Okay, last one on the “to do” list. I’m not too concerned about digitizing for my project, which will mostly include pictures and text. Choices about picture format, of course, will be necessary (and I’m thinking about thumbnails and other ways to use images) but once I decide on a format, I should be okay.
It may be evident from my previous posts that I’m not too concerned about preservation, either, but in this for pragmatic as well as policy reasons. If I keep my site simple — less video and audio, more pictures and text — I should be able to export the content in a way that preserves it. While I’m still trying to figure out the database issue, it seems like that’s one of its advantages — if done right, you can export most everything to a file format that can pretty easily be read by another database program — like copying a table from Word to Excel or vice versa.
In any event, I think that part can be handled. Whether I’d want my work preserved for all time? Still not sure about that. If I wanted to preserve something like this, I’d go about it the old-fashioned way — publishing on paper. (Does that make my project less useful, less interesting, less appropriate to the media? But what the web can do that a journal can’t is provide lots of things — lots of text, lots of images, lots more than you’d be allowed in terms of column inches in a publication.)
So I’ll worry about a lot of things about my project, but not TOO much about that one, at least not until I hit one of those stumbling blocks that always seems to appear when you least expect it.
