Posts Tagged ‘archives’
“Historical oblivion is the default, not the exception”*…
Indeed. And that’s especially true of the institutions that guard the archives that are our cultural heritage. The ongoing transition from physical media sales to digital licensing markets has unleashed a new wave of archival ephemerality, which endangers these memory institutions’ core operations and threatens to plunge society into a digital dark age.
The stakes are high. As Haruki Murakami observed: “Robbing people of their actual history is the same as robbing them of part of themselves. It’s a crime… If our collective memory is taken from us – is rewritten – we lose the ability to sustain our true selves.”
Michael Menna (a Stanford Law Fellow who co-authored the “Our Future Memory” manifesto) and Lila Bailey (Senior Policy Counsel at one of the world’s most crucial repositories, The Internet Archive), call for four digital rights that would allow libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural heritage organizations (“memory institutions”) to uphold their shared public service mission of preserving history and providing access to information…
… We are living through a troubling paradox: Digital technologies have enabled the production and distribution of more information than ever, yet access to that information isincreasingly fragmented and fragile. These technologies should permit us to engage and learn from all the digital content at our fingertips. Instead, many of the basic rights we grew accustomed to in the physical world are now being overtaken by aggressive market tactics that do not reflect the public-interest values the law was meant to protect. If copyright, privacy, and other regulatory frameworks were designed to balance the interests of creators and users with the public’s need to access and contribute to the wealth of human knowledge, then our increasingly digital information economy has thrown that balance out of whack.
In this new media environment, publishers and other content providers have unprecedented power to control knowledge and culture with technical restrictions and exclusionary licensing terms. Governments also have an easier time censoring what people can see by scrubbing their websites and pressuring commercial platforms to do the same. These sudden changes will feel familiar to anyone who has logged onto a streaming service or social media app to find a movie or news story suddenly missing. But for libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural heritage organizations (“memory institutions”), it poses an existential risk to
their core public service mission of preserving culture and protecting history. When these organizations can no longer collect and provide access to digital materials, members of the public cannot place their trust in a stable record—which affects their ability to confidently participate in democratic discourse.
We write this paper from our perspective at the Internet Archive, a nonprofit research library that specializes in web archiving, digitization, and the preservation of media in all forms. We feel the harms from these shifts firsthand and hear many of the same complaints from our partner memory institutions around the world. That shared frustration with today’s digital landscape has given rise to an emerging consensus among libraries, archives, museums, and their allies, calling for better legal protections and practical options to continue their services and preserve cultural memory in today’s information age.
This two-part paper (1) presents the looming threat of “vanishing culture” as a first-order political crisis, and (2) discusses the key role that libraries and other memory institutions can play in meeting that crisis.2 In the first part, we examine the underlying causes of vanishing culture and trace its ripple effects along several different facets of modern life: (a) educational resources, (b) journalistic integrity, (c) civic engagement, (d) religious study, and (e) environmental policy. In the second part, we reintroduce a framework of four rights that would ensure memory institutions’ ability to work together to collect, preserve, and provide access to digital materials. This framework rests on the simple proposition that memory institutions should be allowed to do the same things in the digital world that they’ve historically done in the physical world. It originated in the 2024 statement titled Four Digital Rights for Protecting Memory Institutions Online3 before it became a global rallying cry for the Our Future Memory movement and its growing list of library, archive, and museum signatories. Together, these memory institutions are striving to combat the political causes and effects of vanishing culture by speaking with one voice to the importance of memory work in an age of digital ephemerality. That is why we call on all memory institutions, large and small, to sign onto the Statement and join the movement. Individuals and communities need memory institutions to educate themselves and freely participate in civic life, and every time a content provider lets critical information disappear online, it offers further proof that today’s digital markets alone do not constitute a viable alternative. If things do not change soon, we risk sleepwalking into a future where both memory institutions and the public they serve will become passive consumers, rather than active stewards of human knowledge…
Menna and Bailey explain the situation; unpack the four rights they propose: collection, preservation, access, and collaboration; then issue a call to action.
Eminently worth reading in full: “The Political Threats of Vanishing Culture and the Need to Protect Our Future Memory” (PDF here)
See also Vanishing Culture (full PDF here)
And consider joining me in supporting the Internet Archive.
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As we preserve and share, we might send open birthday greetings to a man who would surely have understood the importance of Menna’s and Bailey’s arguments: Sir Karl Raimund Popper; he was born on this date in 1902. One of the greatest philosophers of science of the 20th century, Popper is best known for his rejection of the classical inductivist views on the scientific method, in favor of empirical falsification: a theory in the empirical sciences can never be proven, but it can be falsified, meaning that it can and should be scrutinized by decisive experiments. (Or more simply put, whereas classical inductive approaches considered hypotheses false until proven true, Popper reversed the logic: conclusions drawn from an empirical finding are true until proven false.)
Popper was also a powerful critic of historicism in political thought, and (in books like The Open Society and Its Enemies and The Poverty of Historicism) an enemy of authoritarianism and totalitarianism (in which role he was a mentor to George Soros).
“We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world”*…
Long-time readers of (R)D will know of your correspondent’s affection for– and commitment to– archives and archiving: see, e.g., here, here, here, here, or here. As the new administration is sytematically scrubbing government websites of public data and threatening the National Archive, it’s a painfully-timely concern.
Digital pioneer Mark Pesce weighs in with a reminder that our archiving efforts should be broad– and that we shouldn’t neglect the personal…
When moving house a few months back I found several heavy plastic tubs that, upon inspection, I saw contained my life’s work in print. They were full of articles, magazines, books and book chapters.
That informal archive represents only a small portion of my total output. I’ve been writing on and for the web pretty much since it came into existence outside of CERN, so have more than 30 years’ worth of material online.
Those plastic tubs are therefore a proverbial iceberg that represent perhaps a tenth of my output, the rest of which is submerged on networks.
I had wanted to write about how to make our invisible digital lives more visible; then two horrible events – one personal, the other of global significance – reset my compass.
Earlier this month I lost my good friend Tony Kastanos to lung cancer. I’d always known him as an artist – musician, painter, provocateur – but it wasn’t until he was gone that I learned from his collaborators that he’d also released three albums of electronic music, produced with collaborator Tim Gruchy, who showed me how to find it on iTunes and Spotify.
I’d known Tony for two decades, but he’d never told me about his electronica work. Nor had he told me about his award-winning stop-motion video animation, Amerika Amerika.
Tim wondered aloud how to ensure that their collaborations would continue to be available. It’s an essential question confronting any creative talent working in the digital era: How do we continue to offer our contributions to the generations that follow, when we’re no longer around to spruik them?
The Internet Archive has a pivotal role to play here – not just because of its immunity to the commercial mutability of a Spotify or an Apple Music, but because its very existence and name imply a promise to maintain a long-term archive of all online creative works. Tim – and all of Tony’s other collaborators – could be putting copies of all their works into a Tony-Kastanos-archive-within-The-Archive. If that happens, my friend won’t disappear completely.
Half an hour after I’d learned of Tony’s passing, a friend in Los Angeles sent me a long, harrowing text message expressing fear the fires battering the city could claim their home.
A week later, they were relieved to find their home intact – but many others did not.
Within a few days, a story began to circulate about one of the structures that did not survive: The building housing the archive of the Theosophical Society.
A century ago, Theosophists stood at the forefront of what today we’d call the “New Age” movement. Although the society’s star has dimmed in the decades since, their influence on religion, philosophy and culture remains profound. Their archive housed most the papers and correspondence of the founders and main movers of the Theosophical Society – its genesis and history.
As Errol Morris has said, “People can burn archives; people can destroy evidence, but to say that history is perishable, that historical evidence is perishable, is different than saying that history is subjective.” The best defense is wide distribution (per the full Aaron Swartz quote, below).
Where are the comprehensive archives to protect digital works, or allow us to memorialize friends? “Memories fade. Archives burn. All signal eventually becomes noise,” from @mpesce.arvr.social.ap.brid.gy in @theregister.com.
See also: “Century-Scale Storage” from Maxwell Neely-Cohen and the Library Innovation Lab at Harvard Law School
Oh, and now is a good time to visit– and support– the Internet Archive.
* “We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that’s out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks… With enough of us, around the world, we’ll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge – we’ll make it a thing of the past.” — Aaron Swartz
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As we prioritize protection, we might recall that it was on this date in 1497 that Dominican friar and populist agitator Girolamo Savonarola, having convinced the citizenry of Florence to expel the Medici and recruited the city-state’s youth in a puritanical campaign, presided over “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” the public burning of art works, books, cosmetics, and other items deemed to be vessels of personal aggrandizement. Many art historians, relying on Vasari‘s account, believe that Botticelli, a partisan of Savonarola, consigned several of his paintings to the flames (and then “fell into very great distress”). Others are not so certain. In any case, it seems sure that the fire consumed works by Fra Bartolomeo, Lorenzo di Credi, and many other painters, along with books by Boccaccio, manuscripts of secular songs, a number of statues, and other antiquities.
“All that mankind has done, thought or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books”*…
… But books (and their predecessors) are fragile, and need special archival care if they are to survive. That’s even truer, as Adrienne Bernhard explains in The Long Now Foundation‘s newsletter, of digital data and documents…
The Dead Sea scrolls, made of parchment and papyrus, are still readable nearly two millennia after their creation — yet the expected shelf life of a DVD is about 100 years. Several of Andy Warhol’s doodles, created and stored on a Commodore Amiga computer in the 01980s, were forever stranded there in an obsolete format. During a data-migration in 02019, millions of songs, videos and photos were lost when MySpace — once the Internet’s leading social network — fell prey to an irreversible data loss.
A false sense of security persists surrounding digitized documents: because an infinite number of identical copies can be made of any original, most of us believe that our electronic files have an indefinite shelf life and unlimited retrieval opportunities. In fact, preserving the world’s online content is an increasing concern, particularly as file formats (and the hardware and software used to run them) become scarce, inaccessible, or antiquated, technologies evolve, and data decays. Without constant maintenance and management, most digital information will be lost in just a few decades. Our modern records are far from permanent.
Obstacles to data preservation are generally divided into three broad categories: hardware longevity (e.g., a hard drive that degrades and eventually fails); format accessibility (a 5 ¼ inch floppy disk formatted with a filesystem that can’t be read by a new laptop); and comprehensibility (a document with a long-abandoned file type that can’t be interpreted by any modern machine). The problem is compounded by encryption (data designed to be inaccessible) and abundance (deciding what among the vast human archive of stored data is actually worth preserving).
The looming threat of the so-called “Digital Dark Age”, accelerated by the extraordinary growth of an invisible commodity — data — suggests we have fallen from a golden age of preservation in which everything of value was saved. In fact, countless records of previous historical eras have all but disappeared. The first Dark Ages, shorthand for the period beginning with the fall of the Roman Empire and stretching into the Middle Ages (00500-01000 CE), weren’t actually characterized by intellectual and cultural emptiness but rather by a dearth of historical documentation produced during that era.
Even institutions built for the express purpose of information preservation have succumbed to the ravages of time, natural disaster or human conquest. The famous library of Alexandria, one of the most important repositories of knowledge in the ancient world, eventually faded into obscurity. Built in the fourth century B.C., the library flourished for some six centuries, an unparalleled center of intellectual pursuit. Alexandria’s archive was said to contain half a million papyrus scrolls — the largest collection of manuscripts in the ancient world — including works by Plato, Aristotle, Homer and Herodotus. By the fifth century A.D., however, the majority of its collections had been stolen or destroyed, and the library fell into disrepair.
Digital archives are no different. The durability of the web is far from guaranteed. Link rot, in which outdated links lead readers to dead content (or a cheeky dinosaur icon), sets in like a pestilence. Corporate data sets are often abandoned when a company folds, left to sit in proprietary formats that no one without the right combination of hardware, software, and encryption keys can access. Scientific data is a particularly thorny problem: unless it’s saved to a public repository accessible to other researchers, technical information essentially becomes unusable or lost. Beyond switching to analog alternatives, which have their own drawbacks, how might we secure our digital information so that it survives for generations? How can individuals, private corporations and public entities coordinate efforts to ensure that their data is saved in more resilient formats?…
Without maintenance, most digital information will be lost in just a few decades. How might we secure our data so that it survives for generations? “Shining a Light on the Digital Dark Age,” from @AdrienneEve and @longnow. Eminently worth reading in full.
C.F. also: “Very Long-Term Backup” by Kevin Kelly (@kevin2kelly).
* Thomas Carlyle
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As we ponder preservation, we might recall that the #1 song in the U.S. and the U.K. (among other territories) was the Beatles’ “Help!” (their fourth of six #1 singles in a row on the American charts).
“The mainstream narrative that we are living through an era of exponential, near-infinite knowledge accumulation no longer fits a society in which we lose our collective record of ourselves day in and day out”*…
Political and government bans and censorship, publishers attacking digital access/ lending— there’s a growing struggle underway (in the U.S. and abroad) that will define how humanity’s collective digital memory is owned, shared, and preserved — or lost forever. Nanna Bonde Thylstrup on why we must care…
… The fact that crucial decisions about whether to keep or destroy data are kept in the hands of actors with profit motives, autocratic aspirations or other self-serving ends has a huge implication not only for individuals but also for the culture at large.
Many instances of data loss have ramifications for cultural production, the writing of history and, ultimately, the practice of democracy…
Alongside the need to maintain public trust in democratic institutions, we must consider how we ought to preserve our collective cultural memory. Institutions like museums, libraries and archives must play a more proactive role while creating stronger institutional safeguards — including rules mandating secure transport of public sector data and professional management of archives, in addition to requirements for public accessibility — on their own conduct. These organizations, whether they are upstart archival initiatives or established public institutions, require stable financial and institutional support to flourish…
The history of knowledge is not one of simple progress or accumulation. Knowledge production in the digital era, like the creation and storage of knowledge across the centuries, is unfolding as a continual oscillation between gains and losses.
Data loss on a small scale — missing phone contacts, digital files lost to a glitch — is the occupational hazard of existing in a digitally reliant world. But data erasure at scale is always political. Responses to erasure and loss must exceed technical fixes and knee-jerk reactions; instead, governments and organizations must constantly reassess the ethical and regulatory frameworks that govern our relationship with data. The mainstream narrative that we are living through an era of exponential, near-infinite knowledge accumulation no longer fits a society in which we lose our collective record of ourselves day in and day out…
Eminently worth reading in full: “The World’s Digital Memory Is at Risk” (gift link)
Pair with the Internet Archive‘s Brewster Kahle‘s “Our Digital History Is at Risk” and Richard Ovenden‘s important (and engrossing) Burning the Books.
* Nanna Bonde Thylstrup
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As we prioritize preservation and open access, we might recall that it was on this date in 1978 that the Rainbow Flag was flown for the first time during the San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Parade. Created by Gilbert Baker, it has become a sign of LGBTQ pride worldwide.
“The great use of a life is to spend it for something that outlasts it”*…
When an online news outlet goes out of business, its archives can disappear as well. A new front in the battle over journalism is the digital legacy of the press.
For years, our most important records have been committed to specialized materials and technologies. For archivists, 1870 is the year everything begins to turn to dust. That was the year American newspaper mills began phasing out rag-based paper with wood pulp, ensuring that newspapers printed after would be known to future generations as delicate things, brittle at the edges, yellowing with the slightest exposure to air. In the late 1920s, the Kodak company suggested microfilm was the solution, neatly compacting an entire newspaper onto a few inches of thin, flexible film. In the second half of the century, entire libraries were transferred to microform, spun on microfilm reels, or served on tiny microfiche platters, while the crumbling originals were thrown away or pulped. To save newspapers, we first had to destroy them.
Then came digital media, which is even more compact than microfilm, giving way, initially at least, to fantasies of whole libraries preserved on the head of a pin. In the event, the new digital records degraded even more quickly than did newsprint. Information’s most consistent quality is its evanescence. Information is fugitive in its very nature.
“People are good at guessing what will be important in the future, but we are terrible at guessing what won’t be,” says Clay Shirky, media scholar and author, who in the early 2000s worked at the Library of Congress on the National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation Project. After the obvious — presidential inaugurations or live footage of world historical events, say — we have to choose what to save. But we can’t save everything, and we can’t know that what we’re saving will last long. “Much of the modern dance of the 1970s and 1980s is lost precisely because choreographers assumed the VHS tapes they made would preserve it,” he says. He points to Rothenberg’s Law: “Digital data lasts forever, or five years, whichever comes first,” which was coined by the RAND Corporation computer scientist Jeff Rothenberg in a 1995 Scientific American article. “Our digital documents are far more fragile than paper,” he argued. “In fact, the record of the entire present period of history is in jeopardy.”…
Our records are the raw material of history; the shelter of our memories for the future. We must develop ironclad security for our digital archives, and put them entirely out of the reach of hostile hands. The good news is that this is still possible. Maria Bustillos on what can be done, including a well-deserved shout-out to the Internet Archive: “The Internet Isn’t Forever.”
* William James
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As we ponder preservation, we might spare a thought for Fred W. Friendly (born Ferdinand Friendly Wachenheimer); he died on this date in 1998. A journalist and producer, he was a driving force behind the rise of CBS News, where he was responsible for See It Now (with Edward R. Murrow) and CBS Reports. Friendly became President of CBS News in 1964, but resigned in 1966, when the network ran a scheduled episode of The Lucy Show instead of broadcasting live coverage of the first United States Senate hearings questioning American involvement in Vietnam.
After CBS, Friendly became a consultant on broadcast to the Ford Foundation, where he was instrumental in laying the groundwork for the American public broadcasting system. As head of the New York City Cable TV and Communications Commission, he originated the idea of the public access channel.
Later, he took a position at Columbia School of Journalism, where he strengthened the school’s broadcast curriculum and authored a number of books.
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