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.

Most people just live and do what they do, and only later they might discover that they either did something unique and wonderful, or not. Often, what they think is important at the time isn’t, and what they think isn’t important at the time is the big thing in the long run. That’s what makes the study of history so interesting.

Talking to some of the people who we consider Digital Pioneers, one of the questions I am asking is whether or not they had any idea that they were making history, or if they knew that they were doing something new and unique. While the general response is “yes” to the latter, no one has yet said that they considered themselves as making history.  At best, people were trying to change the face of research or discovery in their particular discipline or project. But there wasn’t a general sense that the work they were doing would ever merit being written about by historians.

That being said, I had a recent conversation with someone who told me that the story of humanities digitization particularly was one that needed to be told, since the humanists were always unjustly overshadowed by the better funded scientists, even though the humanists were often ahead in digital development.

Without taking sides on this one yet, I’ll say that the primary focus of the project is on the humanists. The scientists may need to get someone else to tell their story.

The project is not yet publicly available as we gather a  useful body of content. I’m looking at a preliminary unveiling in the next month or so.

Stay tuned.

In a recent post, I mentioned my project to document the history of cultural heritage digitization. At the time I was still trying to figure out how to define a “Digital Pioneer.” I’ve come up with a working definition that should limit the project to something achievable while limiting scope creep, yet at the same time yield the breadth of experience that can truly illuminate the time period.

While I believe I knew many of the people I’d list in this category, I wouldn’t put myself in that group. I see myself as a digital pioneer 1.5: not there at the beginning, but went along for the ride with people who were. So are YOU a digital pioneer?

Selection Criteria for Digital Pioneers:

• Active in Cultural Heritage digitization practice, theory or tools development, or funding priority setting between 1994 and 2005.
• Published more than one article in a peer reviewed publication.
• Presented at multiple conferences (three or more) dedicated to cultural heritage digitization  (e.g. Web Wise, JCDL, Open Repositories, CNI, DLF Forum, DRH)

AND

• Received more than one grant from a national funder (public or private) during the period
• Served on more than one review board of funding agencies such as NEH, IMLS, NSF, etc.
• Had a national impact and generated results—new tools, research, models, services, practices, or alliances in cultural heritage digitization–that had strategic impact, showed innovation, or fostered collaboration in at least one of the following areas:
  • Digital Collection Building: the creation, use, presentation, and preservation of significant digital resources
  • Research: the investigation of ways to improve the creation, use, and presentation of digital resources, both in pure and applied research.
  • Demonstration: test new models and practices.

OR

• Was a principal or senior program officer for a funding agency (e.g. IMLS, NSF, Mellon) or support organization (e.g. DLF, CNI, CLIR)  that supported digitization development.

Four and a half years ago, Clifford Lynch wrote an article in DLib magazine called “Where Do We Go From Here? The Next Decade for Digital Libraries.” Prior to looking ahead, he did a brief bit of looking back, quickly summarizing the history of the rather vague term “digital libraries.”  He admitted that there was as yet a “poorly chronicled pre-history and early history” of the field. That comment, plus the opportunity to host the IMLS’s Web Wise conference in Denver later this year led a group of us to think that maybe this was an area that needed some attention. From that came the idea of Digital Pioneers, a project to document a period of time (c.1994 – 2005)  and a type of project (i.e. one that transformed analog cultural materials into digital form) that explored the possibilities of digitization of material that was commonly held by libraries, museums, archives, and historical societies in the words of the people who were an integral part of it all.

The digital future in which we now live was the created by a combination of the work of individuals, organizations, and public and private policy. That the scholar’s desktop envisioned by Vannevar Bush in 1945 looks amazingly like the digital research library resources we know today is because of long conversations that developed into shared visions. These intellectual and policy interactions among , individuals, organizations, government agencies, practitioners, and researchers created the digital “library” we know today.

Although there were glimmerings of pre-history reaching as far back as the 1960s, the great age of experimentation lasted roughly from 1994 though 2005. It was not until the early 1990s that as Clifford Lynch  again says “programmatic funding and community creation… legitimized digital libraries.”   By 2005, Lynch further notes, funding and support for “…the construction of prototype systems [was] at an end…” and “the novelty of constructing digital libraries as a research end in itself [had] run its course.”

By 2005, digitization had become a discipline with standards, practices, protocols, organizations and governance. It moved beyond the mere creation of content to focus on topics like preservation, data curation, sustainability, large-scale aggregation, information exchange, and cyberinfrastructure.

The legacy of standards, practices, mindsets, and approaches developed in that decade informed a entirely new generation of digital librarians, archivists, and theorists and laid a foundation that has become the cornerstone of a profession and has made it into course syllabi in academic institutions across the world.

The scholarly publications, white papers, and conference proceedings tell the official story of the era, but what we want to do is get to the personal stories of how people got involved and what they hoped to do, and if their vision turned into reality.

We are now developing some selection criteria and beginning our first round of interviews. It should be an interesting conversation.

For all of you who might be interested in coming to Denver, you’ll have a perfect opportunity to mix business and pleasure. The IMLS’s Web Wise conference is coming to Denver on March 3-5, 2010. The University of Denver’s Penrose Library is the main sponsor of the event, along with the Denver Art Museum.

Every year the IMLS brings together practitioners and thinkers from all areas of cultural heritage digitization in a small group of usually no more than 300 or so for two days of presentations, discussion, and networking.

My part in the conference, beyond being the PI on the cooperative agreement with the IMLS is to start a new project called “Digital Pioneers.”  We will be attempting to document the history of cultural heritage digitization in the words of those who were present at the creation.

Although there were glimmerings of pre-history reaching as far back as the 1960s, the great age of experimentation lasted roughly from 1994 though 2005. It was not until the early 1990s that as Clifford Lynch says “programmatic funding and community creation… legitimized digital libraries.”   By 2005, Lynch notes, funding and support for “…the construction of prototype systems [was] at an end…” and “the novelty of constructing digital libraries as a research end in itself [had] run its course.” (Dlib Magazine, July, 2005)

By 2005,digitization had become a discipline with standards, practices, protocols, organizations and governance. It moved beyond the mere creation of content to focus on topics like preservation, data curation, sustainability, large-scale aggregation, information exchange, and cyberinfrastructure.

More to come on Digital Pioneers. Hope to see you in Denver.