8 It Takes a (Virtual) Village: Some Thoughts on Digital Preservation
[Arthur] Sullivan responded to the Iranian protests out of an engaged commitment to human freedom. When the Iranian regime began its repression, he tirelessly documented the horror. Such bitter memories, now digitally preserved, give longevity to hope.
—Lee Siegel, “Twitter Can’t Save You” (2001)1
Love your Kindle? Thank MIT. Media Lab associate professor Joseph Jacobson is a cofounder of E Ink Corp, the company that produces the highly readable black-and-white screens found on many electronic books, including Amazon.com’s popular eBook reader.… E Ink is making life miserable for the printed word, while preserving the written word in the digital age.
—“MIT 150,” Boston Globe (2001)2
Digital preservation refers to strategies used to keep born digital and analog information reformatted into digital form both accessible and usable. In 2007 the American Library Association (ALA) developed short, medium, and long definitions of it. The medium definition states that “digital preservation combines policies, strategies and actions to ensure access to reformatted and born digital content regardless of the challenges of media failure and technological change. The goal of digital preservation is the accurate rendering of authenticated content over time.”3
The preservation of digital content cannot always be guaranteed, even when strategies for its preservation are in place. Thus the two quotations at the head of this chapter are overly confident. Siegel cannot assume that adequate procedures were in place to preserve the digital information that he is referencing, nor is E Ink preserving the written word. This is an ongoing challenge that the preservation community faces; there are few easy explanations that can be made to the public about how to preserve digital objects and information—or how complex such efforts may sometimes need to be. We now live in an information mash-up—preservation may include information that exists in fragments, such as photos posted on the Web or a partial string of emails, or information that has been repurposed.4 This chapter considers some new approaches to and attitudes about preserving digital heritage.
Neither the ALA medium definition nor the longer one includes the social, cultural, or ethical dimensions of preserving digital content. They also do not account for the ways in which preserved information may be digitally repurposed or consider how digital information may be altered by hackers—revealing how such materials are not always authorial or authoritative (or in modern parlance, authentic). Digital preservation includes not just the methods used to preserve the information—such as emulation or migration—but all of the issues that must be considered to ensure ongoing access to objects, records, and materials. Now that ALA’s definitions are a decade old, it is time to consider some of the broader dimensions of digital preservation—and consider a new definition.
In chapter 1, I presented a schema that suggested new directions in preservation. These new approaches are particularly appropriate for digital materials, which often require a network of people to achieve, capture, and save the information: creators, institutions, users, and specialists. This chapter provides three examples of networked/distributed preservation: social media, computer games, and digital art. It also touches on similarities to the preservation of intangible art, the 3D representation of endangered monuments, and the role of ethics in preserving digital content.
Social Networking
As I suggest throughout this book, our behaviors have an impact on how we approach preservation. Social behaviors stem from the culture in which we live (or were raised), our values, societal norms, economic and market forces, and other external factors. To give but one example, the United States is sometimes characterized as a disposable culture with respect to consumer goods. We tend to throw away our possessions fairly soon after we acquire them because they are often inexpensive, or plentiful, or else they quickly become obsolete. Corporations bank on this; they lure us with new and newly desirable products. There is always something “better” just on the horizon. And that horizon is not necessarily far away. A new model of a computer printer I purchased ran out of ink just six weeks after I acquired it. I went to the store to buy a new cartridge and was told that the printer was now obsolete. Digital technology evolves at a remarkably fast pace, creating one of the great impediments to the preservation of materials in digital form.
Compare the life-span of consumer goods today to those of the past, in which longevity was often lauded as a desirable feature. Our parents and grandparents purchased goods with the idea that they would last for decades. My first personal computer lasted for over ten years! Today, we refer to PCs, laptops, or tablets that are three years old as “antiquated” or even “obsolete.” We treat objects differently if their shelf-life is three years rather than twenty. Thus, as I suggested in chapter 7, in discussing error rates in digitization, our expectations about longevity and our tolerance for losing data are still evolving. Or perhaps I should say devolving, as our expectations about the longevity of objects are decreasing. (Maybe someday we will lease everything.) Expectations of product longevity are no longer rooted in our culture and this is clearly reflected in modern advertising. No longer do we read or hear that a product will give us years of dependable service. The emphasis now is on affordability, convenience, availability, or modernity.
Social network sites (SNSs) are one expression of social networking. SNSs have been defined by danah m. boyd and Nicole B. Ellison as
[W]eb-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of others with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system. The nature and nomenclature of these connections may vary from site to site.5
The authors also use the term networking, which emphasizes relationships. Here I refer to networking, SNSs, and networks. Networking is a social activity that exists with and without technology, though it may result in the formation of networks. It is easier to preserve social network sites than it is to preserve the activity of networking, though networking can certainly take place online on SNSs, and thus some networking activities can be preserved if there are people to keep them going. I use the term network in a more general sense to describe an interconnected group of people.
Craig Blaha’s study on preserving Facebook records has shown that people who use such social networking sites expect their personal information to persist “indefinitely,” which they characterize as less than ten years. Blaha found that the Facebook subscribers in his sample differentiated between “indefinitely” and “forever.”6 (This distinction between “forever” and “indefinitely” is startling. Ostensibly they are almost perfect synonyms. But to young people with no sense of longevity, the words denote distinctly different lengths of time. This may be generational, but for my purposes here it reveals key attitudes about preservation.) His respondents indicated that they may alter their sharing behavior based on their preservation expectations. For example, Facebook subscribers may disclose less information if they believe that their records will exist for a long time. At the same time Blaha’s study participants believed that Facebook users created “records of historic value” that should be preserved but they also recognized that the Facebook corporation would probably preserve records only for business purposes, not text of a more personal nature. Finally, the author found that it is not likely that Facebook users will preserve their own records.7 Thus “archivists should not count on individual subscribers to preserve the corpus of Facebook records despite [Richard] Cox’s claims about the ‘citizen archivist’ in reference to Web-based personal archives. As [Catherine] Marshall puts it, ‘the more comfortable people are with computers and the more they can do with them, the more [information] they stand to lose.’”8
It is clear from Blaha’s study that a great many people using social media think little about the longevity of materials they are creating on SNSs. In fact, they seem to assume that their texts will “always be there” for them. They may have little notion of preservation, and they are not aware of the issue of personal information management (PIM) that is increasingly common in our cultural heritage institutions, especially libraries and archives. To reiterate what Marshall says, people creating content may wish it to be available for the long term, but they do nothing themselves to ensure its longevity. And “the long term” is vague: as long as they [think they] need the information? As long as they are alive? As long as forever? Digital preservation is an elusive concept as much as it is an uncertain phenomenon.
Further, Blaha’s study points to ways in which market forces and personal expectations will affect the preservation of social media. More studies are needed to understand how people plan to preserve their personal information. Will they back up their own information? depend on cloud storage systems? or use other strategies? Or will they do nothing, expect others to preserve their materials for them, and hope for the best?
Gaming
While people may not expect their own information to be preserved on social networking sites, there is a strong impetus to preserve some forms of digital media. Gaming is one example. There is tech nostalgia for early games. For example, gamers may seek to preserve the slow speed and screen flicker that characterized the older games, or physical components such as joysticks, which are appreciated as artifacts of the past.9 Gaming has now been around for long enough that there are many forms to preserve: mainframe-based and video arcade games; consoles; and online games such as first-person, massively multiplayer online role-playing games, and massively multiplayer online games (called in the players’ own parlance MMORPGs, or MMOs). With all of these, it is sometimes possible to preserve player cultures, which will make it possible for game historians to understand a crucial component of some forms of gaming. But such an understanding will exist as memories only unless hardware and original (and evolving) software are saved.
Derek Murphy describes an initiative to preserve the last few hours of the virtual world game EA-Land at which a “See You Soon Party” was hosted before the publisher “pulled the plug” on July 31, 2008. A student from Stanford University’s How They Got Game project of the Stanford Humanities Lab logged into the program and recorded the event.10 This ethnographic approach complements technical approaches to game preservation, such as emulation, which mimics the original hardware and software. Murphy suggests other approaches to preserving the social aspects of gaming such as ethnographic writing, video documentation, and the crowdsourcing of contributions from the player community itself. Using game players as “citizen archivists,” as Murphy proposes, is a grassroots approach to preserving an important part of contemporary culture. This is akin to PIM in that the users, not the games’ manufacturers, are expected to save the games—and to help others to preserve the experience. Researchers such as Jerome McDonough have used metadata to capture some social information.11
There are several ways to preserve. For example, Richard Bartle provides a historical view of game preservation in his article “Archaeology Versus Anthropology: What Can Truly Be Preserved” by drawing parallels between early works such as the Magna Carta and Homer’s Odyssey and computer games. If the original physical form perishes, copies can be preserved. “Strictly speaking, game historians don’t have to play the games they study, any more than the historians of Ancient Rome have to participate in gladiatorial combat; however, if we preserve the games for them anyway, at least they have the option of trying them out or not.”12 A key point for Bartle, and the crux of his position, is that game worlds are places and people live there. Players are an intrinsic part of the historical context of games. Therefore, we must archive now what people will need to know in the future so that they can understand the games.
But what we archive now is tricky. Do we save original games and the packages they came in? Original fliers and instructions, and other literature that came with the games? The original tapes and disks? For fully online games, do we save all of their manifestations—all of their iterations and editions? Where do these reside? Who has access to them? How can we find these people? How can we convince them (if they exist and we can locate them) to give us these manifestations of the games they enjoyed enough to save? Where will the fiscal resources to preserve the games come from? Who will do the work to preserve them and for how long? And there is another component of preservation we see in gaming: the experiences people had in playing the games in the first place. Can experiences be preserved? The questions I raise here are reminiscent of—and conjure up the same sense of possible futility of—the efforts we must expend in all preservation, of buildings, art, history, and all other manifestations of culture.
Digital Art
Digital art is a central part of contemporary art production, though its preservation may present new challenges to museums. For one thing, digital art is dynamic not static, so digital objects can’t be “stabilized” in the way that analog media could be. Sabine Himmelsbach likens digital art to performance art because new versions can arise with each viewing.13 While Himmelsbach identifies the oft-considered challenges to preserving digital objects—technological obsolescence, proprietary software that is no longer supported by the manufacturer, and so on—she also identifies cultural practices that impact preservation. For example, digital culture consists of practices, not just objects. Technology, media, and social relations are part of a process that calls for a networked approach to preservation. That means that institutions have to adapt their procedures to fit the performative aspects of digital art. This includes working closely with the creators of the objects, changing exhibition and documentation practices, and creating a network of experts in digital art conservation. (Most museums don’t have such expertise in house.) Himmelsbach’s own institution, the House of Electronic Arts, in Basel, Switzerland, focuses on four aspects of preservation: storage, migration, emulation, and reinterpretation.14
There are some ways for us to preserve some digital art. Reinterpretation is an important aspect of its preservation. It refers to such practices as replacing an old piece of software with a new one, switching platforms, housing new software in an old “dumb” terminal, so as to appear to re-create the original look of a digital creation. (As with the preservation of old games, it is often desirable to preserve the look and feel of digital art pieces.) Reinterpretation may be the only possible strategy for preserving a digital work. It has antecedents in the analog world: for example, rebinding an old book, or replacing old building materials with new ones. Of course there are purists in all realms of preservation who feel that reinterpretation compromises the authenticity of the original. Such purists can trace their roots to John Ruskin (see chapter 9). But the stakes are higher now; benign neglect is an option in the analog world—not so in the digital world where time is often of the essence in preservation. Further, a reinterpreted iteration of a piece is better than the memory of one that is completely gone.
Or is it? As with performance or environmental art, some digital artists may intentionally create works that will decay; they embrace the inherent temporality of their art. The transience lends to the performative and dynamic aspects of digital works. However, it also means that institutions must understand an artist’s intent and possibly make decisions that are appropriate to that intent. As with any performative art, it means that institutions have the responsibility to document and archive the work. In cases in which the artist wants the work to survive, an active artist/museum partnership will need to exist for as long as possible. But if the artist is indifferent about the longevity of a piece, or is outright against the work’s survival, what is the museum to do?
In short, reinterpretation requires libraries, archives, and museums to take a network-based approach to preservation. That network may include—but is not limited to—artists, manufacturers, audiences, and outside experts, all with their own ideas of what to save and how to do it.
The opposite of reinterpretation might be a wabi-sabi approach to digital art. This Japanese concept gives aesthetic value to the deterioration that an object accrues through aging and use. Wabi-sabi embraces transience and imperfection. Objects that are imperfect, impermanent, or incomplete have value, as in the example of old vinyl recordings. Such an embrace would need to incorporate the concept of loss. The problem would be to control how much loss could accrue. Such an approach could, ironically, require great care to ensure that a digital object didn’t disappear. With the example of vinyl records, do we save mint copies, ones with a little background noise, ones with lots of scratches, and so on? Where do we draw the line? How many copies can we save? And in what condition should the copies be to merit our preserving them?
Richard Rinehart and Jon Ippolito express some of the same ideas as Himmelsbach’s in their Re-Collection: Art, New Media, and Social Memory.15 In a chapter called “Death by Institution,” they deftly describe ways in which museums, libraries, and archives can move away from their historical focus on storage as a preservation strategy to deal with “rapidly mutating media technologies.”16 As does Himmelsbach, they identify migration, emulation, and reinterpretation as the key elements of digital preservation. However, they keenly note that museums tend to collect rare or unique physical objects and tie the value of works to their rarity. Thus museums might be less likely to invest in redundant and distributed data storage, which is critical in guarding against the loss of digital objects. Rinehart and Ippolito warn that sometimes “the lowliest agents on the institutional totem pole”17 wield the most power when it comes to standard procedures for storage and other policies—and they may enforce the most conservative interpretation of their jobs. Of course, standard professional practices sometimes seem to stifle creative thinking. Cultural heritage institutions must find ways to support innovative thinking among staff at all levels.
As I have observed elsewhere in this book, the notion of preservation can be slippery, protean, fuzzy, evolving, and unstable. It is a matter of interpretation. So for any work of art—especially digital art—interpretation can lead to many manifestations of a preserved piece.
UNESCO and Digital Heritage
In October 2003, UNESCO adopted the Charter on the Preservation of Digital Heritage18 to affirm the role of digital preservation in their Memory of the World Programme. The charter includes recommendations for digitization projects, partnerships, advocacy, publication of guidelines, training and research, and public access to digital heritage. More recently, in 2012, UNESCO convened an international conference, “The Memory of the World in the Digital Age: Digitization and Preservation,” in Vancouver, Canada.19 A rationale for the conference was that there was still a strong need for information professionals to raise awareness of the risks of loss of digital heritage. Concern was heightened due to the rapid increase of personal, governmental, and commercial information that had been created since 2003. Further, more work was needed in the areas of digitization policy guidelines and legal frameworks that could facilitate long-term preservation. In March 2016, UNESCO and IFLA published guidelines that addressed many of these concerns.20
Yola de Lusenet has identified parallels between digital heritage and intangible heritage. She references the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage as well as the Charter on the Preservation of Digital Heritage, both published in 2003.21 Chief among the parallels is that “discussions on intangible heritage have, in recent years, seriously influenced the thinking on preservation and heritage and have dislodged them from their solid base of materiality.”22 Intangible cultural heritage refers to the practices, expressions, activities, and knowledge of communities and groups. As Article 2 of the Convention says, intangible cultural heritage “is constantly recreated by communities and groups in response to their environment, their interaction with nature and their history, and provides them with a sense of identity and continuity, thus promoting respect for cultural diversity and human creativity.”23
De Lusenet, describing the discussions leading up to the charter and convention, observes that some people advocated for including “cyberculture” in the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage; the proposal was not accepted. For de Lusenet and others at the time, digital media was best relegated to documenting intangible heritage. The Charter and Convention and de Lusenet’s 2007 article predate smartphones, SNSs—such as Facebook—and other innovations that have facilitated social networking, and, by extension, online communities. A reading of the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage and the Charter on the Preservation of Digital Heritage today makes the parallels between intangible and digital communities seem inevitable. Bartle’s statement from earlier in this chapter, that “game worlds are places and people live there,” only reinforces the parallels. However, rather than include digital communities in the Convention on Intangible Culture, I think that in the future we might wish to bring the concept of intangible communities into the Charter on the Preservation of Digital Heritage. Clearly, “the preservation of digital heritage” is one of those simple-sounding but monumentally challenging concepts. We have already spoken of the impossibly large realm of heritage: all of the physical, social, psychological, fiscal, historical, and cultural implications it has. And we all know of the tremendously rapidly growing world of digital content. It should be clear to all that we can preserve only a tiny fraction of what exists digitally now and what will be created in the future. The UNESCO charter must deal with procedures of capture, prioritization, funding, weeding, longevity, and so forth. And we must be content with the idea that only a small amount of digital content can be saved—and possibly not even “preserved” in the classical sense in which long-term access is possible.
Financial Sustainability
Digital preservation requires a financial infrastructure that is far more sophisticated than what was once required for analog preservation—namely an institutional budget that could be augmented by external sources such as local and federal grants and private philanthropy. Those sources are still important. However, sustainable, long-term funding for the large-scale infrastructure that is necessary for digital preservation to thrive is required to ensure that digital information will survive. Several years ago the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access issued a comprehensive report that outlined strategies for sustainable economic models.24 The Task Force focused on four categories of information that are of long-term interest to preserve: scholarly discourse, research data, commercially owned cultural content, and collectively produced Web content. The challenges to preservation are long-term time horizons, diffused stakeholders, weak incentives, and lack of clarity about the responsibilities among stakeholders. Absent national policies for preserving digital heritage, there are numerous collaborative projects around the world, including public-private partnerships. Future activities will need to include modifying copyright laws to foster digital preservation as well as the creation of incentives for private parties and corporations to preserve their own assets. The key point is that this kind of preservation is expensive. To achieve it to the best of our abilities, we must secure long-term funding from as many places as we can: corporate, institutional, governmental, and private. Given the amount of data being created now, we must act quickly.
3D Re-creations and Reconstructions as a Preservation Strategy
As described in chapter 4 on Syria, many new technologies are being used to document objects that are endangered by natural or human-made forces. These include the use of cameras on drones, laser scanning, digital modeling, and 3D representations. Such technologies make it possible to document vulnerable heritage sites, and may at least help us record the existence and look of an object. In some cases, it may be the only record. As de Lusenet described earlier, digital media can be used to document heritage. A decade ago the tragedy engulfing culture and people in Syria probably couldn’t have been imagined. But the point is this: new sophisticated digital tools, in a world where civil wars are rife, are useful for cultural heritage documentation. Such technologies will no longer play subsidiary roles in heritage preservation, for they allow us to re-create originals.
But such re-creations will never be authentic. They cannot substitute for the original object. They do, however, serve a purpose. Digital scanning has evolved to such a level that authentic representations can be made of books and manuscripts and they may suffice for some purposes. In the case of war-torn countries like Syria, the technologies allow us to create a historical record of the places that have been heavily damaged or destroyed. However, no copy can substitute for the feel and experience of the original.
Ethics and Values
Ethics usually refers to principles regarding conduct while morals refers to personal relationships and beliefs. Values are socially determined. Samuel Jones and John Holden observe that “in choosing what things we conserve, and how to conserve them, we simultaneously reflect and create social value.”25 As has been described throughout this book, these concepts sometimes bump against one another, as for example with the Bamiyan Buddhas and whether/how to save them (chapters 1 and 10). Ethical standards and guidelines are abundant at the international level (UNESCO and international professional associations such as IFLA, ICA, and ICOM), the national level, through regional associations, and in local institutions. Thus, digital preservation practices are guided by a host of international, national, and institutional ethical standards. Yet there may be some practices that do not neatly fit into ethical standards.
Peter Johan Lor and Johannes J. Britz tackle some complex issues in their essay “An Ethical Perspective on Political-Economic Issues in the Long-Term Preservation of Digital Heritage.” They present two hypothetical cases,26 to challenge the notion that the preservation of digital heritage is inherently “good.” (The authors sent the second case study to thirty-three librarians in developing questions for their feedback.) The first case deals with the harvesting and preservation by a wealthy country of the cultural heritage of a less affluent one. The second case concerns a project that a wealthy country initiated to digitize the cultural heritage of a less affluent country. The studies are in a social justice framework that aligns information rights with human rights. The authors further consider who has the rights to preserve digital heritage.
In the first case, a wealthy nation (called “Opulentia”) downloads the websites of an opposition party in a poor country (called “Povertopia”). The authors pose ethical questions such as whether it is right to download the sites without permission, whether such harvesting is justified in the name of scholarship, and whether we can make the case that we (the people of Opulentia) are helping the people of Povertopia by preserving a part of their heritage that they may not be able to preserve for themselves.
The second case describes a cooperative digitization program between libraries in Opulentia and Povertopia for which Opulentia provides the resources for digitization and storage, and maintains control of the archives; it charges a modest fee for access, except for students and scholars in Povertopia who can access it for free. Responses to the second case study from the librarians who were contacted is telling. In favor of the program it set forth were those librarians who are concerned that materials in their countries are disappearing at an alarming rate. At least one responded that he or she would accept the proposal because her [his] country is poor and lacks the resources to digitize. Weighing in against such a partnership were respondents who raised copyright issues, felt that partnerships should be equal, or thought that the terms of limited access were unfair.
While these cases are hypothetical, it is likely that similar projects are actually taking place. These could raise ethical and moral concerns. A primary concern is asymmetrical power issues among nations. These have certainly occurred in the analog world where it has been easy for wealthy people or nations to take artifacts from less wealthy nations. But there are other issues as well. One has to do with values and perceptions. Will countries that are “digital have nots” live in the “digital dark ages” if they cannot afford to use the digital technologies that “digital haves” access easily? Is it possible to survive in a world in which digital information predominates, without the capacity to engage in such a world? Lor and Britz present a convincing case that we must pay close attention to the ethical dimensions of digital preservation. To do so will enhance social justice generally.
As with many topics considered in this book, ethical issues are multidimensional. Cultures clash over many things, and yet, despite their different opinions, they can justify their positions using the “truths” of their religions, their laws, their social systems, and so on. Cultural “norms” vary from people to people. In the preservation field we must be culturally sensitive in our dealings with others—particularly, in the present context, with respect to the handling of digital information. Do we have a right to invoke our own values when we are deciding how to deal with information from other countries, peoples, or cultures—information we wish to preserve (or to let die)? Should our values—even if they clash with those of other cultures—help us to decide to preserve those others’ information resources? We need an extensive examination of ethics and values, our own and others’, to guide us in our preservation of cultural heritage.
Yet there are already many exciting opportunities for sharing cultural heritage. Abby Smith Rumsey describes the richness and vitality of the digital world when she writes that “now with the Internet, we can continue the conversation [among generations and across the ages] as we digitize materials from the past, but also broaden it across multiple languages and civilizations with different historical experiences and expectations of the future.”27 This chapter has suggested ways in which we might broaden our definition of digital preservation by embracing its rich, social aspects.
The social complexities we have seen in this book—complexities across cultures—make our own tasks of defining and acting on preserving our heritage difficult. We need to look at the digital world in a circumspect way. Institutions cannot assume sole responsibility for preserving digital heritage. Instead, there must be a global and virtual “village” to assure such preservation. Sabine Himmelsbach’s description of a “network of care” for digital art applies equally to all digital content. (Aptly, figure 8.1 illustrates that “now” might be of short duration.)28
“How Long Is Now” (Berlin). Photograph by Michèle V. Cloonan, 2016
A New Definition?
We can define digital preservation so as to include its rich social dimensions. I propose a new, fuller understanding along these lines: Digital preservation includes personal and collaborative efforts to maintain content in a form that is accessible for as long as it is needed. Such efforts will be undertaken by the owners of the content, the creators of it, heritage professionals, and users. The goal of preservation is the accurate rendering of authenticated content over time that takes into account the many uses and modes of digital heritage and communication with a sensitivity to all those creating, saving, and using it, and all others impacted by it. Digital preservation is dynamic and its strategies must constantly evolve. Therefore, we must consider not only the preservation of content, but also the preservation of the context in which it was created and in the world in which it will be used.
Notes