After doing this week’s readings and spending some time on
Archive-It, I have been thinking about the
complications of archiving born-digital content. Reacting to the popular view
among historians that this type of preservation is the responsibility of
archivists, in “Scarcity or Abundance?” Roy Rosenzweig advocates that
historians become more aware of and involved in preserving digital content.
Rosenzweig has a point: historians will one day need to be
using this content and it would benefit us to prepare. Thinking about what
historical research of born digital content means is a more mind-bending reflection.
Catherine O’Sullivan muses over the implications of blogs for the historical
record. The public nature of blogs versus the private nature of their content
creates an ethical question for archivists, namely, who can digitize these
materials? Does the creator need to give permission to the archives or can the
archives just preserve it? If the creator decided to delete their website
forever, is that their right?
Both Rosenzweig and O’Sullivan agree that however digital
content is preserved, it will likely not be a perfect record. Historians
acknowledge that the record of the past is full of holes. Personally, I think
the holes make history fun. Not knowing every detail about the past is what
enables historians to interpret it.
My first impression of Archive-It is that much of the
content is analogous to the type of content found in a paper archives, replete
with holes. The websites captured do not include all links and only provide a
glance at what the actual experience of being on the website was like. The grouping
of collections reminds me of series in an archives. Learning how to deal with
digital content involves an expansion of the skill sets that historians usually
come with, but maybe if we found a way to teach historians that their larger
methodologies are not so different when using digital materials they would be
more willing to accept them.
Readings
O'Sullivan, Catherine. "Diaries, Online Diaries and the
Future Loss to Archives; or, Blogs and the Blogging Bloggers Who Blog
Them." American Archivist 68,
no. 1 (2005).
Rosenzweig, Roy. “Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past
in a Digital Era,”
American Historical
Review, Vol. 108, No. 3 (June 2003), pp. 735-762.
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