Preservation Is About Being Prepared For Institutional Failure

We were excited to see Part 1 of Jonathan Minard’s documentary Archive — a work about the “future of long-term digital storage, the history of the Internet and attempts to preserve its contents on a massive scale” — released the other day. Jonathan is a Fellow at Eyebeam Art & Technology Center, and was the point person there working with the group of volunteers who were assisting with the post-Sandy recovery efforts of their collection.

This first segment is focused on the work of The Internet Archive to record and preserve the Internet, scanned books, films, television, recorded sound, etc., etc. No matter what you think about what Brewster Kahle is doing and how he and The Internet Archive are going about it, one can’t deny that Kahle is an inspirational thought leader. One thing I especially came away with was that statement that the loss of materials is not a failure of the media or technology but, across analog and digital collections, it is a problem of institutional failure. Businesses fail, governments fail, wars and uprisings happen, budgets are cut, policies and procedures are not developed or enforced, preparations are not made.

From this point of view, we could consider that the wariness to adopt digital preservation as a strategy is not because the technology is riskier, but because it exposes those institutional failures and may be affected by them more quickly and more broadly than we are used to. Kahle is right when he says we know what to do, we just need to do it and be more regular and vigilant about it. Know the problems or patterns and be ready.

This is one of my big philosophical problems with the concept of benign neglect, that it embraces a culture of expected failure, grasping on with fingers-crossed, hoping that everything will be okay or maybe nothing bad will happen. Instead, we need acknowledge that failures happen and establish proactive strategies for being prepared when they inevitably do.

— Joshua Ranger

The Two Questions To Ask For Any Preservation Related Project

When I started running again after a short (uhhhh, 10 year) hiatus (man, I wish I had some fun reason for what I was doing in my 20s instead of running to have made it worth it), I didn’t start with running. Working at home on a Masters thesis, every time I had the urge to step away and look in the fridge (this was pre-Facebook and Twitter as time wasters) I took a walk instead. Eventually I wanted to challenge myself and began jogging in spurts. At some point after my thesis was done I decided I was going to run a mile. And then two. And then three. And then I had to replace my 10-year-old running shoes…

I wasn’t aware at the time, but I was approximating the pattern of the popular Couch-to-5k running program, a system designed to help even completely novice runners work up to the point of doing a long distance race. The walking/running schedule is set up so that people ease into the full distance they have targeted in a manner that tries to avoid let downs, burnouts, and overuse injuries. Not that I’m a genius for doing that on my own — it’s one of those simple ideas that just needs the right expression. And I’ve known many people who have used the codified program successfully, and the methodology remains an inspiration and a reference point to me.

That inspiration extends to other areas of my life, especially how I think about approaching large project or thinking through recommendations I make. In essence, it is a way of thinking about achieving a goal that seems overwhelming when only the end point is considered. Rather, it’s about breaking down the process into doable chunks and recognizable milestones. In this way, I consider two basic questions:

Where am I starting?
What are my goals?

1. Where am I starting?

This question is absolutely necessary because, as with exercise, you need to be realistic about what your conditioning and current abilities are. If you have not run for 10 years, you should not try to run for more than 30-60 seconds at a time. If your collection has not been arranged or described in any way, you should not assume that you are mere months from having an online portal for digitized assets.

Every step to greater access requires people, resources, and time. What is the first, the second, the third step you can reasonably accomplish on that road? As those steps combine and experience grows, more complex things will be accomplished. Be realistic, but not fatalistic. The task is not impossible, but it is work. In time you will reach one goal and then another and another. There will be setbacks, but those are not an end. The goal is the end. And a beginning to the next one.

2. What are my goals?

This is critical because it will determine your pace and rhythm, but also because it will help you determine your approach at each stage of progress. What is important to remember is that the ultimate goal is not the goal you should have in the forefront of your mind.

Everything preserved is not the goal. Everything accessible is not the goal. Everything online is not the goal. Every catalog record completed is not the goal. These are too big, too nebulous, and too far down the line. Failure to reach those goals will feel like utter failure and will lead to a greater likelihood of giving up if you do not instead set your sights on the multiple successes along the way. Additionally, those goals are never really achievable. Preservation is a process, not an endpoint. Materials addressed in the past will need to be addressed again, perhaps before other untouched items. The entire collection will not be preserved at a single point. It will cycle through time and formats and caretakers.

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I’ll write in more detail about these ideas in the future, but as a brief example we can consider the selection of a metadata schema.

Where am I starting: Do you have existing data you need to map over, or are you starting from scratch? If you have existing data, in what form is it and where is it recorded? On paper? In a spreadsheet? In a legacy database? How will you get it out of that and into your new system? Does the data need a lot of refinement or is it already fairly clean?

What are my goals: Are you looking at creating a comprehensive finding aid or catalog records? Maybe EAD and MARC are a starting point, or they might be too heavy for your needs. Are you just looking for a quick turnaround to access so you can start making materials available, and then you’ll figure out fuller record sets later? You may want to focus on a minimal set that will achieve your goal, such as ID, author/creator, title, and media/object type. Are you planning for your records to be a part of something like Worldcat or is purely for internal purposes? You may need to conform more strictly to standards like MARC if the former. Are you mainly looking at creating an online portal for access? Consider what fields and types of information would best support researchers or the content.

The thing to keep in mind is that, in the end, it is not a short term goal you are looking at, but how the short term goals support longer term goals. For metadata we have to be aware that it will move in and out of systems and schemas as the collection grows and ages. Consider what will help achieve the need right now to start making things accessible sooner than later, but that will also be granular, portable, and consistent enough to support the next more ambitious goal and unforeseen goals of the future.

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This, then, despite my earlier urge to not focus on the ultimate goal, is the ultimate goal. How do we make our collections more accessible to a wider audience? How do we work through the budgets, the bureaucracy, the politics, the froofrah to achieve that goal as well that goal of having a satisfying and fulfilling career working in a field we love.

— Joshua Ranger

Are We Prepared For The Presidential Library Of The (Near) Future?

One has to assume that a major distrust of the shift to digital reformatting and preservation is the feeling that we’re merely redoing work that will need to be redone again when the next format comes along. This may be especially galling to those who fairly recently reformatted video or film to something like Digibeta, or are lamenting the trashing of a newspaper/journal collection in favor of microfilm. (Wait — film is the perfect format. What’s the problem here?)

Whatever the case, we have to face the fact that such shifts are a part of technology and our market economy. New formats are created and we need to figure out ways of dealing with them after the fact. Extensive research studies into guidelines and methodologies may not be completed until after the market and culture have already cycled through the solutions that result from the study. That may be the problem, or, honestly, our approaches to preserving various objects and formats may just be plain wrong or impractical from the get-go.

Two things here. First, we have to come to terms with the fact that this is the nature of research and development. Assumptions are frequently wrong. Interpretation is frequently wrong. We are frequently wrong.

It frequently seems as if within humanities based research projects we have so much more riding on the line — grants are few and far between, and failure amplifies the risk for future grants or for others denigrating the failed project and its progenitor. Unlike the sciences where one tests hypotheses that may result in as much value in being disproved as in being proven, it sometimes seems as if humanistic hypotheses, illogically, need to prove their originating thesis in order to not be considered a waste of time and money. Outcomes should not be based on proof or disproof, but on the generation of resources or knowledge useable by the originator and by others to adapt or generate new research and development.

This is where humanities has difficulty in competing with scientific research — the lack of a data set that can be shared and easily analyzed by others to verify or discover something new. In many cases assessment comes down to opinion. I think you are wrong or right, valid or invalid, beautiful or ugly.

This brings me to the second thing here. Or probably what should have been the first and only thing so I didn’t lose my readers. To wit, we need to make a greater effort to innovate means of access and preservation in advance of ingest of soon-to-be legacy formats. This doesn’t mean establishing protocols for things that don’t exist — though that may not hurt to do as some kind of advanced research project — but to prepare for the things that are new or coming down the pipeline before they are supplanted within the market or achieve a critical mass of adoption that makes their numbers overwhelming.

We’re playing catch up with websites, videogames, email, Jaz disks, and all manner of technology/formats that have existed for well over 30 years. There is an increasing need to funnel large amounts of resources to figuring out floppy disks and obsolete software like Wordstar. What if we had studied the problem in advance and been prepared for the piles of such materials now hitting archives? We knew these things existed and would eventually be a part of personal or institutional papers. Why did we wait?

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What has me thinking about this is President Obama’s inauguration this week. Many pundits lamented/reveled in the discussion of who would be campaigning in 2016 as soon as the 2012 election was over, but what we should be thinking about is what the presidential library of 2016 will look like. This is a big pain because (callback!) just over 3 years ago NARA released a report looking into the future of the presidential library model. While this was a great report, it had the misfortune of coming just before the Great Information Shift embodied by Obama’s presidency, while also being released in the midst of that presidency.

How are we going to represent the open data initiatives of the past four years? The online petitions? The use of Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter to communicate during campaigns and during his time in office? There has been much disappointment in liberal circles that the Change promised in the first campaign has not been achieved. Change if often not a noticeable shift, but gradual or imperceptible until much later. President Obama (and his campaign team) are the first to utilize social media and other information platforms in an organic, informed manner that does not seem to co-opt, pander to, or misunderstand those for whom such mediums are a natural and accepted part of contemporary life.

The recent restructuring of the Obama campaign infrastructure to a 501(c)4 points to this — the campaign has unprecedented email contacts and data and Likes
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to be the kingmaker in the new digital world. Obama’s library will need to represent this material and this material shift — which is very often database-driven and therefore ephemeral like a number of contemporary artworks — and present it in ways that are understandable and researchable. This may even mean creating a library environment that is not tied to a physical place, but itself is represented (at least in part) primarily online.

If we fail to represent the virtual ways in which the Obama presidency has changed American politics we will have lost a major piece of our history that extends well beyond the individuality of the man. If we fail to be prepared for representing this history, we will potentially lose materials or be many years (and many dollars) behind in accessing it. We cannot rely on something like a Facebook to preserve such things. We (the people) must be responsible and prepared.

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This may not have been the change we were looking for, but it is a lesson we needed, to recognize and accept cultural changes and not permit our prejudices to impede that acceptance. Digital content exists, and we need to take care of it. This does not mean ignoring the technologies of the past, but seeing their place — and ours — in the grand sceme of transition (read: human existence).

— Joshua Ranger

Failure Is A Part Of Success

Earlier this week I attended the Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO) Annual Meeting (#metrocon13). This year’s meeting — or, technically, last year’s meeting, as it was originally scheduled for the week that Hurricane Sandy landed and was understandably postponed — was an innovative new approach to the annual get-together. Rather than a centralized meeting with a parade of speakers in an auditorium, the meeting was set up as a conference. Along with morning and afternoon keynotes, throughout the day there were 30 minute blocks with five concurrent sessions featuring METRO members presenting about projects or initiatives their institutions have been working on.

This rapid, inclusive approach was informative and exhilarating. We were quickly exposed to projects and ideas without being overwhelmed or getting sleepy (a great boon for the post-lunch speakers!), given time to mingle and discuss, and then leapt back into the fray at whatever presentation caught our fancy. New York City and Westchester County have such a wealth of libraries, archives, museums, historical societies, etc., that even the opportunity for 25 panels in one day barely scratched the surface of what collections are out there and what people are doing.

And that is an energizing, elating thing, to see all the great projects coming out of collecting institutions that are making materials more accessible and more useable by the public. I would imagine that for the Solos out there or some smaller institutions the projects presented were inspirational or revelatory, because, heck, even for someone like myself who is lucky enough to visit or work with lots of different institutions the scope of what METRO members are doing is pretty amazing.

Equally inspirational to me was not just what people are doing but how they are approaching it. Namely, many projects were following a rapid release, responsive model that embraces the reality of failure, similar to many contemporary software development models. METRO Executive Director Jason Kucsma encapsulated this in his closing remarks by discussing METRO’s commitment to developing services and resources that are most effective to the largest segment of members. To him this means trying lots of different things at a smaller scale and then feeding those things that really resonate and catch on, but quickly identifying things that are not working and letting them “wither on the vine quietly”.

One of the projects that took this approach most to heart was the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum open data initiative. Perhaps obviously because it is data-centric, but still, by working with the museum curators to streamline the minimum number of fields necessary for a catalog record and determining what could be considered publicly releasable data, the Museum was able to increase the number of online records available for search and viewing 10-fold. This was followed by releasing their dataset on GitHub and opening it for anyone to analyze and play with, thus adding back to the knowledge about the collections as a whole and an understanding by the museum of their data and where there may be gaps or points of interest.

The New York Philharmonic Digital Archives is a much larger project that wouldn’t seem to be as nimble because of the massive scope and long history of the Philharmonic (they have records for all performances dating back to the opening in 1842!), but the approach is the same: Get what you have available out there and then keep adding to it in phases. Because the Philharmonic had such a complete and detailed performance database, they were able to publish that on the web, and then selected a period to start scanning and publishing programs and scores and photographs that would use that data, with plans in the future to start adding their audio and video content. Because at least some assets are available, they are able to track usage and get regular user-based requests for more assets to be scanned and released, thus underscoring the importance of the collections and need for continued funding. And much of the work has been done with open source software and workflows that are continually adjusted as new situations arrise.

Even non-tech projects are using an adaptive approach, as with the New York Archivists Roundtable Archives Education Institute, a program that brings together archivists and educators to discuss the use of archives in classrooms and to develop curriculum around it. Starting from scratch with the initial workshop, the NYART team has continued to refine and improve the program based on participant feedback and other input.

And I think this last example underscores and important point. These approaches are not really anything new and are not data-centric. As librarians and archivists and curators and information professionals and whatnot, we have always been focused on providing service to the public and providing care to our collections. There have been many large scale, paradigm shifting events in the past, such as the shifts to, and then away from, card catalogs. And there have been many changes to the ways that we provide access to the public or what services we provide them. These efforts are accomplished through phasing of projects, generating and responding to feedback, and lotsandlots of trial and error. The shift into the digital world does not change that and should not change our drive to try… and to fail.

Failure happens when you try, even within the crevices of success. The response to failure is not a binary of either keep trying or stop trying. There is a single response: What do I try next?

— Joshua Ranger

Saving And Archiving Are Not The Same

In my personal life I actively work against saving things. I actively work because it is difficult to not save. Because the opposite of saving is wasting or over-consumption, and those are amoral or unethical. Because there are many urges and compulsions to save. Because not saving involves making a decision, and decisions might be wrong or irreversible or just. too. much. effort.

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Why do we save? What is it that compels us?

Value
Monetization
Cultural heritage
Family history
Sentiment
Nostalgia
Ethics
Legal contraints
Mental issues
Expenditures made
Inertia
Just in case

Most likely it is a mix of these, a particolored profile of one’s psyche where the colors bleed and overlap, the dominant field not necessarily the most apparent or even visible at all. Experience, ego, shame, indecisiveness, dreams. These mesh and expand and shrivel and prompt the electrical impulses to save.

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Somewhere in here is a fuzzy line zigzagging the patchwork which the divides the reasons we save and reasons we tell ourselves (or potential funders) why we save or should save a particular thing.

We would prefer these to be noble. Sometimes the primary reasons are. Sometimes, though they may ultimately lead to noble seeming ends, the primary reasons are selfish, accidental, or pragmatic.

What matters then is not why we save but how we save. How we ensure that our stuff continues to exist into the future and continues in its ability to be saved by others in the future. This is archiving, not saving. It is the purposeful and controlled selection, arrangement, and documentation of materials, done in a way that is not overly burdensome to a future caretaker, and in a way that allows a future caretaker to continue using the materials and to easily pass them along to the next caretaker.

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It lacks romanticism, but that’s okay. It is work. It is what we do. It is why we are professionals and why archives matters. It is how we are professionals and how archives matter.

— Joshua Ranger

Are The Aesthetics Of Decay And The Aesthetics Of Preservation Compatible?

If decay is a beautiful thing, why are we working so hard to preserve all this archival material?

A facetious statement, perhaps, but an exaggeration that underscores the fact that aesthetics guide many of the decisions we make as archivists and preservationists. We may claim it is for research, or integrity, or, to use the European term, patrimony, but we have to admit that at the base of our decision-making and the actions we take is an aesthetic judgement of value, quality, and beauty. This fact tracks back through the history of preservation in the west at least into the 19th century, such as was expressed with the scrape / anti-scrape conflict that pitted restoration to an idealized original state against maintaining the existing state of a building and repairing it enough to remain standing as the most authentic preservation of cultural heritage.

Why really does this matter, however? We have things correct now with the way we preserve things, or at least we have identified the ideal we strive to attain.

No. We don’t. And we’ll never be close. We’ll never be close because aesthetic values are temporally and culturally — and even individually — bound. The choices we make are destined to be reassessed and found wanting by future generations — just as we have done — until a subsequent future generation reassesses the reassessment and deems our work worthy — just as we have done. It is the burden of culture, the burden of the past, the burden of progeny.

During the Bush II presidency the refrain was “History will judge us as correct”. They were right. At some point, to some degree, it will. And then it won’t. And then will. And then won’t. And then most people will forget why it even mattered.

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I think about this topic whenever I read things like Dave Kehr’s New York Times review of the Blu-ray release of Bill Morrison’s Decasia. The typical refrain that gets me, and that is oft-repeated by commenters and social media-sharers, is something along the lines of an I told you so Schadenfreude that film is the über-medium and digital is a false prophet.

This attitude seems odd in the context of a review of a work made up of clips from severely decayed film (that also happens to be releasing on a digital format). It also seems odd considering the many missteps that have occurred with film as a physical medium which have led to untold problems with preserving it.

But then again, it’s not odd, because much of Kehr’s review is predicated on a belief that because film decays in a way that may still be presentable, and because that decay is beautifully melancholy, film is far superior to digital formats that (according to him) cannot be viewed once damaged or degraded. An aesthetic judgement, to be sure, that is not really tied to the original cinematic works or their context, as well as one that ignores those who document and find beauty in the artefacting and decay of magnetic media and digital content, which, even if it’s not your bag, is still probably 1000x more pleasing than 90 minutes of pink, color-faded acetate.

I point this out not to say that Kehr is wrong — History will do that for me — but to understand or acknowledge how our personal biases influence us even in matters we believe are born out of logic or a studied lack of self-interest, whereas these approaches themselves are a part of aestheticized systems of thought steeped in the murk of history and ancient religions.

That said, okay, I now have to admit that Kehr is wrong. He is wrong in continuing the fetishization of decay and its inextricable link to archives. To me, this is on par with the dusty archive trope, the lost until a heroic researcher discovered it trope, and the temporal dissonance that older things are more well made and longer-lasting but anything over 30 years old is ready to crumble to dust if you try to do anything with it.

(Okay, that last is just a personal affront to the wounded ego of an aging soul.)

But maybe there’s something in that personal affront, something about the conflict of the decaying body housing the strengthening mind, about the degrading reel of film holding content that does not fade except in our memory. Even if its essence does not change, everything becomes something else over time, whether by nature or by our hand.

— Joshua Ranger

Tips on Archiving Family History

Our very own Bertram Lyons was asked to do a 3-part series for the New York Times Ask an Expert section back in 2013 when he worked at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. Read the questions he was asked and how he answered them.