A citizen's responsibility to history

One lesson I'll never forget from my undergraduate capstone and senior seminar is that historians have a responsibility to preserve the truths of the past. Much in the same way a good citizen of a nation has the responsibility to participate in government (through voting, referendums, and initiatives), a good citizen of history participates in the historical community by upholding their responsibility to promote the truths of the past. One way historians participate as citizens is to gather information about the present to give insight to future generations about our past. Daniel Cohen explains in a chapter about collecting digital history in his online book, Digital History (found here), "historians will need to find ways to capture such documents, messages, images, audio, and video before they are deleted if our descendants are to understand the way we lived". If we are to preserve the history of our present, the historical community as a whole must recognize the historical impact of the digital world on our lives today. It is irresponsible to ignore the digital world when collecting and preserving digital forms of history, but it is also a challenge when issues of quality and questions of relevancy surround much of what we find online.  

The Utah Digital Newspaper Project is one of many attempts to digitize information of the past and present to preserve history for future generations

     Because of technology's ever-changing and constantly improving nature, it can be a challenge to preserve some forms of digital documents. For instance, website codes need to constantly tweaked in order to remain accessible, making the preservation of webpages as they were 5 years earlier impossible. And what happens if one forgets to back up files and the originals get corrupted? Having my own computer wiped and all my Microsoft Word files corrupted by a particularly nasty virus, it is frustrating knowing that when a file is corrupted, unless you have a back up, it is lost forever. As Herbert and Estlund explain (here), the Utah Digital Newspaper found that people feared a reliance on "digital images as a preservation means" because they assumed the program would "destroy the originals". But Cohen argues (here) that historians should focus on "sticking to fundamentally sound operating principles in the construction and storage of the digital materials to be preserved is more important than searching for the elusive digital equivalent of acid-free paper". While I believe that part of the responsibility of a historian is to provide ways for people to easily access historical information, I also believe that the preservation of physical documents is just as important as it's digital counterpart. 

     There are hundreds if not thousands of projects dedicated to collecting, preserving, and presenting history on a digital format, but that does not mean that they are destroying the original sources. The Library of Congress (LOC) has an extensive archive of documents, many of which still have not be copied in a digital format. One of the LOC's attempts to provide digitized forms of historical information is through their myLOC program (found here). After registering for an account, users of myLOC can explore 104 online exhibits (including some that correlated to exhibits that you can no longer see when visiting the LOC today), participate in several online activities including finding secret messages in a virtual Thomas Jefferson Building, save teaching resources, plan for a physical trip to the library, and even save the information you find in a collection folder tied to your user account. While myLoc provides access to information through several collections, it still has much more information housed at the actual library that is unavailable online, and some of what is available online poses copy write issues. 

     In 2008, the Library of Congress announced it would launch a project that would allow the public to contribute to the historical conversation by uploading images on Flickr through a page known as The Commons (found here). For those of you that are unfamiliar with Flickr, it is a Yahoo owned photo sharing website, where people upload their own photos into online albums where they can be viewed by all who look. The Commons project has two main objectives (as outlined on the website):

1. To increase access to publicly-held photography collections, and
2. To provide a way for the general public to contribute information and knowledge. (Then watch what happens when they do!)

This project is controversial for some, not only due to copy write and questions of ownership as mentioned on Spellbound Blog's review of the project (found here), but also because it gives the public the opportunity to add layers of metadata to the image so that those who view an image may learn all sorts of information relevant to the picture that has been added by other users. The problem with this type of crowd sourcing, is that most don't add relevant information to the picture, instead they offer up personal opinions. As many of us know through first hand experience, the internet lends itself to creating an environment that encourages self-expression, often without regard for others or the digital document itself. While some images in the project have benefited from crowd sourced metadata, it is hard to find as one must sift through layers of irrelevant junk to find "crowd sourcing gold" as Cebula phrased it (here). 

An example of the many layers of metadata one may have to sift through on the Library of Congress' Flickr based crowd sourcing  project. 

    While I am all for public participation in history, sometimes I have to remind myself that not everyone is an academic historian, and while some may find the information interesting, many will not have much to contribute to the actual historical discussion. By opening up historical information to crowd sourcing on popular sites like Flickr, we are not effectively presenting historical truths to society. If one has to sift through 40 comments about a woman's hairstyle or attractive looks on a 1920's photograph, only to find a single comment relevant to the historical conversation, is that really good history? If historians are dedicated to presenting the truths of the past, does it make the partners of the The Commons bad citizens of history when historical truths are drowning in irrelevant information?