I particularly liked the way the readings fit together this week — and not just because the problem I had with my first post is all but described at the beginning of the NINCH guide. But comparing the NINCH guide with the books projects was neat — in part because I found the NINCH guide pretty dense and was grateful to have a concrete example to compare with the NINCH techno-speak. Doesn’t really seem to be a tool designed for beginning users — how hard would it have been to provide a simple description of the concepts and choices at the beginning of each section? I know a fair amount about metadata and I still had trouble following their description of its uses — though they did raise a point I hadn’t considered, namely how it could be used to sustain digital media going forward.
On the NINCH guide, I did like both the comparison of image file formats and the formula for estimating file sizes — that seems to me to be pretty practical stuff. Ditto for the tables on audio and video files — a nice decoder of the file extensions and the advantages and disadvantages of the different types of media. Again, not sure that anyone who didn’ t know a fair amount about what they were talking about would get much out of this, but those folks are probably not the much-discussed “audience” of this particular resource. I’m sure other web resources provide similar information in less-detailed but more-accessible terms.
And of course the topic of preservation is a thorny one that requires a great deal of background knowledge, I expect. I have no doubt that the file types you pick for a project now may ultimately determine whether your project survives a generation or more. (On the other hand, it’s not entirely clear that most of the content on the web needs to be preserved for generations and generations hence — are web pages like my memorials, in that this generation shouldn’t get too attached to their imprint of the present, past and future because the next generation should have an equal right to define what those things mean? Different, of course, for the underlying content — the future can’t define the past for itself if all the relics of the past — like digital images of events, for example — have been lost because they can’t be preserved. I though the NINCH did a better job here than in the other chapters of breaking the problem down, though the explanations of how to deal with the various aspects is still pretty jargon-y. The best-practices section seemed to me to be particularly useful.
If the NINCH guide is a bit too “insider” for me, Dr. Rosenzweig does a better job (as usual) of explaining the implications of the problem. We’re really struggling with this problem at work — if I get an e-mail that we’re required to keep for our files, which eventually go to the National Archives, I print it and give it to a secretary to make paper copies. Sometimes the attachments go with it on paper, sometimes not (especially if they’re too big or cumbersome to print out, like Excel spreadsheets). We don’t have another solution and yet I know that a lot of what’s important about that e-mail — metadata, for example — will be permanently lost, which not only calls into question whether we’ve preserved anything but makes it a lot harder for people to find things in the future by a FOIA request or other search (or is that perhaps the point and one of the reasons the Archives have been slow to change over? Nah, never attribute too much motive to the government — more likely, it’s just that change is hard and the old guard doesn’t even want to understand the issues, let alone invest the time, money, and resources it would take to address them.) On the other hand, if we didn’t have a simple paper system, maybe nothing would ever become available — we can’t save electronically things we get on paper, like letters from citizens, so some paper file will be necessary for a long time to come. If we have two files, there’s more to lose (another old government trick, whether inadvertent or deliberate). Where do I send them? Does someone collec them up and match them to a case number? And who archives the information on the electronic files? We’re lucky to have secretaries at all, let alone asking them to do archival work.
Dr. Rosenzweig also gets to the heart of an issue that I raised earlier and that I think is important — if we preserve everything, how would we possibly deal with the size of the archive that results? I’ve talked about this in class — a few hundred sets of letters from the Civil War is a treasure trove — the random thoughts of all Americans (or whatever percentage uses the internet, e-mail, IM, or blogs) may be a caucophany too big to deal with. The Civil War issue makes you deal with samples — are they representational. The information overload is the opposite problem — if you could preserve everything, you couldn’t help but think that the sample was representational, but you couldn’t use it for much because you’d have to go looking for needles in haystacks amidst all the noise. I thought the point that historians and archivists are starting to overlap was an important one — everyone’s deciding what to preserve these days, often without a lot of knowledge. My mother has moved to digital photography but still loves her box of old photos — we talked about whether the digitial form would be around 100 years from now in the way that the pictures of her grandfather still are. She decided to print some of the pictures as a safety net against technological revolution. On the other hand, I’ve often wondered about those old photos — if no one remembers who’s in them, should they be saved? They might be useful as a sample of the era — clothes, hair, images of gender (is she standing up next to him sitting down or vice versa) — but how many samples of that do we need? Every American’s collection seems a bit much. Am I being ahistorical — or anti-historian — if I’m not sure that every piece of evidence needs to be saved for future generations, who will be generating their own thoughts and evidence, thank you very much?
In the end, I suppose, there will be balance — we’ll decide over time how much time and money to devote to e-preservation just as we’ve always decide how much time and money to devote to paper preservation (with some new factors, like space and access, thrown in). Some things will be saved and some not. We’ll wade in, make mistakes, regret them, and move on with a loss of information that may be great or small. What needs to get discussed more, I think, is that we’re already making choices — maybe those choices should be more transparent so the community (and interested observers) could ensure that the resources we do have are directed to preseving the best things we can think of to preserve (just as we always done). What future historians do with what’s saved — well, that’s up to them. They’ll love some of it, be happy for other parts, and ignore some — again, just like us.
