Preserving "June and Art"

With all due modesty, I think the “June and Art” blog is worthy of preservation.  Not only is it about my family’s history but it is also now a new creation of the family.  Although composed of memories of the past, it’s something new in the world and therefore a worthy addition to our family collection.

“June and Art” is a limited-duration blog.  Hosted on Google Blogger, “June and Art” was launched on September 25, 2010 and will conclude on September 1, 2011.  I asked Tom Clareson , Senior Consultant for New Initiatives at LYRASIS, and Leigh A. Grinstead, Digital Services Consultant at LYRASIS, for their advice on how to preserve a blog such as this.  Their response has forced me to think deeper about my own intentions.  This isn’t as simple a situation as I might have hoped.  Here’s what they shared:

“When I think about digital preservation the first question I have for anything is whether it is the content you are trying to preserve, or the format of that content? If it is the content then you probably have copies of the entries that you have created. If it is the context, I would read your user agreement with Google to see what kind of ‘preservation’ approach and services they may offer.

“Most commercial hosting services are interested in providing access to digital materials – and their business model is not based on providing an archival service or preservation of these files. However, many companies are beginning to think about digital preservation. So, if your material appears on a hosted site you can ask to see what level of archival or preservation service they guarantee, and if they offer a fee for some level of archiving.

“For anything that’s posted on public spaces, you will also want to think about keeping a personal copy at hand.”

These responses were especially helpful in clarifying my own desires for the blog’s preservation.  While the blog’s content is important and I have it saved in several formats and locations, I want to save the context, too, and this may require a greater investment.

© 2011 Lee Price

Prepared for Loss

I have floppy discs in my house that are genuinely floppy.  I probably haven’t owned a computer that could play them for over twenty years.  Nevertheless, I saved these floppy discs and now have no idea what’s on them.  If, by chance, I ever find an antique computer that can play them, I have no assurance that the data would still be accessible.

Built-in obsolescence seems to be the nature of the world.  Just as we’re not wired to last forever, neither are computers and all their electronic relatives.  At some point, it’s probably best to accept this – and learn to work around it.

I asked Tom Clareson , Senior Consultant for New Initiatives at LYRASIS, and Leigh A. Grinstead, Digital Services Consultant at LYRASIS, for advice about how to address issues of obsolescence.  I think what I really wanted was a strategy for keeping my preserved records up-to-date, accessible, and safe.  Their response is actually fairly hopeful, but it looks like it will take some conscientious effort, too.

“Museums, libraries and archives have tried to keep appropriate playback equipment in working order and most institutions are unable to do it.  Keeping your old digital cameras and the data cards on hand is one approach, but hardware manufacturers deliberately build in obsolescence.  The best plan is to keep backup copies in multiple formats, send a copy to a family member in a different region of the country, store a copy on your hard drive at home, and/or, for your most important items, keep them on a drive in a safe deposit box, as well as backups in ‘the Cloud.’

“You should attempt to keep both your software and operating systems up-to-date.  Keeping your images in multiple formats, both electronic and print for example, may also be helpful.

“Also, it is wise to plan ahead for potential disasters.  This spring, we have seen so many examples of entire communities affected by floods, storms, and devastating tornadoes.  In instances like this, people who have organized their materials and electronically saved them off-site using one of ‘the Cloud’ services (like Dropbox) will be able to access their materials again, even if all their computers, phones, still cameras, video cameras, and scrapbooks are gone.”

For additional information on digital preservation, Leigh reminds us of one of the very best sites on the web:  “The Library of Congress has been working in the area of digital preservation for a long time and has been developing materials for the public some of which are described at their Digital Preservation page.  During preservation week (the first week of May) they presented a Preserving Your Personal Digital Memories webinar that was very interesting and worth visiting.”

© 2011 Lee Price

The Digital Legacy

Many internet users assume that our digital record becomes more-or-less permanent, with our every spontaneous comment permanently lodged into an ethereal archive.  Personally, I think it’s highly likely that our most embarrassing personal moments really are permanently carved into cyberspace.  Now I only wish I had faith that all the good things will be preserved, too.  In my pessimism, I tend to assume that the worst will be preserved and the best will be lost.

In my discussion with Tom Clareson , Senior Consultant for New Initiatives at LYRASIS, and Leigh A. Grinstead, Digital Services Consultant at LYRASIS, I asked about intentional efforts to preserve these new records of our lives.  After a loved one dies, how can we best preserve their digital legacy:  their e-mails, Facebook page, YouTube videos, website, etc.?  It turned out that I was pushing the envelope with this line of inquiry.  These are areas that the experts are still wrestling with:

“Thinking about YouTube videos, it is likely that the creator probably still has movie files on a computer hard drive and those can be copied and migrated forward over time.  The videos that appear on YouTube are highly compressed and it would be best to keep the first generation file and try to preserve that rather than trying to keep the public or ‘access version.’

“The Library of Congress has just entered into a landmark agreement with Twitter to archive all Twitter feeds.  But for other social media, like Facebook, there are enormous privacy issues associated with the material that is being created. Each Facebook account is set up with unique user agreements about who can see what material so the likelihood that Facebook pages could be archived in the

same way that Twitter feeds are to be archived is very unlikely.

“Facebook posts and other social media forms are ephemeral in nature.  As creators and family historians, I think we need to ask ourselves what it is that we are truly trying to capture with this information.  For the YouTube materials, you might have access to the movie file but for other social media forms, this really is the web archiving frontier.”

© 2011 Lee Price

Preserving the Memorial

My sister Jamie made a beautiful Windows Moviemaker memorial that celebrated the life of her husband through family photographs and a soundtrack of some of the meaningful songs of his life.  Jamie saved the memorial on a bunch of DVDs.  A year later, some of the DVDs work fine but others won’t play on any of our computers.  Their content is already inaccessible.

I presented this situation to Tom Clareson , Senior Consultant for New Initiatives at LYRASIS, and Leigh A. Grinstead, Digital Services Consultant at LYRASIS.  I’m sure everyone’s had the experience of unexpectedly losing unsaved material when there’s a sudden loss of power or other glitch.  That’s to be expected (and a good reminder to save frequently).  However, it is very disconcerting to lose material that feels like it has been permanently saved.

Tom and Leigh started by reminding me that DVDs were never built to be long-term storage containers.  “DVDs, like CDs and flash drives, are all excellent media for the transportation of digital files from one computer to another.  But any electronic file that you want to retain access to long term is something that should be put on a hard drive.  That hard drive should be backed up, and for home use those files should be backed up in multiple places.

“So, another family member in a different region of the country, (at least on a different power grid) may also keep a copy on their hard drive at home. You should also consider a back up in ‘the Cloud’ – commercial services like Dropbox that truly store your data ‘off site.’ Now, any commercial system could disappear overnight, so having multiple copies in a stable file format is the best chance you have to preserve the data long term.”

© 2011 Lee Price

Born-Digital Material

The composition of a family collection changes over time.  From the mid-1800s forward, photographs enter family collections, initially posed in black-and-white.  Kodak’s Brownie box revolutionized cameras in the early 1900s, introducing the spontaneity of snapshots.  Color photography emerged early but took a long time to move into the mainstream of family collections.  Then you hit the 1970s, the era of the Polaroid.

Now everything is digital.  Digital is VERY different.  However, while items like digital images (and digital videos, websites, Facebook pages, etc.) may require very different storage than photographs, their preservation needs will still need to be addressed.  Eventually you’re going to want to ensure that our new media is adequately preserving a record of our lives.

Over the next two weeks, I will be sharing a discussion with Tom Clareson, Senior Consultant for New Initiatives at LYRASIS*, and Leigh A. Grinstead, Digital Services Consultant at LYRASIS, about the nature of born-digital preservation.  As the term “born-digital” is a new one,  I started at the beginning, asking them to define it.

“Born-Digital material is something that has not existed in another format or hard copy before. It’s produced or captured in a digital format first—a letter typed directly in Word, rather than being handwritten.  A family photograph taken with a digital camera, an oral history shot on a digital movie camera—or, an event captured on a cell phone, like the images of tornados shot from a front porch.  These are all examples of 'born-digital' materials. What cultural heritage institutions (Museums, Libraries, Archives, Special collections and Historical Societies) have done over the years is to work with their staff, and volunteers to adopt best practices for image and audio capture.  File formats like PDF-A, TIFF or RAW files, and WAV files are all standard, stable, non-compressed formats that have been around for a long time.  They have been adopted by numerous institutions and institutions know how to deal with these files.

“When cultural heritage institutions receive smaller jpg files or mp3 files, depending on the material and its importance, they may convert the file into a TIFF or WAV file.  But not all files justify the time, or the storage space.  For a home environment, you might take only a few of your most important images and save them as TIFF files.

“If I consider myself the family historian, when it

becomes time to invest in a new camera, that is when I would invest in a higher-end digital SLR camera that can capture in TIFF or RAW so that moving forward I have digital files that will be easy to maintain in the future.

“The Library of Congress has been working in the area of digital preservation for a long time and has been developing materials for the public some of which are described at their Digital Preservation page.  During preservation week (the first week of May) they presented a Preserving Your Personal Digital Memories webinar that was very interesting and worth visiting.”

*  The nation’s largest regional non-profit membership organization serving libraries, LYRASIS helps libraries operate more effectively by providing expanded access to valuable resources and professional expertise in content creation and management.

© 2011 Lee Price