neylon

I was particularly struck by a point that was made in Digital History this week.  The comparison came in the sentence, “It would be a shame to “print” your website on the digital equivalent of the acidic paper used by many Victorian publishers, which is now rapidly deteriorating in libraries around the world.”  This sentence really made me think critically about digital history and the continued maintenance of information and sites.  The loss of access to most of the memories from the My History is America’s History website is pretty depressing.  I keep thinking about the possibility of creating a collection site for my project, but this is another problem that I would have to confront- how to make sure it keeps going, and remains available to the public.  There were some interesting suggestions in the chapter, including finding an institution to take over the website if I am unwilling or unable to maintain it myself.  I’m actually considering modeling my project on what someone else would be willing and eager to maintain for me if I do decide to stop working on it.

This week’s reading has only reaffirmed the discussion that we had last week, when a few people said that we have to re-save all of our documents periodically on new media, to make sure that nothing is lost over time.  I would hate to be an archivist, because my instinct is to back up and keep saving EVERYTHING.  When I did a class project at the Historical Society of Washington, DC, I was told to copy the newspaper articles in my collection onto acid free paper, and then throw everything else out.  There were so many newspaper articles that went into the trash, but weren’t copied either because they were not relevant to the collection.  Throwing things like this out is scary to me, because though we may not think something is important now, someone down the line may think it is.  In fact, I have run into this problem myself, where I wanted to see something that no longer exists because people at the time saw no importance in it.  But, with the amazing price drop in storage (Digital History said that in 1993 1 terabyte of digital storage space cost $5 million, and today it only costs $500), do we ever have to get rid of anything?  I understand the problems that the chapter raised, such as the inability to search the documents in the future due to the sheer numbers, but I also wonder about the longevity of the media on which the information is stored.  Is it possible that one day even the New York Times method of storage will turn out to deteriorate much sooner than they think?  At that size, how difficult would it be then to re-save all of that information?  And many years down the road, will the format used in the encoding be usable?  I’m starting to feel a little pessimistic about this whole thing…

I really enjoyed the Lifehacker site.  I was pretty interested in the procrastination article, though I disagree with it.  I don’t think I sabotage myself.  I’ll go back to the typical procrastinator defense- I work best under pressure.  But other than that posting, I was fascinated by the links to sites that I have never seen before in my life.  I never know that there was a site that would tell you how to do everything you would ever need to do in life.  I didn’t know that someone would need an instruction manual to introduce their kid to snow, or how to make a snow angel.  In fact, I don’t think such instructions existed before, and this brings me back to a question I ask myself all the time.  We are so used to using technology for everything, that we’ve become almost dependent on it- do people actually use it for things like instructions on making a snow angel, and if so, do they realize that we lived without things like this for many years?

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