As the new media is becoming more and more accessible to people, more and more documents are being created in digital form: “Born Digital.” One thing that everyone can agree one is that, as the time is passing by, technology is rapidly and constantly changing. Looking at the new media from this prospective, a concern arises among lovers of born digital documents on how to safely preserve their digital creations. But before we all can be concerned about how to lastingly preserved what is in the web or in other digital format, we need to worry about determining what is worth preserving first. I believe that every content has the right to be preserved for the sake of preservation itself, and based in this concept that of one man's trash being another man's treasure. Moreover, the digital storage capacities are getting bigger and more affordable on the daily basis. The down side of this approach is the overload in the amount of material available. Also, this approach destroys the core value of “perceived importance” in the profession of archivists.
“Obviously you have to use some combination of hardware and software to create and serve your website, and it can be difficult to determine where the herd will go.”(Cohen and Rosenzweig, 2005)
Preserving a digital document is more complex than just an ink-paper document. With digital material, the creator should be careful and insightful when it comes to choosing the programing language which will ensure the future of the website's functionality or digital material. The format by which historians should represent their documents. Furthermore, Most digital documents become unreadable just because of the unpopularity in term of the format by which the document were saved under.
“No acceptable methods exist today to preserve complex digital objects that contain combinations of text, data, images, audio, and video and that require specific software applications for reuse.” (Margaret Hedstrom, University of Michigan) . I would agree with her because of the complexity of the new media and the occurrence of constant changes that happen within the new media. However, one thing that all web users and scholars would agree on is the use of back ups and a regular update of those back ups. If we look at preserving the digital past from this prospective, I can say that there is not and there will not be a definitive way of preserving digital material, simply because of all the changes that occur in the technology sector. Backing up data is not enough. The library of congress can back up all their data today and not be able to read it five years from now. I will confidently conclude that preserving digital material is a matter of updating old technologies' material in order to synchronize with future technologies.
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Sinclar, I sympathize with your position on the need to preserve all digital content on the grounds that all artifacts deserve future consideration by historians. However, I feel that it is an unrealistic expectation, at least for now. Digitization still represents a costly venture and organizations dedicated to preservation do not have unlimited budgets. Frankly, financial limitations will need to impose some consideration of utility/relevance in any discussion. Furthermore, and I hate to sound like a pessimist here, do we truly expect all this content to be of use? Will future historians be able to incorporate this content into their scholarship?
ReplyDeleteThe one concern I have with digital preservation is cost. Storage is getting cheaper, but will it plateau? Will storage continue increase in capacity and get cheaper at the same time? Also how will the cost of constantly updating file formats factor in, changing file formats may not be too expensive, but what about the time it will take.
ReplyDeleteI agree with your conclusion that the only way to preserve Digital information is to constantly upgrade and update any information that is deemed worthy of care. Inevitably artifacts will be lost through the attrition of maintenance and custodial care.
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