Introduction
Time, when it made you and me the
Person of the Year on Christmas 2006, challenged Thomas Carlyle’s theory
that history is shaped by the powerful and the famous. It pinpointed Web
2.0 technology as the driver of a revolution, in which we are “citizens
of a new digital democracy.” Everyone with a digital camera, it said,
now has the power to change history. The Web 2.0 world is a massive
social experiment that could fail. It may have reinvented democracy, but
at what cost to democracy? [1]
While Web 2.0 may be the new driver, the
revolution actually began in 1975 when we turned away from the pen and
the typewriter and started buying personal computers.
How do we view personal
digital practices and preservation now? And, more importantly, how are
libraries, archives and museums tackling information on private
computers and in the cloud?
A 2010
perspective
Over the past three years, digital data and
its consumption have continued to expand. There are now more than 1
billion PCs in the world, a number that is expected to grow to 2 billion
by 2014.[2]
There are about 45 gigabytes of digital information for every person on
the planet. By 2011, this is expected to grow ten-fold and it will
expand by a factor of 10 every five years. [3]
In 2008, Americans spent 12 hours a day consumed information outside
working hours. Reading, which was in decline because they were looking
at too much television, tripled from 1980 to 2008 because reading is the
overwhelmingly preferred way to process ideas on the Internet.[4]
Web 2.0 tools and
services have proliferated. Facebook has outstripped MySpace in
popularity. Bloggers, like one-day cricketers attracted to Twenty20
circuses, have become twitterers. Wikipedia and YouTube have become
routine aids for many readers and viewers.
The value of the Web 2.0 world
My thick file of press
clippings on Web 2.0 topics contains items from a number of broadsheets
that read as though they were meant for the tabloids. Social media sites
and services are addictive and vindictive. They are playgrounds for the
narcissistic. They are tools for stalkers and paedophiles. Although they
can create friendships, they inhibit real friendships. They are brimming
with inanity. You can even use them to find your next date – if you are
at an age when finding your next date is more important than being
satisfied with your old one or settling down with a good book.
John Fowles, author of
a string of notable literary best sellers and curator of the Lyme Regis
Museum, once wrote that “a diary is a place you can write the things you
dare not say in public, a place where you are free to vent your anger,
frustration and prejudice, no matter how unreasonable those feelings
might be.” And, quoting William Boyd, he observed that “No true journal
worthy of its name can be published while the author is alive. Only a
posthumous appearance guarantees the prime condition of honesty.”[5]
But Elizabeth Farrelly detects a shift in the attitudes of younger
generations in her observation that the internet is a place for a new
kind of exhibitionism, a place “where young people are willing to expose
failures and vulnerabilities to an unfiltered, even hostile audience.”[6]
Social media
technologies can lead to wasted time. In fact, knowledge management
pioneer, Tom Davenport says they are among the greatest time wasters of
the age.[7] John
Freeman proffers a reason: the simulated busyness of email addiction is
actually numbing an inner pain. The internet is not a world unto itself,
he reminds us, but a supplement to our existing world. Trading the
complicated reality of friendship for a vacuum-packed idea is not a good
idea. Context matters, so if electronic communication has stopped
providing it, we should turn back to the real world for a solution and slow down.[8]
Some feel social media
will do irrevocable damage to mainstream media. They fear that
newspapers will lay off experts in the face of competition from
bloggers. Citizen journalists mainly use, at no cost, regurgitated news
from old media. Hardly any of them break news themselves. If mainstream
media begins retrenching skilled journalists, the rot will have set in.
In debunking the value
of social media, some predict that a preoccupation with it will cause
the decline of civilisation. John Freeman laments the fact that we are
turning the “once-eloquent art of writing into a behaviour that
encourages a torrent of self-absorbed output at the expense of
introspection.”[9]
Ben McIntyre agrees: real storytelling is being drowned out and we are
being led into an anorexic form of culture.[10]
Andrew Keen, while acknowledging that the Web has increased the
availability of knowledge hugely in our favour, says the views of the
expert do trump the collective wisdom of amateurs: “although it is
enticing to believe that online diaries are empowering, the hype is
dangerous.”[11]
But, if we turn to the
internet itself – to Wikipedia – we find a semblance of balance. The
internet and social media have made possible entirely new forms of
interaction, activities and ways of organising things. They have
generated new forms of leisure. They have been successfully used in
political campaigning and government communication, in education, in
emergencies, in public relations, in gathering opinion, in space
exploration. Jonathan Zittrain, professor of Internet law at Harvard Law
School leans towards a positive view: "the qualities that make Twitter
seem inane and half-baked are what makes it so powerful."[12]
And George Megalogenis, in a recent piece about its use in political
contexts, sums it up this way: “The content may be banal, but these are
the conversations that will define an era and help decide the next
election."[13]
Personal habits
Personal habits are
changing. In the age of the digital camera, the story of almost everyone
can be more easily captured from birth to death. Ordinary people have
mounted the same stage as the famous. There are fewer degrees of
separation. Websites have replaced gravestones.[14]
In the old days, the
famous scribbled away during their lifetime and their jottings were
published after their death. If Jane Welsh Carlyle, George Orwell,
Philip Larkin and John Fowles had lived in a Web 2.0 world, would their
diaries and letters have been as revealing if they had joined Facebook?
If the reclusive Stanley Kubrick had been born in 1948 instead of 1928,
would he have still left behind the goldmine of his one thousand boxes?
And, if Emily Dickinson had lived between 1986 and 2042, would she have
published in her lifetime all 1775 poems, instead of the seven that
reached the public arena before she died in 1886?
Helen Mirren’s recent
autobiography highlights richness in the way lives are now presented as
digitally-produced products. Images in the book – happy snaps and
professional photos – are accompanied by pictures of letters, family
trees, school compositions, wartime ration cards, houses lived in,
theatres performed in, press clippings and travel documents.[15]
The biographer has become curator and exhibitor.
Every person has a
story to tell. Every town has a Diaspora of prodigal sons and daughters.
My own scrapbooks, now with digitised memorabilia, have family trees,
the photographs of immigrant antecedents, old houses, old schools, past
teachers, fellow students whose names have been forgotten, community
theatre programs and influential record covers. But they also contain
unique images and text, not yet captured in public institutions, about
notable Australian artists, writers and entertainers. A relatively
unimportant digital photograph of me in a winning suburban cricket team
during the mid-1960s is somehow now retrievable from a regional library
via the internet. But a more important photograph of William Dobell at
an Awaba children’s summer camp during the mid-1950s, taken with my Box
Brownie, is only available in my personal scrapbook. Anomalies of
significance are no doubt echoed around the country.
Managing personal
information employs established principles, processes, values, skills
and tools as new products arrive for organising, analysing, evaluating,
conveying and securing information and using them to collaborating with
others.
 |
| George Washington from Archiving
Early America www.earlyamerica.com |
The methodical George
Washington kept, from the age of fourteen, every scrap of paper
belonging to him and carefully arranged and preserved them. Washington’s
life, says Paul Johnson, is the best documented of any spent in the
entire eighteen century, anywhere.[16]
Two centuries later, it still comes down to method and tools. Few of us
are as organised as Washington. Technology helps us to think
structurally. But it also encourages sloppy methods.
William Jones has
written that, at the centre of method, is making a decision about what
to keep, but making such a decision is fundamentally difficult to do.
Too much information can be nearly as bad as too little information. He
observed that although we are nearing the limits of what can be done to
reduce the costs of keeping, we have only just begun to explore the
potential to reduce the likelihood of keeping mistakes.[17]
As Richard Nixon and Godwin Grech discovered, keeping too much
information can lead to unexpected disaster.
Catherine Marshall says
we flirt with digital brinkmanship. Digital loss has a tendency to be an
all-or-nothing proposition. People don't lose just a few of the baby
pictures of their first child; they lose all of them. She calls
for a radical revision of the way we approach personal digital
archiving. We need to question casual assumptions about the security and
accessibility of information stored in the cloud. We need a combination
of services and mechanisms that will make it possible to designate which
of our digital things are the most valuable. We need to organise the
rest of them into tractable archives that reflect the value of items and
to not spend all kinds of extra time taking care of them. While it is
seductive to envision a single venue – storage in the cloud – “it is
more important to know what we have and where we've put it than it is to
centralize all of our stuff into a single repository.”[18]
Individuals
in organisations
Old notions about
public information are changing.
The Australian
Government 2.0 Taskforce report and a series of supplementary reports
published in 2009 examine the potential use of Web 2.0 technologies by
governments, and by extension, other sorts of organisations. Its broad
recommendations emphasise leadership, policy and governance to achieve
shifts in public sector culture and practice, the application of web 2.0
collaborative tools and practices, and greater open access to public
sector information. This approach will “make democracy more
participatory and informed, improve the quality and responsiveness of
services, deliver services with greater agility and efficiency, unlock
the economic and social value of information as a precompetitive
platform for innovation, and make government policies and services more
responsive to people’s needs and concerns."[19].
Some of the supporting
documents contain analysis to tempt a devil’s advocate.
Economic arguments for
implementing change point to existing poor information management
practices and to the potential for increased productivity. Professor
John Quiggin, one of the project’s authors, observes that most
Australian cultural institutions, including libraries, archives and
museum, have implemented digitisation strategies as ‘unfunded mandates’,
and in the face of budget constraints, most have opted for some form of
cost recovery, despite the potential for greater social benefit from a
free, publicly financed approach. Our devil’s advocate might quibble
with this if he has a different view on priorities for taxpayer-funded
programs.
On the preservation of
Web 2.0 content, the report urged a more expansive view of information
management, clearer guidelines for capturing appropriate records from
social media, and further exploration of recordkeeping in crowd-sourcing
projects and engaging with the cloud. In supporting the proposition that
more prominence be given to metadata, it pleaded for a ‘layered
approach’ to make up for the lack of comprehensive metadata and for
simpler metadata sets to overcome what it calls “metadata paralysis”. It
also pointed to past recordkeeping failures and it lays some blame at a
“lack of leadership by information management professionals in
remedying” these failures.
In assessing the
report’s observations, our devil’s advocate might ask whether “metadata
paralysis” is real or imagined. He might ask whether “simpler metadata
sets” are less important than the application of more rigorous
vocabularies. And he might question whether information management
professionals are inhibited not so much by their attributes as by other
factors. The records management business is more about being methodical
than taking great risks. Most information professionals, including
record managers, will find leadership a difficult call because, as
middle managers, they dance to someone else’s tune. In public sector
circles, responsibility lies with the CEO.
The taskforce chairman,
Nicholas Gruen, in a separate piece about the report, highlighted recent
engagement with Web 2.0 opportunities outside the public sector. Firms
are successfully adapting aspects of volunteerism to their own
organisational structure, policy formulation, and bureaucratic
processes. Formal status is not as important as it was in the past.
Google and the software maker Atlassian allow employees to spend one day
a week on projects that may bring benefits to the firm. The workers are
free to choose. However, although greater recognition of volunteer
contributions can create many organic possibilities and unexpected
associations, there are productivity questions. Introducing ‘Google
time’ by edict into the public service may reduce productivity. The
Taskforce report therefore has recommended an incremental approach in
encouraging staff to experiment and enhance their agencies’ worth.[20]
Responses by cultural heritage institutions
Libraries, archives and museums, if we
discount policies and legislation relating to digital recordkeeping by
governments, have been gnawing at the problem of dealing with digital
lives for the best part of a decade. What are some of the efforts that
attempt to advance solutions?
In the United Kingdom
Personal Archives
Accessible in Digital Media (PARADIGM) was a JISC-funded project by the
university libraries of Oxford and Manchester. It reviewed selected the
practices of working politicians in the search of ways to harmonise
acquisition of digital personal archives with traditional archival
processes.[21]
The project report,
published in March 2007, makes recommendations revolving around
development of roles, skills, standards, and more effective engagement
with creators of records. The project workbook has sections on
collection development, working with record creators, appraisal and
disposal, administrative and preservation metadata, arranging and
cataloguing digital and hybrid archives, digital repositories, digital
preservation strategies, and legal issues. The appendices include a
number of useful tools include a model gift agreement, guidelines for
creators of personal archives, creating screenshots, capturing directory
structures, harvesting websites with Adobe Acrobat Professional 7.0,
exporting email from Microsoft Outlook email clients and other useful
information.
The Digital Lives
Research Project, set up at the end of 2007 with funds from the Arts and
Humanities Research Council, brought together staff from the British
Library, University College London and University of Bristol, under the
leadership of Dr Jeremy Leighton John.[22]
To address the paucity
of research in this area, the project posed a series of questions to
guide its work on personal digital collections. What are the
implications of digital obsolescence and ephemeral media for the
transfer of personal digital collections from individuals to long-term
repositories? Do we need to be more pro-active? Can we develop better
guidance, toolkits and services for individuals to ensure preservation
before transfer? Should we explore methods for continuous capture of
collections over individual lifetimes? How should we address hybrid
personal collections of digital and traditional media? Are there new
organisations acting as intermediaries for managing and publishing
personal digital collections?
The project held an
international conference at the British Library in February 2009. It
published a discussion paper by Andrew Charlesworth on the legal and
ethical issues in October 2009. A final report, initially due in June
2009, and was published in February 2010, after this article was
written.[23].
In lieu of the report, the following commentary draws on recent articles
and presentations by Jeremy Leighton John and other project personal.
In an article published
in April 2008, reporting the findings of interviews with creators of
personal digital personal collections, John and his colleagues
highlighted the high risk of losing “whole swathes of personal, family
and cultural memory.” Previous research relating to personal information
management, they noted, had been fragmented by application and device.
It has focussed on email, the internet and paper of electronic retrieval
rather than broader issues.[24]
Personal practices associated with
managing personal digital archives are extremely complex, they said, and
few patterns had emerged from the interviews conducted during the
initial stages of the project. There were significant differences in
methods and places of storage, familiarity and expertise with hardware
and software. There were widespread differences in perceptions about the
meaning of personal digital collections and about issues surrounding
their preservation. There was widespread misunderstanding about what is
created or stored online and what is created or stored offline,
particularly email. Some respondents did not know whether their messages
were stored on their own computer or remotely. There was also ambiguity
about the meaning of ‘back-up’, ‘storage’ and ‘archive’. There were a
number of questions to be explored in the remaining term of the project.
What do people want and expect to happen to their digital collections at
the end of their lives? What motivates people to share digital files
during their lives? And which types of files do individuals share (and
not share but retain) and in what circumstances?
For curators and archivists, there is
unlikely to be a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to personal digital
collections. It will be important for to be able to deal with and advise
on multiple storage media and file formats. Recordkeeping tools may be
helpful providing they offer flexibility in supporting individual
requirements. Educating the creators of digital records on a range of
issues will be needed.
In Adapting Existing
Technologies for Digitally Archiving Personal Lives, John examined
technical issues around the transfer of information on superseded media
to new media. He explored the use of software and hardware from the
forensic, ancestral computer and bioinformatic communities – such as
Forensic Toolkit, Macintosh Forensic Suite, Back Track, Coroner’s
Toolkit and many other applications. It is essential, he said, that we
not to rely on any single technology for digital capture and to continue
the process of exploring, adopting and adapting this technology.[25]
And in
another more recent article, he and others working on the project, after
acknowledging that little is still known about what people do and why
they do it, explored a information lifecycle approach.[26]
In the United States
The OCLC Online
Computer Library Consortium’s project, Sharing and Aggregating Social
Metadata, focuses on the cloud. Features of social media sites under its
scrutiny include the use of tags, controlled vocabularies, comments,
annotation and reviews, ratings, lists, images and video, articles,
links, filtering, and policies. Under the leadership of Karen
Smith-Yoshimura, the project includes representatives from universities,
public libraries, museums and historical societies, including Rose
Holley from the National Library of Australia. Aspects being explored
revolve around site objectives, measures of success, best practices,
moderation, and attempts by cultural institutions to integrate social
metadata into formal taxonomies. A report is anticipated in early 2010.
Smith-Yoshimura, in
presentations about the project at the RLG Partners Annual Meeting in
June 2009 and the OCLC Digital West Forum in September 2009 offered
preliminary observations on work already undertaken.[27].
There are a great variety of sites. Success appears to be tied to the
objective and the type of audience, not necessarily traffic. They appear
to be of value in leveraging a “sense of community.” Some sites are
heavily moderated, others are not moderated. Institution-specific sites
have fewer contributions than aggregate sites. Tags contributed at
network level are of more value. Tagging is most useful when there is no
existing metadata. Success depends on a critical mass and a sense of
community. Some promising areas include the use of sites like Flickr to
identify “mystery photos” and provide context, CommentPress for
translating, transcribing digitised documents in different languages and
scripts, and the integration of user corrections, as used in Flickr
commons, Minnesota Historical Society’s WOTR (Write on the Record) site,
and the UK National Archives site, Your Archives.
The list of social
metadata sites being reviewed by the working group can be viewed at
http://oclcresearch.webjunction.org/social_metadata. Among the sites
are prominent services like Amazon, Flickr Commons and Wikepedia.
International library, archive and museum sites and projects include the
British Library’s Archival Sound Recordings, Netherlands Institute for
Sound and Vision, Polar Bear Expedition Digital Collections, Science
Museum of Minnesota’s Science Buzz, The Social OPAC, Steve (the Museum
Social Tagging Project), Ancestry’s World Archives Project, and WorldCat.
Australian and New Zealand sites include Archives New Zealand Audio
Visual Wiki, the National Library of Australia’s Argus Index 1870-1879,
Auckland War Memorial Museum’s Cenotaph Database, the Australian
Newspapers beta, Historic Australian Newspapers, 1803-1954, Digital NZ,
Mariners and Ships in Australian Waters of State Records NSW, Auckland
Museum’s Memory Maker site, Picture Australia, the Powerhouse Museum,
and State Library of Queensland.
In addition to these
sites, investigators of the subject may be interested in Archives
Outside (http://archivesoutside.records.nsw.gov.au/),
Now and Then (http://www.nowandthen.net.au/), a site that gathers
material about the small South Australian township of Mallala, and
Museum of Victoria’s site, Collectish (http://www.collectish.com/).
In July 2009, the
Library of Congress National Digital Information Infrastructure and
Preservation Program launched a pilot program to test cloud technologies
for preserving digital content. The pilot will focus on a new service,
DuraCloud, to be developed and hosted by the DuraSpace Foundation. The
New York Public Library and the Biodiversity Heritage Library are among
participants. The test will cover both storage and access services,
including services that span multiple cloud- storage providers. The
program will focus on providing trusted solutions for organisations such
as universities, libraries, cultural heritage organisations, research
centres and others who are concerned with ensuring perpetual access to
their digital content.[28]
In February 2010, the
Internet Archive organised a conference on personal archiving and has
established a website at
http://www.personalarchiving.com/ to attract further conversations
on the subject.
In Australia
Another Australian site
listed by OCLC Group is the Community Created Content Project of
National and State Libraries Australasia (NSLA),[29])[29],
a project in NSLA’s strategic plan Re-imagining Libraries, with
programs relating to e-resources, virtual reference, document supply,
new work environments, collaborative collecting, collection management,
economic issues, and metadata. The Community Created Content project
sets out to develop a sustainable framework for individuals and
communities to build personalised digital library spaces where they can
create, tag and protect content and share it with family, peers and
groups and feeding that content into community, institutional and
preservation repositories.
As an initial step Paul
Reynolds, Adjunct Director of the National Library of New Zealand and
Managing Director of Mcgovern online media, has produced the discussion
paper NSLA Project Five: the Project @ April. This proposed a set
of online tools and web services designed to leverage knowledge assets
within the web ecology by enabling the assembly of personalised library
customer web spaces and sharing information in these spaces.
These tools consist of
four stations. The first, a source station, will give users the ability
“to manage, store, subscribe and direct their own ecology of web
information and web sources.” The second, a search station will deliver
“search and discovery features based on customised user profiles to
allow them to search and retrieve the rich set of sources available from
the open and subscription-based deep web.” The third, a social station,
will give every library user in Australia and New Zealand a social
networking space which will offer the ability “to participate in a rich
collaborative digital public space that can be shared with other social
networking spaces”. And, the fourth, a remix station, will give the user
“the ability to create a personalised user/group creative studio where
the user uploads, co-creates, shares and remixes to the world.”
NSLA is currently
working on a presentation tool to assist in building a community of
practice relating to the project, establishing a web space and
development of the toolkit. Resourcing requirements will be submitted to
the NSLA members for endorsement at the NSLA meeting in March 2010.
Other international deliberations
At the RLG Partnership
Annual Meeting in June 2009, several presentations caught my eye for
their relevance in dealing with personal digital collections and
activity in the cloud. Karen Smith-Yoshimura and Thomas Hickey, in
Names and Identities, reported on the Networking Names Advisory
Group’s work on a cooperative identities hub and framework “to
concatenate all forms of names using a social networking model. Hickey
and Ed O'Neill spoke about the Virtual International Authority File (VIAF),
a service to provide free access to the world's major authority files,
as one of the building blocks for the Semantic Web. Penny Carnaby
(National Library of New Zealand), in Going Global, flagged
possible changes to roles when outlining how national libraries can work
together with academic libraries, archives and museums. And Diane
Vixine-Goetx spoke about OCLC’s Terminology Services, which aims to make
the terms and relationship in controlled vocabularies available as Web
resources.
At OCLC Digital Forum
West in September 2009, Jonathan Furner, in Twenty Tall Tales About
Tagging, questioned widespread views about tagging, a field of
enquiry that tends to be based on opinion rather than evidence. Anne
Gilliland, in Increasing Digital Discovery and Delivery, urged us
to make more out of metadata, including the use of expert-created
metadata. And Luis Mendes, in Out of the Mouths of Users into
Library Systems, put the case for the continued develop of tags and
controlled vocabularies as complementary systems.
Additional issues have
been exposed in other recent conferences. From the IPRES Conference in
October 2009, Jens Ludwig’s Into the Archive: Potential and Limits of
Standardizing the Ingest, deals with the complexity of ingesting
digital material, work underway, and possible future steps. Maureen
Pennock’s ArchivePress: A Really Simple Solution to Archiving Blog
Content provides an update on research by British institutions on
significant properties of blogs and the development of related open
source plug-ins. Johanna Smith and Pam Armstrong (Library and Archives
Canada) talked about the influence and collaboration with record
creators in preserving the digital memory of the Government of Canada in
Are you ready?[30]
The DigCCurr 2009
conference, part of a three-year project funded by the Institute of
Museum and Library Services, focussed on the need to improve graduate
level programs for professional training in digital curation.[31]One
of the presenters, Andreas Rauber demonstrated HOPPLA (Home and Office
Painless Persistent Long-term Archiving), which is under development at
the University of Technology Vienna. This system will offer back-up and
automated migration services in personal data collections and SOHO (Solo
Office Home Office) settings. The project is exploring system design
requirements and professional development needs.[32]
Summing
up
Social media are like
other media. Quality floats on a sea of dross. However, as George
Steiner observed, many tongues are better than one voice.
