[Personal_archives] Guidance for creators

Wed Apr 29 17:40:22 EDT 2009

Hi Yvette,

I have to respond to your message (even though I've promised myself I'm going to resist the temptation of responding during the day). Specifically, I want to say something about de-centralized storage. (Then I'm going to go back to work! Really! There are other points that deserve comments too, but you hit one of my favorite topics.)

There's something appealing about centralizing a personal archive, but I'm going to argue that there's no one right tool, and no one right repository (although I've gone back and forth about the topic myself, so this is an argument that comes out of arguing with myself at great length). Right now, people are putting their stuff in different places for different reasons, and I don't think that'll change-the reasons behind their choices are often social, not technical. They're similar to the reasons people establish different email identities or use Flickr and have separate photos in Facebook. Although I can picture there being technical reasons for de-centralization as well-the requirements I have for storing my medical records, my financial records, my photos, my unpublished short stories, my correspondence, and so on are all very different. I could develop a repository that could handle all of them, but it would make more sense to keep them de-centralized, so I can take advantage of different functionality, different guarantees, different provider policies, different levels of trust etc.

I understand your argument that these current decentralized copies are throw-away and you're talking about a reference copy living in a centralized archive, but that argument only works if the centralized archive is free or only the very highest-value material is in the centralized archive. The bulk of most people's stuff is in that ambiguous place of medium/medium-low value, and people won't pay to keep additional archival/reference copies. Serendipitously, some of this stuff will end up being very valuable to us over the course of time (ah-those candid snapshots where we were young and cute!), but because this value increase is unpredictable, most of us are willing to trust the incidental copies we keep to act as surrogates for real reference copies.

I know this isn't a very satisfying response-and I've gone back and forth about it a lot myself-but my current position is that centralization (which I agree is a more principled approach to personal archiving) means swimming against a strong tide.

That said, I'd love to hear rebuttals that challenge this-I might could be in a rut. (The double modal is an intentional Texas-ism, even though I'm a Californian)

best,
Cathy

P.S. I'm looking at the InterPARES guidelines-that deserves a separate response. It's a wonderful pamphlet.

From: personal_archives-bounces at mailman.yale.edu [mailto:personal_archives-bounces at mailman.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Hackett, Yvette
Sent: Wednesday, April 29, 2009 10:23 AM
To: personal_archives at mailman.yale.edu
Subject: Re: [Personal_archives] Guidance for creators

Hi everybody,

I've been lurking, hoping to find time to send a considered reply on one of the many interesting threads already started - but who has time for considered replies these days?

On the subject of advice for records creators, InterPARES 2 did create an advice document.  The impetus was the research done in the Arts (called Focus 1), where many individual artists were dealing with digital loss issues.  This is the link to the "pamphlet" version, which is quite fancy graphic-wise and may not open for many of you.  http://www.interpares.org/ip2/display_file.cfm?doc=ip2(pub)creator_guidelines_booklet.pdf

There is also a much plainer text version at http://www.interpares.org/ip2/display_file.cfm?doc=ip2_book_appendix_20.pdf.  I can't actually guaranty they're identical - too many versions!

And on the subject of why people don't practice safe recordkeeping - I would ask why so many people don't prepare wills.  I think organizing memories is a time-of-life kind of thing - like the realization that you too could actually die.  With most analog forms, the stuff is still there to organize when you are ready to do it.  With digital stuff, it is mostly lost.

I can't help being an archivist about this - I hate to see people move to "de-centralized storage".  I would argue that they don't use centralized storage yet because nobody has created the right tool.  In the end, it would be much easier if they considered a single storage mechanism for "master copies", and then thought of the many other distributed versions as, essentially, disposable, replaceable reference copies.

Yvette

Yvette Hackett
Archiviste de projet/Project Archivist
Direction des archives canadiennes et collections spéciales/Canadian Archives and Special Collections Branch
Secteur de la collection du patrimoine/Documentary Heritage Collection Sector
Bibliothèque et archives Canada/Library and Archives Canada
550, Place de la cité
Gatineau, Québec   K1A 0N4
yvette.hackett at lac-bac.gc.ca
(819) 934-7383
Gouvernement du Canada/Government of Canada
www.collectionscanada.gc.ca

________________________________
From: personal_archives-bounces at mailman.yale.edu [mailto:personal_archives-bounces at mailman.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Hobbs, Catherine
Sent: April 28, 2009 10:18 AM
To: personal_archives at mailman.yale.edu
Subject: Re: [Personal_archives] distinctions among user types andbenignneglect as stewardship mode
I guess I can't help but think that the whole issue of being able to relate fully to the document in order to be able to appraise, curate or destroy it has something to do with the inherent intagability of digital records.  Part of people not knowing what to do, shirking their responsibilities for weeding and arranging their digital assets might also have to do with the fact that these records do not reside in our world.  If they are deleted, it is like they never were.  We do not have to take out the garbage (or recycling), light a match and later clean up the mess.  They are easily ignored because they are not physically there, they are equally less easily missed because they were never physically here (although this might change with the advent of digital picture frames, for example).  The ease with which these records are created and manipulated gives them a further fluidity, unreality, replacability and perhaps even a sense of super-mundaneness.  They are a bit halucinatory and perhaps this is the way the human mind chooses to deal with proliferant physically unreal materials?  In this way, perhaps the computer crash is just a nightmare to get over.

________________________________
From: personal_archives-bounces at mailman.yale.edu [mailto:personal_archives-bounces at mailman.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Rodney Carter
Sent: April 28, 2009 9:56 AM
To: Cathy Marshall
Cc: personal_archives at mailman.yale.edu
Subject: Re: [Personal_archives] distinctions among user types and benignneglect as stewardship mode
The notion of neglect *as* stewardship is an interesting one and I think highlights the importance in understanding the psychology of records creators/keepers that Catherine flagged at the start of yesterday's discussion.

Certainly, for physical records, there are times when, despite any logical or rational argument for keeping something, after performing appraisal  on certain records and seeing no long term administrative, legal, or historical value there is a reluctance to destroy the documents. For records that are a significant age or fit into a personal interest this can often be the case. Anonymous photographs in my archives certainly have a home, despite my frequent inability to make a solid case for their archival value. Perhaps we rely on technological failures and fires & floods to make those hard choices for us. We cannot bear to get rid of the records ourselves but we know subconsciously that we'd be better off without them.

Heather D draws our attention to the connection of value to appraisal. The trouble we can get into, particularly when dealing with personal material that we cannot help but relate to subjectively, there is personal history in relation to the items which can lead to holding on to some material and hastily destroying others. Value, including archival value, can be said to be "radically contingent" (following axiologish Barbara Hernnstein Smith). In this articulation, the value resides neither wholly in the object nor in the viewing subject but arises as a product of the interaction of the subject and object at a particular moment in time. As the properties of the object change, as the psychological state of the subject shifts, and as the environment of that the interaction takes place in alters, the value will change over time. When weeding personal collections - I am thinking of boxes of memorabilia from highschool or college, for example - things that were of the utmost value at the time are of little or no value now, if not entirely meaningless as the context is forgotten. This process, what Cathy has highlighted as re-encountering, is, as she writes, much more difficult with digital artifacts. We perhaps are still tied to the tangible and it is much easier to delete a folder on the computer than it is to throw out a file of papers or photos in the physical world (at least for some - there are those who relish in "cleaning out their office" - four words that send shivers down my spine at work).

If we agree that value of records can shift over time, I am very interested to hear more about the idea of "intrinsic metadata" (from "Rethinking..." Pt. 2, end of section 2). Are there technological solutions to chart how things are used, moved and modified over time. Certainly this information would be wonderful to have for physical records as well, but if there are ways to have this information automatically generated all the better.
I'd like to thank Rick for his message and its detailed advice. I was certainly armed with more knowledge about "what to do in the case of..." than I was last thursday and armed with that I placed a call to the IT guys who were looking after things. Thankfully, it seems that the problem was not with the harddrive itself and I am told they were able to save the data and tranfer it to a new harddrive. We'll see what state my files are in when they arrive here in a few moments.

Which makes me return to what Cathy said about moving on after a fire. Speaking for myself, and others who are similarly tech-impaired, when a crash occurs or "something mysterious happens" and things disappear (I blame the gremlins in my computer) there is often a fatalism associated with it. We throw up our arms and say "what can we possibly do!?!? It is lost forever". We don't have the knowledge to even begin to know how to approach the situation, similar to what we would do in the face of a fire. Throw your arms up and move on and attempt to rebuild. Which, of course, makes the preventative measures all the more important. But I am wondering if the same fatalism prevails - harddrives crash, cds & dvds fail, ISPs go out of existence and take our data with them. I wonder if the focus can ever be put on data saving measures in a positive light, particularly when there are folks who capitalize on generating fear in order to sell back up devices and services.

In a distributed storage model that Cathy highlights there is even more difficulty as people must not only be worried about local harddrives but things "in the cloud" as well.

Sorry if this was a bit all over the place. A great deal going through my head this morning.

All the best

Rod

On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 10:24 PM, Cathy Marshall <cathymar at microsoft.com<mailto:cathymar at microsoft.com>> wrote:

Hi all,
[...]

Rodney-I'm sorry to hear about your recent crash-I'm going to say something now, and I'm curious what you'll think about it:

I've noticed a somewhat puzzling pattern: people seem to be relying on disk crashes, technology failure, and periodic obsolescence as a way of pruning their collections. It's not that loss doesn't bother them; it's rather that loss makes their collections more tractable. The accumulated weight of these digital belongings is swept away, so that the home computer users can focus their attention on the present. This cycle of accumulation and accidental loss might underlie explanations that consumers offer for failing to backup their computers. In the end, people may be unhappy about data loss, but they shrug it off, all too frequently saying exactly the same thing:

"I mean, if we would've had a fire, you just move on."

All for tonight. Let me know what you think.

best,

Cathy

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