A research area at the Library Innovation Lab that focuses on weaving together technological solutions, distribution philosophies, and professional practice to create a more resilient digital history.
Libraries, archives, and museums have experienced a paradigm shift: the work of preserving culture and history through time no longer means exclusively caring for and preserving physical media. It also involves incredible amounts of data and digital information.
This dynamic is not new. There has been theorizing and efforts to strengthen the digital cultural safety net since born-digital materials started being produced. Things only escalated with the explosion of the world wide web, and a shift towards human culture being hosted in large part exclusively online.
Digital memory disappears. It gets taken down, moved, deleted, or forgotten about at an alarming rate.
The urgency of this problem finds new footing in an era where institutions - both societal and cultural - are changing rapidly either by choice or by necessity. New dynamics such as cloud computing and proprietary platforms controlling material, advances in distributed storage technologies, and shifting priorities at institutional levels all make this topic more relevant than ever.
This research seeks to define and confront the barriers to the long term preservation of our digital culture from a technological, societal, and human point of view.