The Quantum Archivist

In a recent interview for the Digital Pioneers project, Howard Besser called YouTube the “ephemeral material of today” and a “microphone on the water cooler discussions people have at work.”   You can hear these comments for yourself about 4 minutes into the conversation on critical issues facing cultural heritage digitization.

Recent news about the Library of Congress collecting Twitter tweets would seem to confirm that social network material is the new “correspondence” series of personal papers collections if the terms correspondence and personal papers could be said to still have meaning in today’s archival environment. They are becoming the record of personal and casual social and intellectual interaction of the current age.

Is YouTube the kind of “ordinary everyday material produced by ordinary everyday people” that Howard Besser says it is? I guess that depends on your definition of “ordinary.” Certainly YouTube and Twitter are a view into a certain sector of the population, one that is reasonably literate and has a certain level of technological ability. And the technological barrier is certainly a lot lower than it was even a couple of years ago so this form of communication is available to a much larger pool of potential users. By collecting this content centrally, we can have access to a vast amount of material from a huge variety of people, far more than ever would have donated their personal papers to an archive. So in this aspect, I agree with Howard completely.

I’d argue though that documenting the contents of social networking tools only gets us back to where we were in the age of paper, and not much beyond that. Although my evidence is purely anecdotal, I’d bet that the people who create YouTube videos and are on Twitter, are by and large, educated people who are at home with the visual and literary communications methods of today. And although it is now so much easier for anyone from that group to get his or her ideas spread across the globe, I believe that the people who were voiceless in the age of paper have not made similar progress.

It would be interesting to think if Ben Franklin, the Sons of Liberty, and the authors of the Federalist Papers would have been on YouTube and blogs had they existed in those times.  If it had been possible, would John and Abigail Adams have posted messages to each other’s Facebook pages rather than fool with those messy quill pens? And if they had, and we didn’t preserve this highly ephemeral material, what would we know of the early struggles of the American nation? What future counterparts to Abigail and John Adams are posting in blogs, or tweeting, or making YouTube videos of things that inspire or outrage them?

While we HAVE become much better about documenting the formal means of communications of our society in the digital age, I think that we could be at even greater risk of losing not only the ephemera of today’s society, but the personal papers of our entire culture because we blithely rely on organizations beyond our control, who have no interest in our content as historical artifacts, to maintain and preserve our own personal history for us.  (A note of disclosure here: My wife and I run a blog on a hosted web site where we post news and stories about our family for friends and relatives and this blog is hosted by a for-profit service provider.) Yet what choice do we have? As archivists and digital librarians, we have to find ways to solve this dilemma.

And then they want it YESTERDAY.

There have been numerous studies related to why or why not Institutional Repositories succeed. Many of them have been gathered by Chris Bailey in his Institutional Repository Bibliography.

Basically, IRs fail because no one has any use for them (in the economic sense of “utility”) and because they are often marketed as preservation solutions and not as something that could benefit the actual users. I had a conversation the other day with some folks who want me to market our digital repository to faculty, get significant buy-in, and then explore how we can expand services for them. Sort of the opposite of “if you build it they will come.”  Now that the age of experimentation in digital libraries is over, and has been for about 5 years, the idea of leading from the front has taken a back seat to leading from behind.  The tagline we hear most often is “user-centered design.”  That is, our systems must reflect what users want and not necessarily what we think they need. Presumably, the user knows what he wants, and it is up to us to give it to him.

I think there is a flaw in this approach. Most users can only imagine what they want within the context of what they already know.  This idea is illustrated in numerous folktales. One of my favorites is “Jaimie O’Rourke and the Big Potato” where Jaimie, after being granted a wish by a leprechaun, wishes, not for a release from poverty or anything like that, but for the biggest potato in the world because that’s the best thing he can think of. While Jaimie ends up all right, he would have done much better if he could have broken free from established conventions.

But how could we have expected him to? Can we really expect users to be able to articulate or even imagine paradigm changing scenarios without being led to them in some way by people who think about this all the time?

I think we should go back to leading from the front, by listening to our users and (at the risk of sounding like Mama Odie here), discerning from them what it is they need, rather than what they want.

Most people don’t know that they need a digital repository, or if you ask them, think that they don’t need one at all (I have backups! I have network drives! I have CDs!). But if you give them something they need, like a platform for open access publishing or a means to deliver content that they couldn’t include in their most recent publication, or a place to keep their grant-funded datasets, THEN they see a value in what you are offering not because it offers permanent durability, but because it meets a need or solves a problem, or just makes their life easier.

Despite what we as archivists know to be the value of digital repositories, for the user, the digital repository is a means, and not a destination in itself. For them it is a means of access to a corpus of content that they need to do their scholarly work that will be there when they need it. For us, it is the other side of the same coin.

I’m attending and speaking at a small conference for members of the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries called “Digital Repositories, Data Curation, and the Cloud.” The Keynote speaker in the preconference today was Thorny Staples, the “godfather” of Fedora and currently Director of Community Strategy and Alliances and Fedora Project at DuraSpace. In this morning’s talk, Thorny introduced the idea of “durability” as being different from, and preferable to, the idea of simple preservation. As I understand it, durability differs from preservation in that while preservation seeks to maintain the existence of a digital object in a way that enables it to be accessed, durability preserves not only the existence but the meaning or context of the content in a verifiable way.

This strikes me as being absolutely obvious, now that it has been pointed out. The record of humanity now takes place on the web. How do we maintain the connections that are made between and among objects that are combined and recombined in 2.0 tools  even when those objects do not live in the same place, and the tools that are used to create those connections are themselves ephemeral?

The scholarly record, and by the same token the historical record, relies on citations to stable resources that provide verification for the assumptions or assertions made in an argument. How do we verify and persist, i.e. make “durable,” the context of a digital object in all of its contexts? Once we let the object out of a controlled environment that enforces context, how can context be maintained?

These are the kinds of questions that we might address when thinking about durability rather than just preservation.