:dons librarian hat:
Digital preservation is more expensive than preserving paper; it takes more staff, active attention, and consistent computing resources. Libraries have discussed “digital dark age” since the 1990s.
Corp archives often 1st to go b/c suits haven’t figured out how to profit.
One of the interesting things about the Internet is that we’re actually living through a dark age. Future historians are unlikely to have records of this period.
Paper and ink last. Digital storage, less so.
variety.com/2024/tv/news...
Digital archivist here: we constantly have to explain to every faculty member proposing digital projects that said project is more like a puppy than a book--it requires constant care and attention right up until the day it dies. In other words: someone has to pay for every minute it remains standing
...and that's not even getting into the questions of access and power! More and more, slices of the infrastructure maintaining these archives is being outsourced to various enterprise software platforms--which can alter or cut off access/use at any time. It's maddening.
Working at an archive digitalisation project, it cannot be overstated how fast digital archives disappear into the void unless there’s staff actively working to keep it alive – in a neglected paper archive you can usually rescue *something*, digital is just gone.
And this is in fact the only record I have of emails between family and friends sent in the ‘90s and ‘00s because none of those email accounts or services exist anymore 🙃
I don’t know WHY I was printing out emails back then, but now I’m kind of glad I did
I'm at a tiny place and deal directly with the Board, so every time there is a new member I get to explain why I don't just digitize everything, why the cloud isn't the answer, what it actually costs, why I still print our most vital documents on paper...
Yuuup. I spend a lot of time explaining to donors that we've only digitized about... .005% of our rare books & manuscripts collection and the rest of it isn't getting done anytime soon.
We had a local journalist ask when we would have all of our photos digitized and online this week. My assistant told them that we hoped to do it in the future because she didn't want to tell him "never."
This week!! 💀
Folks asked frequently about the document collection when I was at a bigger institution and I calculated it out for fun (assuming a couple FT staff, which they'd never pay for) and started telling people "100 years. At which point we'll have to start all over again."
At this point, I just want to get a full inventory and preserve the magnetic media we've got. The photos and negatives are definitely an "as needed" thing.
Yeah, the way a lot of paper archives persist past the moment short-sighted executives see a use for them is that it's often cheaper to just leave them wherever they are than it is to have someone come get rid of them. With digital archives a lot of this stuff is actively costing money to maintain.
CORRECT. The paper stuff will outlast the current suits as long as it is not drowned or set on fire, just left alone in reasonable-ish storage. The digital archives, not so much.
Ugh, yes. I work for a very large university library and I always get asked why we need to have so many physical books when everything’s online now. This is why!!
I've kept most of my digital business records for 30 years and at least one of the machines I need to be able to read them. I have printed everything possible. It's not possible to print video. Digital preservation requires both the media and the tools to display it. It's not simple.
I'm beginning to feel better about the fact that I take each year's blog entries and turn them into a POD book. I've done that since 2004 livejournal days
I use InDesign, but the same process could be used for other software. It is a manual process where I copy paste each blog entry individually. I use it as a way to re-read and review my year. I can also add notes and info if I feel like something got missed. Then I print via Lulu.com
Back in livejournal days there was software that would auto download entries into a file, but it was basically an unformatted data dump and I had to do a lot of work to make it an attractive book.
It's not a technological problem either - we have tape and optical discs that are designed to last for decades. It's all a matter of will, and like you mentioned, the only motivator these days is profit
I guarantee you that after January 2000 rolled through, they overwrote the December 1999 backups, and when January 2001 rolled through, they overwrote the December 2000 backups, though.
> these days
Comedy Central didn't create the show in 1996 to generate warm fuzzy feelings to add to the common good. They created it to make a profit. The fact that the show was still available online until now was - frankly - fucking amazing.
ah yes, let's just delete thousands of man-hours of work never to be seen again just because some ceo couldn't suck pennies out of it. this is exactly why capital first doesn't work. good job carrying water for billionaires though
It's not exactly a new phenomenon, though: To pick another famous comedy example, the BBC almost erased the Monty Python's Flying Circus tapes to reuse, until one of the cast/writers offered to buy the physical objects from them.
All preservation is fighting against clawing entropy, I think many people imagine digital storage as immune to this but it just isn't true.
Preservation is a process, not an end state regardless of format. Formats with the least barriers ensure the highest chance of a work surviving
*shudders in digitizing in ABBYY and having to verify that no, that ampersand is not the number 4 and that number 4 isn't an ampersand for several straight hours*
Indeed. I feel this goes for a lot of digital content, games as well. There are a lot of older arcade games which have not been preserved yet, as in dumped to roms & if it does not happen they might be lost forever, w/ sourcecodes already gone. Capitalism does not care about preservation. No profit.
I mean, yeah, that happens with backwards compatibility not always being an easy thing to do when hardware moves foreward. This is why Emulation/Virtualisation of old hardware is so important, imo.
Even with emulation, you still need a physical device that can read the physical object on which the data is recorded. Which is where it gets unwieldy and complicated.
I still have Syquest discs, Zip discs, and floppies of various sizes and formatting from way back, and nothing that can read them.
Have you ever tried to get in touch with some demosceners? They usually are the kinda guys who are good with old formats and have the old hardware to read it out.
I actually have a friend who collects retro-tech and has a whole museum of stuff going back to the 70’s
But am I really gonna schlep stuff to Jersey just to open a disc from college out of curiosity, probably not anytime soon.
Meanwhile I can open a paper folder and see art I did when I was two.
