The Quantum Archivist

Digital Pioneers web site

A few months ago I posted a bit about Digital Pioneers, a project I was involved with that has as it’s aim 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 present at the creation. The original project was organized around a class project at the University of Denver’s Library and Information Science Program. After the class ended, responsibility for Digital Pioneers was transferred to the Digital Initiatives office here at the Penrose Library, where we will continue to develop the project and interview more subjects as time and resources permit.

Our goal is to put a human face on the development of cultural heritage digitization. The story of the content and the technology development is told in the peer-reviewed publications and white papers, but we want to find out what people were actually thinking and attempting to do when they embarked on building the digital future; the challenges they faced, and the insights they developed as agents of change.

For now, there is a somewhat eclectic (but based on specific criteria) gathering of reminiscences, observations, and visions from a small group of people we were able to contact and interview in the time that we had. More interviews are in the pipeline, and many more people have already been identified as potential interview subjects. If you have a suggestion for someone who should be interviewed, please fill out the Suggestion Form on the Digital Pioneers web site. And for now, enjoy hearing the stories from a time and place that is fast becoming only a memory.

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.