As I read the articles for today’s lecture, the broad issues of digital stability and the magnitude of the flood of available materials immediately struck me. Every discipline is trying desperately to find ways of moving into the digital age. The comparison of collections of Pearl Harbor and 9/11 in the Cohen article were startling. That 30,000 websites, archived in less than 3 months following 9/11, comprise only one-thousandth (Cohen, p. 3) of the websites in existence during that time is simply mindboggling. Further, the amount of manpower needed to determine what is of enduring value is nearly impossible to imagine.
The issues with stability and technological obsolescence add greatly to the expense, especially in terms of manpower, of keeping the archives healthy and accessible. Just overseeing the copying and transferring of information to new technologies is a major undertaking and one that is growing in magnitude every day. This would seem to offer an opportunity for technologically savvy public historians: the determining of what is and what is not of enduring value. I just had a vision of thousands of rows of cubicles with frenzied public historians tapping on computer keyboards…nightmare! But seriously this could also be handled as a cottage industry with historians hired to page through millions of emails, documents, files, photos, etc. to determine which must be kept, what should be kept , and what is redundant or of no enduring value. When I took the Archives Class, one of the discussions we had was concerning the ‘enduring value’ of the boxes and boxes of ‘hanging chad’ ballots from the 2004 election that the archives are storing. This seemingly simple decision had, at least at the time of my class, not been decided leaving the State Archives in the position of having to store and care for a large and unused collection with dubious value to research. Brennan and Kelly discuss this same manpower issue from the standpoint of collection: they found they seriously underestimated how much time would be required to do things such as weed out spam, duplicates, and offerings that had nothing to do with the Katrina disaster.
The third article was particularly interesting because of our discussion yesterday concerning ‘edutainment’. Brown seems to be advocating exactly that: build a computer/digital game that teaches history. Comparing his work with the ideas associated with P. T. Barnum’s American Museum, Brown shows how mixing history with entertainment can produce a hybrid of both. His experience seems to show that the technology is available but that the real problems rest in the tendency of technology to limit or narrow the scope of the user’s choices. By requiring historical accuracy, the developers also limited the ‘fun’ of the user because the ‘answers’ were predetermined. I think this idea of combining gaming and history has a real plus from the standpoint of getting people to pay attention, but also has a real problem with maintaining historical accuracy.
That's an interesting idea of farming out digital archiving to private individuals. I certainly wouldn't mind getting some extra money for spending a few hours a week sifting through old websites. I just wonder viable such a system would be given the quality controls that most archives seek to enforce among their staff.
ReplyDeleteI do believe that access is important. However, I also believe that the traditional form will not die out. Thus, the traditional and the new media has to become a partnership. Access can be a tricky things because of presentation can alter or change initial intended use. So, limiting access, meaning not giving user all the images or photographs may be necessary.
ReplyDeleteRows and rows of public historians, typing away like stenographers - what an image! The amount of manpower needed to deal with digitization, as Brennan and Kelly discussed, is perhaps higher than we originally thought. I interned for an oral historian, and I've seen firsthand how quickly things pile up when you're dealing with technology; equipment breaks or needs to be updated or you need more space/memory. I thought the idea was for technology to make things easier!
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