Scarcity or Abundance? : Preserving the Past in a Digital Age
While researching articles for a bibliography on digitial preservation, I ran across this article that seemed worth sharing: Rosenzweig, Roy. Scarcity or abundance? Preserving the past in a digital era. American Historical Review, v. 108, no. 3, p. 735, June 2003. (28 pages) This article provides a good overview of the stakes involved in digital preservation, why web docs disappear, explains why historians can't fully count on the Internet Archive, and worries about the problems historians might face if digital preservation efforts are successful. Article also insists that digital preservation is much too important to be left to the technologists and that archivists and librarians need to be involved. My thanks to the Center for History and New Media for making this article available online. Continue reading
Hurricanes Katrina & Rita web archive
Internet Archive in conjunction with individual contributions created a web archive for Katrina and Rita. The site contains 25 million documents which were crawled between the dates of September 4 - October 17th. The site is available for the public. Continue reading
Anecdote of unusable decade-old proprietary technology
In a column called Dead Media Everywhere, writer John C. Dvorak highlights a problem we at FGI have written about before - proprietary digital formats that quickly become unusable. In this case, the propritery technologies are late 1990s digital cameras and their associated proprietary file formats:
So I'm digging around the archives (aka closet) and I find two old digital cameras that cost $500 to $1,000 when new and now cannot even be used unless I can find the old software and cables. This is a new form of dead media: old digital cameras. I was actually hoping to take some pictures with these "antiques" to post on my blog. No dice. The first camera is the fascinating Agfa 1680. It still works, but so far I have been unable to find any way to read its SmartMedia cards, since the camera uses a strange file format. And I have long since lost the cables that would let me transfer the photos directly from the camera. The other classic I unearthed was an old Olympus D300-L. This 1996 camera has no removable media. I was never a fan of this, but was always assured that it wasn't important. Yes, it's not important if you can ever find the extremely weird cable that hooked to the camera to transfer pictures (slowly). See the images here: http://www.dvorak.org/blog/?p=3409. Continue reading
GPOExpress
GPO has announced a new service. The announcement says, GPOExpress is "a nationwide convenience printing contract that allows Government personnel to walk into a printing company, day or night, at any of the thousands of locations throughout the United States and Canada -- to take care of small printing needs." Sherburne quotes Bruce James as saying, "This is GPO's next step in streamlining small printing procurements while increasing flexibility for our customers."
- Coming Soon... The GPOExpress Program Government Printing Office, November 22, 2005.
- GPO Awards Contract to Kinko's: Launches GPOExpress with FedEx Kinko's November 29, 2005 -- (WhatTheyThink.com Exclusive, By Cary Sherburne, Senior Editor)
Maybe it’s trains, trucks and planes
In his recent Depository Library Council Plenary Address, Public Printer Bruce James compared the curent changes in the documents world (paper to digital) to the Government Printing Office's switch from steam power to electric power in the early 1900s, and to the abandonment of horse drawn wagons in favor of gas powered delivery trucks. I've been thinking about that a lot, knowing that outside the government documents world, digital takes its place alongside print but hasn't come close to replacing it. Even today, e-books are an insignificant fraction of the $28 billion spent on books in 2004. Maybe we need a new metaphor in thinking about the distribution of government information. Instead of buggies vs. cars, let's think of trains, trucks and planes. As most of us know, the Pony Express was replaced by mail trains in the 19th Century. Horses simply couldn't compete in terms of speed. But when the Post Office aquired trucks in the early 20th Century (or therebouts), they didn't stop using trains. Trains still had a purpose in the postal distribution system. Later in the 20th Century, airplanes became available but that didn't put the trucks or trains (or boats, in Alaska) out of business. Each mode of delivery survived not because of misplaced nostalgia, but because each mode had at least one application not well served by the others. Could that not be a parallel for print and digital? Tell us what you think! Continue reading