From Surplus to Success: Reflections on “Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era”
Ever since I began my time as a student taking Digital Past, I couldn’t help but to be terrified at the apparently fragility of items stored digitally versus their traditional analog counterparts. This is the exact same fear that Dan Cohen explores in his online essay entitled “Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era.” Even though the site used in this example is satirical in nature, I still even value this as an important clue to the public climate of the past. The fact that entire websites such as this one, even if they seem trivial on the surface, is absolutely an indicator of the challenges to come as the field of digital history continues to expand.
In fact, some of these challenges have already begun to appear. For example, something as simple as the National Archives not having a policy requiring some form of digital record for United States government records has lead to a myriad a missed opportunities to preserve potentially valuable emails and text based documents that have been exchanged since the 1990s. These facets of government history are essentially lost in the digital world, far from the eyes of future historians. Despite this lapse, however, efforts have been made moving towards creating a more complete digital historical record.
Another question pertinent to this discussion – one that I had not though of until reading Cohen’s essay – is how will historians function with such a complete record of history at there disposal, given that the problems associated with preservation are resolved? Instead of focusing on how precarious digital archives are (as I have frequently in past posts), I would like to take some time to focus on this point. With website popping up everywhere, images being uploaded by the thousands, and blog entries flooding the screens of computers everywhere, the impressive ability to save massive amounts of media digitally is clear. With all of this information available, naturally there will be complications.
First, maintaining all of this information will be extremely difficult. While certain more modern files are easy to compress and save without much effort, earlier digital records, such as magnetic tapes, require much more to keep them in good shape – an issue that has already presented itself to NASA, which has not taken adequate measures to preserve their over 1.2 million magnetic tapes. But for that which is saved, being able to navigate it also becomes an issue.
With so much available from so many people, as publishing on the internet does not require the same qualifications as publishing a paper book, it becomes increasingly important to evaluate the ways in which we use this information. As I have discussed previously in this blog, it is important to carefully examine clues to the quality of what parts of the internet we are using, Further bringing in topics discussed on this blog, it is also important to both know how to search effectively and make an effective means of searching through work you create.
Whether is is using a more accurate Optical Character Recognition (OCR) program to create searchable metadata for scanned documents or using a combination of text mining tools and logic to optimize your searching power, this new world of inclusive historical records requires the people of this digital era to learn how to effectively manage the tools they use. I suppose my point here is that all of this (as in all that has been discussed here) is interwoven, meaning that all points must come together to combat the problems facing the future of digital history.
Looking forward, just the sheer amount of data available will be a huge hurdle for the field of digital history to conquer. Once the issue of the fragility of digital archives is resolved, we must place our focus on how to make this massive amount of data usable and how to use it wisely as an individual historian. On the bright side, historian are already exploring these means of navigating and categorizing the digital world before we are inundated with years of digital history yet to come. Surprising even myself, in this regard I am actually optimistic for the digital future.