Interviewer
If you were given unlimited funding to design a system for storing and preserving digital information for at least a century, what would you do?
Amelia Acker
I probably wouldn’t build a system. I’d build a bureaucracy. I know people are really down on institutions and the federal government right now, but we really do need a huge, national, government-led program for some sort of preservation grid aimed at 100 years that’s sustainable, that doesn’t just seek rents.
When I think about how you would do it, it has to be a huge bureaucracy and it can’t be a business plan. It has to be similar to electrification efforts or the Apollo program or ARPAnet or NSFnet. It has to be led by government workers thinking about serving everyone in equal ways.
Right now the plan to preserve most digital cultural memory is through rents. It’s only a business plan. The few options that aren’t are still public-private partnerships. They’re still very limited. Most of those business plans are about providing second and third-party access that is for platforms or for ads or for AI strip mining and not necessarily for cultural heritage or posterity.
Do you know the Digital Public Library of America? They had this really great API that I teach with in class. If you just do a quick search, a lotto search for S3, all the S3 records are all The Smithsonian, the National Archives, all from what I think of as the biggest and best and brightest information institutions that our country has built. We need an S3 bucket that is not built by Amazon.
We need an S3 bucket that is not built by Amazon.
Interviewer
What do you think about grassroots community archival efforts? It’s obviously different than what can happen on a governmental or institutional level, but there’s some examples, particularly in the arts, that have done quite well even over hundreds of years.
Amelia Acker
In terms of preservation, community archiving, and crisis response, grassroots efforts are the fastest and most malleable with digital targets, but they also often struggle with the long term. I got really involved in data rescue in 2016 and then there were data rescues in January 2025 when the second term administration took over. A question that I often think about is—is data rescue the only type of model that fits for that type of crisis?
I would imagine sociologists say that this is probably the most flexible and adaptive way for us to do it, crisis collecting or rapid response. But one thing that grassroots efforts come up against is that they have to be very selective in their identification and appraisal efforts, and these decisions are often pressurized by an event. They’re often in response to something happening, as opposed to the more deliberative documentation strategy that we might want for science, or for some sorts of arts and engineering, where we do want to document as much as possible.
But it’s true there are examples of data rescue of science, like the early COVID data dashboards. Those were all volunteers. That wasn’t the state collecting and organizing and making that data accessible.
Interviewer
I would love to chat a little bit more about what it means to be a good bureaucracy. What do you see as effective practices of a bureaucratic structure?
Amelia Acker
Business solutions are often oriented towards satisfying a customer, making a sale, or saving money in operations. You can imagine a good bureaucracy doing those for the citizen while also conserving energy, but I think the biggest difference with good bureaucracies is that they serve everyone from every different background. Whether you’re a young person or you’re an elder, you’re an inexperienced person or you’ve interacted with the service for decades, what I imagine the best bureaucracies do is they meet everyone in the same way.
We are in a time where we think of every single information service in terms of the user, it’s an ascendency of user-ism. I see my reflection in every single information technology that I use, and that’s not what most public services should do. They have to serve all of us in different ways, so it shouldn’t be the same user-ism that we see in our private tools. Something that I would imagine the best bureaucracies and the best public institutions do really well is they don’t personalize.
There’s a lot of historians of science who say that the best bureaucracies are just entities that you can kick and are not going to go away. They’re going to stick around for a while, whether we like them or not, whether they’re ugly or aesthetically pleasing. So oftentimes they take up space, they’re not flexible and adaptive in some ways.
My understanding is also that bureaucracies and institutions assert legitimacy in an interesting way. Digital tools and collections are pretty slippery, putting your finger on what legitimacy and authenticity is in most of the spaces that we’re talking about is actually hard for most of us.We also spoke with our colleague Rebecca Cremona, who works on the Perma.cc project. A major part of Perma’s success is its ability to say “Harvard Law School Library preserved this web page.” We have these simulacrums or proxies of what we think because of the way digitization has served up our collections, but it would be really interesting to think about a digital preservation bureaucracy that asserts legitimacy and authenticity in a contemporary frame. What does that look like? Like it has a blue checkmark? Has a bunch of likes? What is the patina that gives legitimacy? The first websites that I interacted with as a college student were always out of date. They always had old information and that’s how you knew they were serious.
Today, what would an authenticity layer look like?
Interviewer
I know you have an entire forthcoming book on the subject, but I’m really interested in your research on the relationship between the tools we use for archiving, processing, and holding data, and what the use of those tools does to our understanding of those holdings themselves.
Amelia Acker
Machines shape memory. Since the 1960s and 1970s, we have known that the first few years when a new document form or object morphology emerges, like baseball cards or the Xerox machine, those early years have a very significant impact on how the next generation or generations in the future carry that information forward.
Every time we’ve packaged up data in a different format, we have organized it, represented it and then managed it because it’s taking up space and energy and form. The book argues these change the way we think about not just what that data is, but how we think about data when we are accessing it. It’s a biography of digital data all the way up from punch cards to cell phone apps, five different vignettes covering big changes with data and format.
The elevator pitch for professionals is, if you go to the Society of American Archivists glossary and you go to a couple of training manuals, traditional professional archivists do not use “archive” as a verb. It’s considered doubly déclassé, because on the one hand, archive can’t be a verb, and on the other hand, we’re putting ourselves out of business if we say machines can do it.
I’m trying to unpack this history of how it is that everyone uses “archive” as a verb. Even archivists themselves of course use “archiving data” or “archiving photos” regularly, but how is it that we think of actions that we’re doing with digital information all the time as “archiving”. It’s not something that professionals or people that we train to steward these formal digital cultural memory workers do.
One of the big changes for our culture right now is that most of the ways we think about preserving things has to do with digital files and databases, but most people think about information in terms of a streaming app or social network. There’s a sense of networkness that these earlier generations of information representation just can’t really account for, which is kind of fun. That’s the next question. I’m excited about it. If all of our information that we’re creating right now together is born in networks, how should libraries, archivists, and other institutions, like within judicial contexts, churches, or communities, think about information we create together in networks?