Monday, March 13, 2006
Digital Preservation and Blogs
This morning's first panel is about digital preservation. The convener just compared blogs to the personal papers that are collected for "famous" people. They're trying to collect the blog content to preserve blogs around historical events such as the 2004 election and hurricane Katrina. There are issues of being too close to an event, but recognizing that it's important to capture a snapshot of the moment. They're trying to find a balance between preserving blogs that are significant and capturing a "sense" of what blogging is.
What is the archival object when you're dealing with blogs? What questions are people going to be asking 50 years from now? You want to understand what it was like to create and participate in this networked in environment. Greenberg considers things like ads and design are important.
Copyright issues. How is copyright a barrier to preserving culture? Linksvayer from Creative Commons is disturbed by the costs involved in the process.
Are we too late to capture the essence of early blogging? Allison Headley suggests that blogging is going to continue to be popular so it's not too late. If, however, blogs become obsolete next year, then it may be.
An individual post is important to preserve. However, when someone changes their template, it changes the context of the post, so while the text may be the same, it's situated differently.
Cultural environmentalism. About preserving the culture using the same frame as preserving species and habitats.
With digital objects, there is a problem of authenticity. For example, preserving emailed memos. How do you know what's real? Digital information is easy to create, alter, etc. But the mutability is problematic. How do you track authenticity and document it? For example, preservation of the September 11th attacks. Usually collections are created by people over their lifetime and then turn it over to libraries. Now, however, with digital collections, they're dispersed, there are problems with formats, and there's a high probability of losing that data. You need metadata, but often people don't have metadata. Blogs often contain this metadata.
The blog is often a collecting point for such things as social bookmarks, flickr photos, etc. Open file formats: tiff is open; jpeg is not.
Inadvertent archives. Blogs are a form of inadvertent archives. Aggregating individual contributions.
What is the archival object when you're dealing with blogs? What questions are people going to be asking 50 years from now? You want to understand what it was like to create and participate in this networked in environment. Greenberg considers things like ads and design are important.
Copyright issues. How is copyright a barrier to preserving culture? Linksvayer from Creative Commons is disturbed by the costs involved in the process.
Are we too late to capture the essence of early blogging? Allison Headley suggests that blogging is going to continue to be popular so it's not too late. If, however, blogs become obsolete next year, then it may be.
An individual post is important to preserve. However, when someone changes their template, it changes the context of the post, so while the text may be the same, it's situated differently.
Cultural environmentalism. About preserving the culture using the same frame as preserving species and habitats.
With digital objects, there is a problem of authenticity. For example, preserving emailed memos. How do you know what's real? Digital information is easy to create, alter, etc. But the mutability is problematic. How do you track authenticity and document it? For example, preservation of the September 11th attacks. Usually collections are created by people over their lifetime and then turn it over to libraries. Now, however, with digital collections, they're dispersed, there are problems with formats, and there's a high probability of losing that data. You need metadata, but often people don't have metadata. Blogs often contain this metadata.
The blog is often a collecting point for such things as social bookmarks, flickr photos, etc. Open file formats: tiff is open; jpeg is not.
Inadvertent archives. Blogs are a form of inadvertent archives. Aggregating individual contributions.
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