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.