Digital Preservation as a Thought Experiment
Back in 2017, I had an abstract accepted for a chapter in the ALCTS Monograph: Digital Preservation in Libraries: Preparing for a Sustainable Future. With my author’s copy now available, I take a look at the background and its genesis below. The complete monograph is a fascinating read with some great contributors. You can find it online at the ALA Store.
An introduction to Digital Preservation as a Thought Experiment
My chapter “Digital Preservation as a Thought Experiment” started life as a rather unwieldy and unfocused piece of writing, which I later took the opportunity to turn into something more substantial. Following an open call for chapters for the ALCTS Monograph: Digital Preservation in Libraries: Preparing for a Sustainable Future, working with the publication’s editors Jeremy Myntti and Jessalyn Zoom, I was able to transform this writing into something more complete and hopefully more useful to folks in the field (all fields) getting to grips with digital preservation.
I drew on my experience over the last 10 years as a researcher and analyst to describe the building blocks of any problem I work on. I wanted to demystify it for those just getting started.
Digital preservation spans disciplines and domains
In a field that is not just cross-disciplinary, but seeks to transparently protect heritage across domains, I sought to describe a pragmatic worldview that makes it clear that the skills everyone brings to the table are needed to make digital preservation successful. Indeed, it is also important to emphasize that this does not work unless everyone can come to the table to discuss needs and requirements in as humanistic and inclusive a way as possible.
People new to digital preservation or computer science can be overwhelmed by the language used in this field, for example, terms like checksum; debugging; bits, bytes, binary, and byte-level analyses. I wanted to show the reader how they might work their way back from a seemingly insurmountable or difficult-to-understand problem to find its essence.
To have a meaningful conversation about the many ways a problem can be solved using technology it is important to begin with an unambiguous description of what is being solved. Technology after all serves our purposes, not the other way around.
Problem solving inclusively
I try to practice more effective and more inclusive communication every day. Seeking out others’ guidance or good examples, I will often revisit my words to understand what could have been written better. It is a firmly held belief of mine that digital preservation will benefit from having more people we can bring into the tent and from those this specialism engages with and learns from.
In my ACLTS chapter I describe to the reader some of the methods that I have adopted to communicate issues to different audiences be they technical or non-technical and everyone in-between.
I would love to hear people’s thoughts on the outcome of this writing in the comments below.
Learning digital preservation concepts
For those reading this blog, you may also be interested in the flash cards I have created for beginners to digital preservation. More about that in my blog: Brainscape: Flashcards for Digital Preservation.
Let me know if you give them a try and how they’ve benefited you (or not, and how they could be improved!).
Acknowledgements
As I sign off, thank you to Andrea K. Byrne for being a constant source of inspiration as a colleague at Archives New Zealand and every day since. From the day she arrived at work, her voice, one that called for fairness and inclusiveness was always heard, and as I hope this work proves testament to, is, and shall continue to be a constant source of self-reflection.
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