“I’m sorry that I won’t even be here
the first week you are back” I tell Hanna, a student worker who is about to
depart on a 6 week study abroad program. “I’ll be at a week of training in
Indianapolis.”
“Are you giving or receiving the
training?” she asks.
“I’m being trained to provide
training on digital preservation.”
“Digital preservation?” she says with
a quizzical look.
Hanna sees me do traditional book and
paper conservation work, she assists with rehousing maps, and she does a lot of
scanning of our print materials, but hearing the term digital preservation leaves her puzzled.
“It’s about making sure the files we
create today are still there and usable in the future.”
“So, backing up your files,” she
suggests.
“Well, yes that, and more. It’s about
making sure that files don’t get corrupted, and about being able to view files
that were created 10 years ago.” I explain.
“One of the big challenges for
digital preservation is there is no good visual for people to really get it.
With traditional preservation you can show people an old tattered book and
there is a visceral understanding of the need to take steps to preserve it. We
are physical creatures and we understand other physical objects. Digital
preservation is completely disembodied.”
“It doesn’t appeal to any of the five
senses,” says Hanna.
“Exactly.”
----------------------------------
Like many who work in analog book and
paper preservation, a big part of what attracted me to the work was the chance
to work with interesting physical materials. These materials excite and appeal
to at least four of my senses. (I can’t recall a time when I used the sense of
taste in my work – except for with Edible Book Fest.) The text and images on
these book and paper objects are not just text and images, but they are
inextricably connected to and embodied in physical containers – just like those
of us who engage these texts and objects.
If I show someone a tattered book
there is usually an innate understanding that something is wrong, that this
wrong was caused over time, and that something can likely be done to lessen the
wrong. I often sense people feeling empathy for a damaged book. (Books seem to
have an iconic place for many in the western world: a broken chair is just a
broken chair, but a damaged book often brings out an emotional response of
compassion.) Much like books, people are personalities embodied in and
inextricably linked to a physical form.
And this, for me, is the challenge I
have with digital preservation. Conceptually, I understand it; however, because
digital objects are so disembodied, all I can do is understand them. It is hard
for me to feel compassion and sympathy for them. (I understand that some might
question the validity of compassion and sympathy for an object as an
appropriate motivation for institutionally based preservation. My experience
tells me that compassion and sympathy are often present in the person
undertaking acts of physical preservation. )
Physical preservation often involves
physical interactions with the objects and the hand skills gained over years of
working with similar objects. Digital preservation involves administrative and
technical decisions about processes. (I fear the two previous sentences are
convenient oversimplifications which merely help me make my point but it seems
to me there is an important difference between a person’s encounter with
physical and digital preservation. My purpose is not to suggest the experience
of physical preservation, is more noble or soulful than digital preservation, but
rather to try to uncover what might be the human, soulful elements of digital
preservation.)
 |
| Bamiyan Buddha before and after destruction |
I think digital preservation is one
of the most urgent issues facing the larger library and cultural heritage world
today, but I also think the disembodied nature of digital objects makes it a
challenge to communicate that urgency to the larger world. With the “Slow
fires” video about brittle books, seeing brittle pages turn to crumbs readily
communicates the issue. But what images can do the same for digital
preservation? People can relate to files lost, but trying to persuade someone
based on an absence of something they can’t see seems challenging. The hollowed
out wall of rock where the Bamiyan Buddhas used to be physically communicates
an absence in a way that lost files do not.
As I was working on this blog post I
read the latest post from The Signal:Digital Preservation from the Library of Congress which is my favorite
source for trying to keep abreast of the world digital preservation. The post
“Rescuing the Tangible from the Intangible,” by Butch Lazorchak spoke about a
program at the Library of Congress called the Tangible Media Project which
consists of a mobile cart with a Ripstation
machine which is taken to different parts of the Library and it is used to copy
files from CDs onto their digital asset management system. What most caught my
attention about the post was the closing line. “In a rapidly transforming world
where digital objects are often mysteriously distant and abstract, the TMP
provides a physical, tangible gateway to digital management and preservation
issues.”
Does digital preservation have soul?
Yes, I suspect it does but I can’t help but think that communicating that soul so
that it moves people will have to involve to an appeal to one or more of our
physical senses. Locating and effectively portraying that soul to others will
take minds more clever than mine.
