Subj : Preserving Digital History
To   : Kaelon
From : Boraxman
Date : Wed Jul 20 2022 09:33:54

  Re: Preserving Digital History
  By: Kaelon to Boraxman on Tue Jul 19 2022 05:42 am

 > During the Renaissance, this problem was tackled programmatically through a
 > variety of specialized roles:
 >
 > * ARCHIVISTS were responsible for determining how content would be stored
 > for the long-haul, and built upon the ancient library science and started
 > creating standards for preservation, categorization, and reference.
 >
 > * CHRONICLERS reviewed all of the news of the ages and built abridged
 > histories, or Chronicles, of the time, including extentive reference to
 > content that had been archived for future generations to conduct follow-up
 > research.
 >
 > * HISTORIANS became the scholars that reviewed the chronicles and
 > cross-referenced with what archivists, and lesser librarians, had stored, in
 > order to produce more 'modern' retrospectives and studies on what really
 > happened and what the impact of what happened was.
 >
 > We need similar roles for the new digital age.  And I am not really
 > convinced that the Internet Archive has a true archival, chronicling, and
 > historiographic practice for their resspective domains.
 > _____
Agree, but who?  Private interests may do it, but likely to monetise it, or not be interested because there isn't a quick return.  Churhes?  Monasteries?

I think the solution is custody.  Who owns the information, how is it transferred.  A way to transfer the public contents of a server before you decommission it.  A way for people who are done maintaining their sites to simply hand it over to archivists.  This would be more a cultural shift than a technological one.

We will resolve this issue, but not without a significant period inbetween where a lot of digital information was just thrown to the wind.

There are already questions about how to handle social media accounts after people die, who takes ownership and such, and I think this problem neatly extends to the one we are discussing.

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