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?
Trevor Owens
There’s a technical way to answer the question, focusing on redundancy or what kind of media to use, but my sense is that those are largely solved problems at this point. I think the harder questions are about organizational and institutional commitments, public trust, and the viability of future collection of knowledge. To the last point, to give an example, people aren’t posting to Stack Overflow in the way they used to, and it’s because they’re asking AI chatbots for the answers, which is great because it gets you the answers faster, but it’s actually then killing off the root of this amazing knowledge source. The knowledge base that was funneled into that is consuming itself. In that case, the information-seeking behaviors and the understanding of where the knowledge that fuels it all comes from present a really complicated threat environment. In that context, I think I would probably focus on how to shore up investment in institutions.
One of the big points I try to make in the book is that a repository is not a piece of software. It’s people, it’s roles, it’s funding lines. Collecting, preserving, interpreting, describing, all of those are actions which take people’s time. A lot of the work is really anchored in who’s noticing, who’s paying attention, who’s engaging with communities, who’s soliciting stories, who’s protecting them and thinking about what might be vulnerable.
Those are all non-technical questions, as opposed to going down a rabbit hole about blockchain or other technical solutions. There’s a bunch of interesting stuff there of course, long lived media or putting stuff on the moon, any number of those things are interesting, but social relationships and connections between people, institutions, and society are where the big vulnerabilities lie. What’s going to happen to our institutions as a result of continued action or inaction on climate change, is another big picture question.
Interviewer
I’m curious how you think about the trade-offs and tensions between centralized and decentralized archival efforts, and how the collaborations and interchanges between them can work?
Trevor Owens
Ultimately, I’m a firm believer that institutions that are the only way memory will persist forward. I think of examples like Martha Ballard’s diary, which might be disregarded or forgotten about for an extended period of time. Benign neglect just isn’t going to work with digital materials. We’re all going to die. And then our stuff won’t be around unless we’ve worked with other people. But I think institutions can be broadly conceived. If you think long term, zooming out, so much has survived via religious organizations or family networks.
And so in that case, efforts like the DC Public Library’s Memory Lab initiative are so important. There’s a lot of people who don’t know how to get photos off of their phone. Technology is increasingly obfuscated from us, and how we transition knowledge from personal holdings to institutions is crucial.
Ultimately, it’s about resources, dollars, and people’s time, but institutions can be broadly conceived. You’ve got organizations like the Internet Archive. It’s a nonprofit. It has a constituency, it has stakeholders, it has community members. All of that persists. It’s a real library. It’s not pretend. It’s fascinating watching new institutions pop up. Rhizome, and its relationship to the New Museum, is amazing. The fan fiction communities have built archives of their own where it’s possible to create and fund the sort of real core guts of doing digital preservation with volunteers.We had another conversation with the Video Game History Foundation’s founder Frank Cifaldi that touched on the liminal space between a community-driven initiative and institution. It’s really exciting to see the bulwark institutions that have been around for a century or centuries figure out how they fit into this ecosystem and rise to the challenge of doing what they’ve done previously, but now in the digital world.
Interviewer
What role does access play in allowing collections and archival efforts to persist, in incentivizing funding and labor?
Trevor Owens
Preservation is access in the future. There’s a fair number of situations where dark archiving is important. We have to accept embargoes sometimes.
Preservation is access in the future.
The way we frame this within the American Institute of Physics research team is one of our core areas of focus is ensuring that records of 20th and 21st century physical science are both preserved and used at the same time.
The digital preservation community, as a field, has a lot of work to do around stepping back and saying, what stuff should we focus our attention on? What’s not being covered elsewhere? So while I am on some level concerned about major publisher eBooks and eJournals, rights, and DRM, I’m also not worried about it in the same way that I am about a lot of other things.
In contrast, oral history collecting is something where you build a relationship, you get consent, and you can instantly distribute things. A big and distinctive portion of our collections are unpublished memoirs from physical scientists. We’ve been getting them since the 60s, and we now can just solicit them from people and put them online. We are part of their memory process. We connect with them. We are a memorialization. It’s a chance to engage in a legacy kind of thinking.
When you have huge equipment or something like that, how do you preserve it? So often it’s the case that when you talk to people, you start to realize you should do interviews with people who use that equipment and have them show you how they’ve used it and why, and talk about why it mattered. That interview is actually way more useful for almost every use case than the giant piece of equipment. This is, I think, another approach that comes up when it comes to the technical problem of preserving software, World of Warcraft or something similar. There’s a bunch of videos of people playing the game where you see what happened and why, talking about it, not to mention the discussion forums where they argued about what matters.