Materialities & Preservation in the Digital Age?

This week's reading – the 2005 Heritage Health Index Report on the State of America’s Collections – centers on the tenuousness of our physical cultural heritage. From books to photos, textiles to furniture, we find that "millions of objects are in urgent need of treatment or attention" across the nation (11). How we go about caring for them – utilizing safety protocols, environmental controls, skilled workers, and the funding that makes it all possible – is a major issue within the public history profession.

The public at large seems to have a perverse fascination with preservation horror stories. Be it "Monkey Jesus", botched frescos, the paving of the Great Wall, or tombs-turned-picnic tables, we often have good reason to anxiously anticipate restoration and conservation efforts. Outdoors or indoors, antique or ancient, the salvageability of documents and objects is treated with both wary and perverse fascination. We mourn the deevolution of the Ecce Homo, all the while creating memes and traveling great distances just to take selfies with it. Why?

In the Digital Age, how will we negotiate the preservation of non-physical histories. For instance, what does it mean to “archive” the Internet? “Archiving” is usually reserved for the act of backing up digital information, not the work of preservation in a physical repository. “Digital preservation” is itself an oxymoron depending on how you interpret it. Preservation ensures material is available in the long-term, but digital formats are finite. Digital preservationists are charged with maintaining both reformatted and “born-digital” content.

The cost of digital storage (maintaining servers and databases) is much greater than the “passive” storage of materials in, for instance, a warehouse. Web content is inherently ephemeral; the Internet was founded as a communications system, not as a place to store information. Yet the Internet has become a place where information is stored without physicality (e.g., “the Cloud”) even while no concrete means exist for digital collections to be acquired and preserved. In her article “Raiders of the Lost Web,” Adrienne LaFrance points out that “in the print world, it took centuries to figure out what ought to be saved, how, and by whom.” What was lost in that time? The contents of the early web, our web, will likely disappear and be forgotten in the same manner.

Feel free to check out my American Archivist article on preserving (cyber)porn in the Digital Age!

^{Courtesy of WeKnowMemes}

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^{100% of the SBD rewards from this #explore1918 post will support the Philadelphia History Initiative @phillyhistory. This crypto-experiment is part of a graduate course at Temple University's Center for Public History and is exploring history and empowering education to endow meaning. To learn more click here.}