Session 3: Born Digital

Born Digital

Alice Prael, UMD Libraries

• Email
• Websites
  • E-publications
  • Blogs
• Legacy media
  • Floppy discs
• Oral histories
• Music
• Art
• Movies
• Games
• Code

• Social media profiles as primary sources
• We don’t necessarily control what we are producing and that may disappear

• Can we adopt preservation procedures to other forms of history?
• CDs and other forms of media don’t last as long as anticipated
• Anna: “fallibility of CDs/DVDs”—what does this mean for information recording, storage, submission, transfer etc?
• Ironically, the most long-lasting format is paper
  • Transcribe as quickly as possible; the thought of dating and migration and formatting is sometimes an obstacle
• Limited grant funding for archives and large institutions
• Sometimes people consent to having their interviews transcribed with the stipulation that no one sees the transcription—only hear the audio
• Transcription software tends to be better for audio than video
• Is a transcription considered a primary source if it is derived from audio?
  • How do we account for errors?
  • You lose data when you transcribe it—miss tonality, inflection, dialect, etc. Interpretation is required when you do that
• There are problems with analog formats in any field lasting longer than digital formats
  • Constant migration of formats

• “People’s minds don’t work the way databases are structured”-Glenn
• How can data be reorganized for purposes of discovery?

• You can’t just save a file, you have to save the whole ecosystem
• Virtual environments to simulate older operating systems
• Emulation is another layer of artificiality, but can extend the half life
  • Software is pretending to be hardware but it can never perfectly copy what hardware can do

• Is using an emulator going to combat data loss?
• What are acceptable preservation rates?
  • Illusion of what the rate should be based on letter writing habits of earlier generations
  • Juxtaposition of being able to keep much less of much more material
• Cost-benefit analysis

• Project now being outsourced?

• It’s easier to disseminate and reproduce information
• CERN has so much digital storage that they said they would hold all of the records of the EU government
  • BUT they’re not performing any kind of curation! Oh no!

• Even ephemera from years ago are still sources of information about the past—historians can find value in anything
  • Does this mean we have to preserve all of our ephemera today?
• Documentation is disappearing in rush to meet quotas
• We need things digitized at a quick rate but people don’t want to pay for labor
• Government obligations? Security and trust?
  • What is the responsibility of information professionals?
  • Deleting emails—malicious?
• Emails present issues of appraisal—what’s important and institutional?
  • Who has time to sort through emails?
• Archivists believe different things to be important—curation is subjective

• Is it anybody’s job to preserve the Internet?
• Robots.text files
• How, if at all, can we trust people to appraise and preserve digital records?