Here at Musematic we are taking our fist blogging babysteps and we are still a little wobbly, like a toddler. Today we fell down and scraped our knee. Actually not entirely us, but there was a little bit of a burp with the database underlying WordPress that meant we lost some posts for a while. Most things are back in place and we’re back up on our feet.
Unfortunately it does look like we may have lost some of your comments that were recently posted. Thanks for the nice comments that folks have been posting elsewhere! Keep them coming!
While not the best way to get off on the right foot, I’m glad today’s hiccup happened before too much was lost. It underscores the fragility of what we do with technology and the need to be vigilant with backups and making copies. It also demonstrates the value of “Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe” approaches to digital preservation. If you haven’t heard about LOCKSS yet:
LOCKSS is open source, peer-to-peer software that functions as a persistent access preservation system. Information is delivered via the web, and stored using a sophisticated but easy to use caching system. Simply put, LOCKSS provides for Jefferson’s “multiplication of copies,” but with an electronic twist.
Right now LOCKSS is being used by library consortia and publishers to preserve online journal contents, but it would be interesting to see something similar developed among museums for backup of collections information. A museum LOCKSS project wouldn’t necessarily mean sharing your collections data with the public, but it would allow a copies to be stored by other partners in a private, distributed archive. Disasters such as Katrina have proven that offsite, but still regional, backup services are not always sufficient to prevent losses. I know I’d sleep better at night knowing there were many places to recover my data from, instead of the tape sitting in BTITG’s backpack.
April 20th, 2006 09:09
This is why I will always love the possibility of holding the physical printed book in my hands. As much as I love the Internet and its qualities of ubiquitousness and pervasiveness, I find myself always holding a little bit back due to that fear of ultimate loss. It reminds me of a poem I wrote in college (I usually refer to it as The Poem, since it was the only good piece I ever wrote in that genre) that was lost: it was saved on no disk or harddrive; my professor never returned the assignment and never found it again when I asked for it. In my heart of hearts, I know it was good (at least, my professor, a classics diehard, said it was), yet no one will ever know of it, or read it. It is perhaps a silly thing to contemplate, but it makes an excellent point: data is fragile. Perhaps it belongs in a museum. (Ha.)
April 24th, 2006 09:22
Books are a perfect example of “lots of copies keep stuff safe!” The Poem that you lost was a single manuscript, had it been published copies of it could be found distributed across many diffferent places (libraries, bookstoes, my bookshelf). Books, particularly books printed on acidic paper, also disappear, but on a longer timescale.
The reality is that we can’t make everything into a book for preservation. New media artists are creating works that require digital migration or emulation. The costs of converting billions of e-mail messages to paper are prohibative and other kinds of data just don’t make sense in analog formats (think of petabyte size astronomic data sets). Thankfully there are a number of intitiatives underway studying the problem, and hopefully offering solutions. I’ll be contributing more posts specifically about digital preservation issues and how they will impact the museum community.