We have always been told that “there is no financial model for archives.” This has begun to change a little in the entertainment industry with the ‘value added DVD’ that has a lot of historical outtakes etc. However much of our valuable past data still costs more money to store than can often be justified. Enter the web and Amazon. In an encouraging step for archives to gain a sustaining financial model, you can now purchase copies of footage from the National Archives through Amazon and their subsidiary Custom Flix.

It would be really great if they could offer you ANY part of the national archives, but I assume that is in the works as more and more of this content gets digitized. It is also a good preservation method to have this content distributed around as we painfully discovered with the moon landing tape kerfuffle…

Thanks to Stewart Brand for sending this Washington Post story to me (registration required).

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I was once again reminded of Dan Bricklin’s excellent piece on long term software and thought it was worth a mention here.  His basic point is that a governments software, should be as lasting and shared as its other civil infrastructure.  The article does a great job of showing the perils of entrusting all our public records to proprietary software and formats.

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A little while ago the design for the Svalbard International Seed Vault was released (BBC article).  They are building a long term vault for seed stock preservation.  Interestingly they seem to have chosen the site mainly under the assumption that the planet will only get warmer in the next 200 years.  My understanding of the Gulf Stream dynamics is that if the Greenland ice sheet calves off, and shuts down the Gulf Stream, it is also likely that the North Atlantic will be plunged into an ice age, burying the seed vault under a lot of ice…

This article was forwarded to me by Paul Saffo who also points out another interesting fact about the location chosen in terms of long term preservation strategies:

Spitzbergen (one of four islands in Svalbard where the vault will be) is very unusual, though it is Norwegian Territory, it is actually an international ‘condominium’ with approx 12 nations having rights for commercial exploitation on the islands.  It thus mirrors the sentiment that led to the notion of “The common Heritage of Mankind” in the (mostly) failed Las of the Sea Treaty.  Anyway, I find the status interesting because building archives on land owned by many parties is an interesting preservation strategy.

-Paul Saffo

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Someday in the future our trouble with our current systems of networking and wireless and routers and protocols and software will seem as charming and obvious as… well as charmingly obvious as the hassles medieval monks may have had with the first books, if you can believe this cool video. It’s a glorious send-up about medieval tech support — in part a spoof on tech support of all kinds, and in part a jab at technology which depends so much on tech support. Very funny and worth a minute of your time. It’s origins are explained here, where you can also find the video:

A comedy about medieval tech support, learning how to use a book. It’s from a show called Øystein & Meg (Øystein & I) produced by the Norwegian Broadcasting television channel (NRK) in 2001. The spoken language is Norwegian, the subs in Danish. It’s written by Knut Nærum and performed by Øystein Bache and Rune Gokstad.

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On January 2nd of 02007 Stewart Brand and I stepped into the cool deep past and unknown future of who begat who.

(picture: the granite genealogical vaults)

Since I began working on the 10,000 Year Clock project, and associated Library projects here at Long Now almost a decade ago, I have heard cryptic references to this archive. We have visited the nuclear waste repositories, historical sites, and many other long term structures to look for inspiration. However we had never found a way to see this facility. This is the underground bunker where the Mormons keep their genealogical backup data, deep in the solid granite cliffs of Little Cottonwood Canyon, outside Salt Lake City. UT.

The Church has been collecting genealogical data from all the sources it can get its hands on, from all over the world, for over 100 years. They have become the largest such repository, and the data itself is open to anyone who uses their website, or comes to their buildings in downtown Salt Lake City.

However they dont do public tours of the Granite Vaults where all the original microfilm is kept for security and preservation reasons. Since Stewart had recently given a talk at Brigam Young University we were able to request access, and the Church graciously took us out to lunch and gave us a tour.

(more…)

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An update to this post about the Society of American Archivists disappearing their listserv archives, as posted on the Archivist’s Listerv:

To: A&A List

From: Elizabeth Adkins, SAA PresidentSubject: Appraisal of A&A List (1993-2006)

The SAA Council convened via conference call last night to review the feedback on our previously announced decision to dispose of the A&A List archives (1993-2006). We are impressed by, and grateful for, the range and depth of responses to our announcement – particularly as they relate to concern on behalf of the profession. After taking everyone’s thoughtful comments into account, we’ve decided to work with Miami University of Ohio to explore the option of transferring the list archives to another repository.

We remain concerned that transferring the list archives raises administrative and legal considerations that must be addressed, but we are willing to work to find ways to address those issues, if at all possible. We have contacted MUO, which has agreed to extend until further notice the date by which the list archives must be taken down to give us more time to work out the details. Should it become necessary, we will arrange for a download of the archives list files that could be used in a transfer to another repository.

Clearly this experience demonstrates that appraisal is something about which good archivists can disagree, and we respect the passionate disagreement of the list community with our original decision. I want to thank all who have expressed their concern, publicly or privately, and for the constructive suggestions that many of you have made to address SAA’s concerns.

We will be communicating with the list as we progress through next steps.

As the kids are saying nowadays, w00t!

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There is a good story in today’s Herald Tribune on how costly digital loss can be:

“JUNEAU, Alaska: Perhaps you know that sinking feeling when a single keystroke accidentally destroys hours of work. Now imagine wiping out a disk drive containing information for an account worth $38 billion (€29 billion).
That is what happened to a computer technician reformatting a disk drive at the Alaska Department of Revenue. While doing routine maintenance work, the technician accidentally deleted applicant information for an oil-funded account — one of Alaska residents’ biggest perks — and mistakenly reformatted the backup drive, as well.
There was still hope, until the department discovered its third line of defense, backup tapes, were unreadable.” -AP

This whole article brings up an interesting issue however. How should we store our public data as a civilization?
Some of the details of this article made my antenna perk up… (starting with the fact that the qualified 800,000 Alaskan residents are getting $38 billion dollars). But it is quotes like this one;

“Over the next few days, as the department, the division and consultants from Microsoft Corp. and Dell Inc. labored to retrieve the data,…”

That really bring up another interesting point of where we are entrusting our public data. Data like tax records, property documents, census, birth, death and marriage announcements are being stored all over the country at city, county, state, and federal levels on proprietary systems. In other words we have public data who’s future is resting entirely on the hope that companies like Microsoft will both stay in business, but also make all their software backwards compatable — forever.

We are also seeing some governments, like Venezuela,  really understanding this issue before the rest of the world. It will be interesting when the future tries to look back on this time, our early digital history, only to find a bunch degraded mag tapes with proprietary file formats. They will likely know more about ancient Egypt than us.

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From The Prelinger Library:

Now comes word that the SAA Council has decided that the archives of its own listserv are no longer worth saving and will be “disposed of” at the end of this month. After an appraisal of their value, they’ve determined the cost of keeping these bits is higher than their “evidential or informational value.”

Way to archive, Archivists! We here in the Digital Dark Age Corner salute you.

We note that the meeting on the listserv archive’s fate was held via email.

One can only hope that by this precedent they will find it perfectly acceptable to expunge records of other past digital events that they deem too difficult to maintain, such as the evidence that archivists removed the archives of their archivism miscellanea.

The whole article, including where to complain, can be found here.

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Interesting and quite long article in the Times Business Section on Sunday, beginning page about one of the downsides of digitization of books and similar printed resources. The thesis is that as we come to expect sources to be available digitally, and thus to rely on what we can find and search that way, those sources that are NOT digitized are lost to cultural memory. And, despite what seems to be the vast quantity or material being scanned for inclusion in digital libraries, much more cannot be scanned because it is the wrong size, or because it is not deemed economically feasible to scan them….

-Paul Alan Levy via Farber List

New York Times Article (login required)

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As reported by Engaget, Sandisk is rumored to be developing 100 year archival memory cards… These may be just the thing for those family photos languishing on your ever detiorating CDRs.

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