
3) The new template for your site will not allow you to migrate data from your old template.
4) You can’t migrate your contacts from one phone to a new one
5) You can’t change your default directory when scanning.

These examples are counter-intuitive to good information management. Are there better products out there? In some cases, yes. This is why we need to be careful consumers. In some cases though, there are so many unknowns until you install your data that it is a painful “learning on the job” situation. In many more instances, your institution is already married to a technology and you just have to work with it.

Will things get better? Or is the question HOW will they get better?
I firmly believe that we (librarians and archivists) need to become more technologically astute and create our own products. The more we know will also allow us to push developers to better understand what we need.

We also as a group, have to really praise developers that are listening to us and that DO create products that are user and administratively friendly.

So, my question to you, is how best to do that?

Fast, easy and cheap. This was the title of a recipe book my mother created for me when I left home and entered the “real world,” but it can also describe the ideal technology for dealing with digital obsolescence. Who wouldn’t want technology that is fast, easy and cheap? It’s straightforward (“I’d like to order the archival program that is fast, easy and cheap, please”) and it certainly rolls off the tongue nicely. But what exactly does fast, easy and cheap mean?

Let’s tackle each element on its own:
Fast – You can quickly enter information.
Easy – You know exactly what information to enter and where to find it.
Cheap – You can do all this within your ridiculously slashed budget.

Ideal technology solution – DONE! – just like Mom’s enchilada casserole. What’s that, you ask? It’s one of Mom’s fast, easy and cheap recipes: every ingredient comes from a can, my husband hates it and there’s nothing remotely close to authentic about it (unless you think Hormel chili is Mexican food).

Hmm… maybe fast, easy and cheap isn’t the ideal technology after all… Maybe the solution to digital obsolescence is more complex.

For starters, what is digital obsolescence? Neither the SAA glossary nor Merriam-Webster offers a definition, but the latter defines obsolete as “no longer in use.” The Jem Report (http://www.thejemreport.com/content/view/33/74) provides a bit more meaning: “Obsolete means that the equipment in question is no longer valid or able to be used in the modern context.” (The Report also declares obsolete “the most misused word in the history of computing.”)

So if digitally obsolete files can no longer be used in the modern context, than the ideal technology is one that can read and display these files. Well that was easy! (Not to mention fast, and since you’re reading this for free… you get the idea.)

Not so fast. Even if a program reads and displays the files, it may not render the files the same way. So what? Maureen Pennock (http://digitalarchiving.wordpress.com/2009/04/16/authenticity-digital-obsolescence) provides several excellent examples as to why this may concern archivists and it all comes down to authenticity. Programs that simply read and display may alter document formatting, change fonts, remove headers, alter formulas and delete hidden characters; all of which may be valuable to future researchers.

Even the simple act of preserving content by printing it onto paper may cause loss of data, such as mathematical equations embedded in Excel files; loss of image quality, such as an original piece of digital art created at 600 dpi and printed from a desktop printer that can only output 150 dpi; or loss of original point of view, such as a PowerPoint presentation meant to be viewed on a computer screen.

Suddenly the simple issue of reading obsolete files becomes a more complex issue of preserving digital authenticity.

Remember how there’s nothing authentic in enchilada casserole? Sure it’s fast, easy and cheap; but it sacrifices authenticity. Is the same true for technology? In the ideal world we want fast, easy and cheap, but in the real world, we may have to pick one.

Technology relative to the field of Archives is a much-needed friend as well as an enemy of sorts. The merits of technology are easy to note – probably most importantly the quick access it provides to Archives both internally and externally. Items are much easier to keep track of and to locate internally. When items are made available to the public online, research is easier, time is saved, and so are many other resources. There’s no doubt that technology has opened Archives up to the world.

The speed with which information can be uploaded and made available is astounding – whether from a digital camera, digital video recorder, or general file type (Word, Excel, etc.). Gone are the days of waiting days, if not weeks, to update your files and information. Time to clear the library of that old hand-written card catalog. Or is it?

The enemy moniker comes into play in many ways, though, making technology difficult for many Archives and Archivists to embrace. Cost is one of the major issues. Small and large, corporate and not-for-profit Archives struggle to make initial hardware, software, and programming purchases – never mind upgrades and constant format changes and improvements. Not only is the hard cost of upgrades an issue, but also the soft costs of redoing, reformatting, and migrating file types.

Nevermind power failures, unreadable files or disks, or fried hard drives. Not that Mother Nature can’t do plenty of damage to our trusty old hard copies and originals of everything – we can’t make it sound like technology is our only worry as Archivists!

Technology isn’t just software and hardware either. A whole new world has been opened up to Archives with various social media options available to inform others about activities within your Archives as well as promoting and marketing your Archives or services. This blog is one of them! Others include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, etc. The drawback to these relatively new technologies is the time it takes to keep them fresh with regularly updated materials. Another consideration is to decide what you hope to gain – new business, cheap PR, disseminating information as a gesture of goodwill?

While Technology offers plenty of concerns to the Archives community, you can’t really beat all of the advantages it offers us. So, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to run and do some online research for a larger scanner for my next project!

Since the advent of the Internet, floodgates have opened with people creating all forms of documents put on the web. And with open source and proprietary software, the proliferation of websites and blogs has been nearly overwhelming. But will all that material be around a year or five from now? What will exist in the future? How will it be archived? Internet content creators cannot be certain that their material will be around for years to come. A lot of people might be OK with that, but if they do want their sites around for posterity, they should be proactive in saving their works.

Although “good-faith relationships” typically exist between users and the Internet service providers, the records actually belong to the latter, and most of them do not archive all the websites in perpetuity. In 1997, Tom Hyry and Rachel Onuf wrote in Archival Issues, “From multimedia projects to personal homepages and beyond, new expressive digital media proliferate. Since content in these formats, too, can be easily altered over time, the past forms, looks, and contents of these documents become replaced, and normally lost, with the developments of their replacements.”

Another consideration is when “sponsoring organizations” of Internet sites cease to exist, like for political campaigns, so the digital contents may depart as well. This happened to Al Gore’s website after the 2000 election was finally called. Of course there is the Internet Archive and its Wayback Machine to view various websites, but it does not have everything, nor are all the links active. Brewster Kahle created the Internet Archive in 1996. According to its website, it contains almost two petabytes of data and is currently growing at a rate of 20 terabytes per month. “This eclipses the amount of text contained in the world’s largest libraries, including the Library of Congress.” But Kahle acknowledges, in a 2007 American Archivist article, that “digital technologies erode very quickly. The current digital technologies only last about three years. In the last ten years, we’ve moved – transitioned – our materials three times.”

There continues to be concern about whole companies’ sites disappearing. For example, Driveway.com, a provider of free web-based digital storage, had approximately two million users. The company then announced its “demise” giving people a two-week notice to move their files. If those customers did not see the notice, they lost all their material.

There is a risk of disappearance for even the more prominent websites. For instance, on January 20, 2001, Inauguration Day, the White House website had changed completely with the incoming president. However, the previous contents of the Clinton administration’s site, and its searchable archive companion site, were “completely wiped clean.” Called “link rot,” thousands of links within other websites were broken. Not only did this create issues for the general public who may have wanted to research material from and about Clinton’s tenure, but archivists and historians know such material is vital to analyze a presidency. Fortunately, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) took action to preserve various “renditions” of those sites which were taken down. This is recounted in the article “Digital Preservation: Paradox & Promise” by R. Wiggins in Library Journal Net Connect from 2001.

Some computerized material and electronic records are difficult to preserve and access since they are “born digital.” As more documents are authored in a digital form, some of that material cannot be reduced to print, at least not without “substantial loss of content or function,” according to Clifford Lynch, Executive Director of the Coalition for Networked Information. These documents also create other issues for archivists such as making sure works like digital photographs that might be accessioned into an archival database have metadata added to them so correct cataloging information can be kept.

The Internet Archive, amongst all its electronic pages of information, warns that when it comes to preservation, “any medium or site used to store data is potentially vulnerable to accidents and natural disasters.” And with the news reported on October 12 that a division of Microsoft, called Danger, had a server crash leaving users of its Sidekick device without their photos and other personal information, this just reinforces the vulnerability of all the electronic material that deluges the Internet.