The Quantum Archivist

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.