It’s a wild world out there, with enemies lurking behind every corner, ready to ambush the weary archivist. This may be a bit melodramatic, but one does get a sense of impending panic when thinking of the challenge of preserving digital information for future generations.
To help justify this position I will take a look at some of the challenges regarding digital preservation, and why this issue cannot to be left to the archivists alone – by then it may well be too late! This article is a sometimes light-hearted, sometimes desperately sad attempt to stress the challenges. This story may just leave you hanging (a fitting end to such a sad tale), but keep an eye out for the next chapter where some solutions to this awesome challenge will be presented.
If we consider how digital artefacts or information objects are created today, then we must realise that creation is in the hands of the uneducated, the “archivally illiterate”. These heathens are the users in our organisations, suppliers and customers, business people, civil servants, secretaries and Chief Executive Officers, who all have their collective hands in the digital pie, concocting this mix of information that may need archiving at some later, undetermined stage.
Few if any of these people are trained in how to write e-mails, contracts, or any other form of digital communication or correspondence. Few are even trained in how to use the systems that our beloved IT comrades willingly place in their grubby paws. None of these well-meaning but potentially dangerous digital anarchists know anything about records management or archival science. Worst of all, heaven forbid, they are only concerned with doing their daily tasks.
Maybe that is the way it should be. They have enough on their plates without trying to turn them into archivists. So the challenge we have is to somehow make sure they create information objects which are archivable, without impacting on their ability to perform their daily tasks. In order to understand how this may be possible, let’s take a look at some of the different ways that an object may be handled during its useful life.
Digital objects are created by people who have a job to do. During this early phase of use, the object may be part of a collaboration process, where it is amended many times before publication. Once published it may be distributed and shared amongst many people. Ease of use, access, sharing and collaboration are words that may describe the activities that take place here.
Clearly not all of these “Documents” will become records, but for those that do, it is imperative that they are accurate, that they are filed in the proper place, that they are named correctly, and that the systems that manage them start to populate metadata that may be meaningful later on. Simple metadata, like the systems and the versions that were needed to read the document. If, for example, these documents are not filed in the correct place, they can never be archived, because we frankly won’t even know that they exist.
The problem lies in the fact that these distributed, uneducated users now have control, and if they don’t do the right things, early in the process, this information is already lost ever. But, in the utopian world, if we assume that these digital diamonds have now been captured, and named properly, and even stored in the correct location (dare we say repository), who takes control?
Our IT colleagues possibly, who may be techno-gurus and gadget kings, but who haven’t been trained in records management principles? IT staff are just not familiar with terms such as file plans, retention, disposal, and legal holds. This is not meant to be an attempt to belittle IT staff. Far from it, as they have a vital and increasingly important role to assist records and archive staff with this delicate task.
Some of these “records” are inactive, or semi-active. Still very much alive, but seldom accessed, so our records management professionals have to make decisions how best to handle them, what media to store them on, whether they should be on-line, on robotic systems, or off-line making cute, perfectly symmetrical, dusty piles on a shelf somewhere. Of course, records management considerations such as access controls and policies come into play, and this we do well (sometimes).
Making sure that the records are protected is something that we understand. Where we may just be missing the boat a little, is that we may be protecting worthless things. Already at this stage the CDs that we lovingly store in climatically controlled conditions (you do of course store your digital records in perfect conditions don’t you) may contain blobs3 of information that are completely unreadable. But we keep them nonetheless, sometimes for many years. It is these potentially worthless pieces of digital land fill that we hand to the archivist.
And so we move on to the last player in this sorry tale. The diligent archivist collects the matter (using such impressive words as “ingest”, “fonds” and “collections”) and very quickly realises that the media, the contents, or the format may well be unreadable. This is a very sad ending to this tale of diligence indeed. The observant eye may notice that the poor archivist gets a very short paragraph in this tale, and the reason is clear; they actually do not have a job to perform, as there is nothing to archive.
Hopefully some underlying messages become starkly clear in this tragic tale, the most important one being that the process of “archival” as regards digital preservation takes place much, much earlier than in the process than we would like. That the people who need to take actions on information to ensure that that it is able to be preserved, are currently unaware, untrained, and ill-equipped for the task they don’t even know they have. All organisations are faced with these issues today, yet many are not aware of just how great a problem it may be.
Even those that realise the significance of the problem are standing on the dusty streets of Terrabyte Gultch, arms at their sides, hands by their trusty revolvers. Sadly they may have left the silver bullet on the mantelpiece along with the rest of the Betamax cassettes.
Paul Mullon
www.corconcepts.co.za