Subj : Preserving Digital History
To : Kaelon
From : Boraxman
Date : Wed Jul 20 2022 09:33 am
Re: Preserving Digital History
By: Kaelon to Boraxman on Tue Jul 19 2022 05:42 am
> During the Renaissance, this problem was tackled programmatically through a
> variety of specialized roles:
>
> * ARCHIVISTS were responsible for determining how content would be stored
> for the long-haul, and built upon the ancient library science and started
> creating standards for preservation, categorization, and reference.
>
> * CHRONICLERS reviewed all of the news of the ages and built abridged
> histories, or Chronicles, of the time, including extentive reference to
> content that had been archived for future generations to conduct follow-up
> research.
>
> * HISTORIANS became the scholars that reviewed the chronicles and
> cross-referenced with what archivists, and lesser librarians, had stored, in
> order to produce more 'modern' retrospectives and studies on what really
> happened and what the impact of what happened was.
>
> We need similar roles for the new digital age. And I am not really
> convinced that the Internet Archive has a true archival, chronicling, and
> historiographic practice for their resspective domains.
> _____
Agree, but who? Private interests may do it, but likely to monetise it, or not be interested because there isn't a quick return. Churhes? Monasteries?
I think the solution is custody. Who owns the information, how is it transferred. A way to transfer the public contents of a server before you decommission it. A way for people who are done maintaining their sites to simply hand it over to archivists. This would be more a cultural shift than a technological one.
We will resolve this issue, but not without a significant period inbetween where a lot of digital information was just thrown to the wind.
There are already questions about how to handle social media accounts after people die, who takes ownership and such, and I think this problem neatly extends to the one we are discussing.
