The Coming Global Digital Super-pocalypse™

Are all these tricks and tools a curse and not a blessing?  Jerome P. McDonough says in a Science Daily article on the subject, that our reliance on digital will render vast amounts of data unusable in a relatively short period of time.  While its easy to whip up hysteria by pointing to the possible loss of 369 exabytes worth of data, its also perhaps a bit misleading.  The problems of digital preservation seem to mostly be problems of willpower and foresight, not technology.  Like any analog format, if a record is not kept in a controlled and meticulous way, then it may not survive.  What is not even calculable is the innumerable "exabytes" of paper records that do not survive for this very reason.

Image courtesy of Kent State University

What is surprising when discussing problems in digital preservation is the potential ease of their solubility.  Compared to the shear effort taken in physically maintaining a massive collection of say, microfilm, with temperature and  possible toxic waste concerns, the updating of file formats seems to be relatively easy.  The problem of course is doing so en masse to a large collection without losing metadata or quality.  But those problems will be solved as the rest of the field technically evolves.  All in all, despite real problems, I predict a bright future in the realm of digital preservation.

Image courtesy of the Polar Bear Expedition Digital Collection

The Polar Bear Expedition Digital Collections project was designed to present information about and digitized documents relating to the Polar Bear Expedition of 1918 in Russia.  As well as that basic task, it was also designed to track what was useful in building future online archives.  Using web analytics to track user choices, the Polar Bear collection came to some conclusions about user interaction.  With a simple comment feature, the site enabled users to suggest corrections and give further information about specific items.   Bookmarking, which seems somewhat redundant in a world where every browser has that ability, was less successful.  An attempt was made to replicate Amazon.com's link suggestion system, but many of the users did not even notice it.  The biggest flop was a login system, the failure of which Magia Ghetu Krause and Elizabeth Yakel would attribute to the sites newness and lack of a large user base.  The lack of any login system on the sites modern main page would seem to indicate that it was not to be.  This is likely a result of "login overload" that many internet users were feeling a few years ago, when every site wanted to be the new "myspace."  The most important feature and only reason for the site's existence, the digital collection itself, was deemed "very important" by 5 of 6 surveyed users.  One user marked it "very unimportant", confirming again my own personal theory that between 10-20% of any given survey have no idea what they are doing.

Image courtesy of the Polar Bear Expedition Digital Collection

The site today, seen above, seems a bit dry and lacking in a presentational flair that many sites have since attempted.  But it stands as an important step in the creation of academic web archives.