A Digital Dark Age?

     This weeks readings focus a lot on the potential digital apocalypse. What would happen if tomorrow the world's technology ceased to work? I always hear people talk about how books are becoming obsolete in the digital age. In reality, paper and other analog records have lasted so long, because they are reliable (even if there are periods where paper has disintegrated). But since we live in a digital world, there are records that are purely digital. If we want to preserve the information of the current age, we must recognize the fragility of digital records today. In a 2008 article in Science Daily (found here), explains that “with ever-shifting platforms and file formats, much of the data we produce today could eventually fall into a black hole of inaccessibility”. The problem with digital information is that it is subject not only to deletion, but with the rapid changes in software and technology, digital data can become incompatible or end up corrupted as time goes on. In the four years since the article was written, we have continued to see a heavier reliance on our digital tools, and thus we are continually locked in with companies that don't like their products being used on devices they don't make a profit on. The key to maintaining digital information’s relevancy and accessibility in the future according to the article is to focus on open source and adaptive software formatting.
    

According to Wikipedia, digital preservation (found here) can be described as “managed activities” focused on “continued access to digital materials for as long as necessary”. Preservation programs require massive amounts of sustained funding, which means that very few groups have the capacity to preserve digital information that will hold up to the test of the apocalyptic digital “dark age”. Not only do digital preservationists need to consider software and deletion problems, they also have to recognize the ethical and professional dilemmas one can face in the field. Questions about relevancy, authenticity, and accessibility can plague any good preservationist, but groups such as the University of British Columbia have sought through their InterPARES (International Research on Permanent Authentic Records in Electronic Systems) to develop methods for best practices, standards, and policies that can protect digital information and ensure accuracy and reliability for years to come.

NBC's drama, Revolution, plays on the idea that our tech-reliant world will face a digital "dark age" in the near future.

     While the Science Daily article is good at exploring the potential pitfalls of digitizing and archiving information, the author argues that organizations, universities, and governments are wasting money by investing heavily in digitization of information, because if we enter a digital “dark age” all of the money spent will be lost. Personally, I doubt we will hit a digital “dark age”  any time soon (NBC's Revolution anyone?), and the benefits of digitizing for public access alone seems to be a great reason to continue investing in digital preservation. Since we live in a digital world, we should continue investing in digital archival and preservation of both purely digital and digitized analog documents.
     Magia Ghetu Krause and Elizabeth Yakel's article on the Polar Bear Expedition Digital Collection (article found here, collection found here) explains that  by digitizing documents they were able to “preserve the originals by reducing handling [and] facilitate access”. The online collection was designed with the visitor in mind. Not only does the site offer a digital “book-bag”  to store documents for later viewing, they also use a sort of visitor tracking, so they can alert other visitors of pages related to their views. The group behind the project, FANG (Finding Aids Next Generation), sought to “identify those features and functions that enhance the usability of finding aid, create common ground, and provide 'social affordances' that encourage interaction, such as the participation of users to help one another”. The project particularly focused on social interaction as a way to help users find information relevant to them within the archive. When the site launched in 2006, the group sought to survey users to find out how the site worked for them. Since many of the users had personal family connections to the Polar bear Expedition, things like bookmarking or the comment feature meant they could have a personalized sense of access to the archives, making research easier and more user friendly.
     Personally, after reading Krause and Yakel's article, I was made aware of the impact of accessibility in digital archives. By continuing to expand digital collections and employing digital preservation methods,  historians are opening up access to public while potentially saving original documents from handling damage. While we could find ourselves stranded in a world with out technology in the future, digital preservation is important today because of the accessibility it gives ordinary people. Plus I don't think we should be destroying original documents after we digitize them. I like to think of digital archives as a back up source, that not only protects but provides access to documents.