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Digital Preservation or Conservation?

June 5, 2009 at 3:00 pm by Chris

Last week's episode of the Spark podcast featured a segment on digital preservation, a concept I'm interested in both from an organizational and practical point of view. The host interviewed Seamus Ross, Dean of the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. In the course of his interview, Ross mentioned Digital Preservation and Nuclear Disaster, an animation about digital preservation, and the problem of bitrot, where storage media degrades such that software can't interpret the bitstream because some information has been lost. Ross also suggested that we should be storing entire databases of information (medical records, tax returns, etc.) for posterity because historians:

"are going to be very interested in large data sets, because embedded in these data-sets is the ability to look at our society at high levels of granularity. You can see the individuals, but you can also see the trends. And they can ask new and original questions that help them to understand who and what we were better. It's in that base of information that the greatest knowledge about our contemporary society is being held."

This concept came up initially for me when the whitehouse.gov site transitioned from the Bush administration to the Obama administration. Many people wondered (and still wonder) what happened to all the information that used to be at that website. Suggestions have ranged from archiving these sites and moving them to new domains or having them as subsites of whitehouse.gov. But the larger problem is really whether storing large data sets, given how rapidly large amounts of data is generated, is practical. I am all for archiving and preserving information for history's sake, but if we do this, we'll need digital curators just as much as we'll need the physical resources necessary to hold the data. What we don't want is vast storage of junk tweets, blog posts, comments, Facebook wall posts, etc. Perhaps we should be considering digital conservation?

Tags: digital-conservation the-future

Comments

A.J.	June 8, 2009 9:55 AM Isn't digital curation what we're doing when we tag things on delicious, post them to blogs, digg, twitter, tumblr, wordpress, etc.?
Ben	June 8, 2009 4:09 PM @A.J. no, that kind of annotation just creates interconnections, but it's not really curation in that there is not a point-of-view to the collection.
Stephen	June 29, 2009 10:01 PM I'd like to learn more about the digital conservation movement. Can you point me to some resources? Where/how did it start?
Chris Butler	June 30, 2009 10:33 AM @A.J. I've heard the word "curation" used quite a bit in reference to sharing web content, but I agree with Ben in that curation is a bit more than just sharing content, but assembling a group of content based upon a particular point of view, theme, or purpose. @Stephen, I'm not really sure if it has started at all. I suggested we start one back in March in a blog post titled It's Time to Start a Digital Conservation Movement. I don't know of any particular resources at this point, but I hope to keep this conversation going. Let me know if you find anything of interest...