Wednesday, May 11, 2011

Digital Preservation and the Digital Dark Age

Reading Reaction 6


The issues of digital preservation and the Digital Dark Age are topics that we find addressed repeatedly in our readings this week. The Wikipedia entry for digital preservation provides a thorough description of the topic, highlighting many of the aspects of digital preservation as well as many of the practices used by people actively engaged in digital preservation. One specific area the article brings up is that the process of digital preservation is an ongoing process that changes and adjusts with the technological advancements. One of the problems with this, the article states, is that “Digital technology is developing quickly and retrieval and playback technologies can become obsolete in a matter of years.”

This issue is also addressed in the Science Daily article (from 2008). The rapid advances in software are leaving many files inaccessible, thus forever losing their content. Jerome McDonough adds to this idea that “If we can’t keep today’s information alive for future generations, we will lose a lot of our culture.” I find it rather interesting that the article is from 2008. If McDonough is raising these points then, how much more is it relevant now? Well, continuing on, the key to avoiding a digital dark age, according to McDonough, is to first decide which data is valuable, then make sure that data is available by migrating it to a format that is currently in use.


In terms of data that is valuable and worth migrating, the Polar Bear Expedition Digital Collections offers a great number of papers and photograph collections from the American intervention in Northern Russia at the end of WWI. Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan is responsible for archiving all of these documents. They did this because a large number of soldiers involved in the intervention were native to Michigan state. You are encouraged to take a look at the large number of documents contained in the digital collections.
Photograph from the Aldred S. Buckler photograph collection from the Polar Bear Expedition Digital Collections

Finally, The New York Times features a section on the job market in the field of digital archiving. Since digital preservation started picking up momentum and attention, the need for dedicated individuals to oversee these operations has increased proportionately. Victoria McCargar, preservation consultant and lecturer at U.C.L.A. and San Jose State University says “People with I.T. backgrounds tend to be wrong for the job. They tend to focus on storage solutions: ‘We’ll just throw another 10 terabytes on that server.’” That may be good news for many of us History majors, since we tend not to be the most tech savvy. For doing the active work of operating the storage facility, the pay expected can range from $70,000 to $100,000, while being a consultant can pay up to $150 per hour.

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