Day 4: ABBY SMITH Presentation:

ABBY SMITH Presentation: "Storage is not preservation." "Preservation is 100% delayed gratification.” Smith, Abby. New-Model Scholarship: How Will It Survive? Washington, D.C.: Council on Library and Information Resources, 2003. 49p. $15 (ISBN 1887334998). Also available online from http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub114/pub114.pdf. An article by NEH chair Bruce Cole published in June 2002 in The Wall Street Journal bore the title "Our American Amnesia." It decried the dangers of forgetting history and pointed to a host of signs that our national amnesia is "worsening." The consequences are serious, Cole points out: "Citizens kept ignorant of their history are robbed of the riches of their heritage, and handicapped in their ability to understand and appreciate other cultures." Most thoughtful contemporaries will likely agree with Cole: As a nation, we simply cannot afford to lose any more ground when it comes to memory. And yet consider the Internet and its role as an increasingly important site of meaning in our lives. The Internet is as notorious for the ephemerality of its resources as it is for the explosiveness of its growth. Whole galaxies of popular culture, public opinion, social life and history, and indeed reflection and research arise and disappear without leaving a trace. "Daily, new landmasses form and then submerge," writes novelist Jeanette Winterson in The PowerBook (2001): "New continents of thought break off from the mainland. Some benefit from a trade wind, some sink without a trace. Others are like Atlantis—fabulous, talked about, but never found." Ironically, just such a disappeared continent is the NEH’s own project "My History Is America’s History," touted on a government Web site (http://www.pueblo.gsa.gov/cic_text/misc/my-history-p/my-hist.htm) as "a virtual ‘front porch’—a cyberplace where families can drop by to exchange stories [and] to explore the tales from history that help make sense of [their] own and [their] ancestors’ lives." Yet, if you go to this Web site at http://www.myhistory.org/, all you get is a laconic "‘My History Is America’s History’ has closed its operations." Forgetfulness abounds indeed. AS begins by talking about living in Soviet Union and issue of information as property and control of citizens and subject. And this is the background of preservation. Preservation is all the actions humans take to transmit information from one generation to another so it can be decoded. Was that stone doodling, art, communication . . . it is no different now for bits. She will talk about her project with Library of Congress and digital practices, where preservation strategies are inadequate for digital materials. “Environmental scan of digital content: value, risk, stewardship.” NDIIPP—Government funded digital preservation project. Web is about 10-15% of digital material available. Nationwide Collection Strategy: Guiding Principles More is better than less. Democracy is better than autocracy. EU digitization is entirely from top-down, not populist as in the US, she says. Communities of knowledge are better at selecting and collecting than policy committees. Communities range from commercial documentary film companies to social scientists building data archives. Preservation grids. And it should also be Flickr communities and others. Comprises distributed collections. Held by a network. Storage v. preservation. Preservation takes huge efforts and it requires resources and choices that exclude those resources and choices going elsewhere . . . [She will give us her power point and we will post it on the website.] See Taxonomy diagram on the power point. Four categories: 1) Published (all copyrighted), 2) Unpublished materials (inc business records, personal records, government records; copyright materials for unpublished materials very difficult, requires going to the creator and have permission to preserve it); 3) Made Public to the Web (ephemera, vlogs, blogs, social software, deep content sites: what else??). The average life of a website is 44 days. 4) Deep Web and Data Bases (geographical data, remote sensing datra, sensor data, surveillance data, scientific data, commercial and engineer data, social science data, pharamaceutical and biomedical, public health and safety, reference work, encyclopedia, dictionares, etc.) Organizations that compile geospatial data overwrite their own data to update it---so, for example, there is no information in some case from before Hurricane Katrina. But private citizens were able to help collect data, by Google Mash-Ups. SHE WOULD LIKE OUR INPUT ON THE QUESTION: WHAT MAKES DIGITAL CONTENT VALUABLE??? NOTE: 80% of all film made before 1930 is lost. This is continuing with digital . . . Google is created through citation algorithms .. . but that is use now. What about use later? She has another complex slide worth checking out to indicate all the different kinds of value of content. Preservation is 100% delayed gratification!!”