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I worry about this a lot. There's archive.org doing an amazing job but it seems like so much of our culture is getting lost because it's online. My box of Popul

I worry about this a lot. There's archive.org doing an amazing job but it seems like so much of our culture is getting lost because it's online. My box of Popular Science magazines from the 1950s is amazing - even the ads are interesting. The difficulty in archiving this stuff is worrying, as is the discovery experience for someone 60 or 70 years down the road. I can pick up a crusty magazine and flip through it, cutting across a whole bunch of topics and their surrounding context. There are lots of silos trying to save bits of it, but if this guy put a bunch of papers in a box in 1997 and it didn't get eaten by mold, then all of it would have been around to browse today.

vitovito 12y ago
Absolutely. We know how to archive paper pretty well. Your box of magazines will last another 20 years in your garage. Maybe twice that in a climate-controlled vault. But they're still made of cheap paper, and will eventually decompose, or your garage will flood, or bugs will eat them, or mold will be particularly bad one year. And, like anything physical, unless someone makes a pilgrimage to your garage (or that vault), no-one else will ever (re)discover them, or share them. That's the problem with physical things: they can be controlled, hoarded, kept secret, or destroyed. Born-digital artifacts, and digitized physical ones, can be much more discoverable than physical ones. They often can be repurposed and remixed much more easily. And they absolutely can be copied and distributed widely in ways that physical artifacts can't. Sticking to paper isn't the answer. Figuring out better ways to index, preserve and distribute digital artifacts is.
- _delirium 12y ago
  I agree that paper per se isn't the advantage, but the fact that something comes in a relatively unencumbered and self-contained unit does help a lot with digital archiving. That is so far still more common with paper on average. A library can build a more or less complete digital archive of a paper newspaper by simply subscribing to it and setting up a routine digitization process. Building a complete archive of an online news site is much harder: you have to figure out how to scrape it in full, and many sites actively try to stop you from doing so. As publications have discovered that selling access to their own archives (or "vault" as some call it) is profitable, they are even less likely to want free third-party archives to be available. The best-case for "born digital" archiving at the moment are probably publications that still produce a full PDF version of each "issue". For example a library could archive The New Inquiry by simply subscribing and downloading each month's subscribers-only PDF, rather than trying to scrape the website. A publication that put the full content in an RSS feed would also be fairly easy to "subscribe" to and archive. But most don't have an easy way of subscribing to full updates that can be archived and stored/viewed independently of the original site, and many are even kind of hostile to the idea. Journals are another problem. Paper journal subscriptions go into a library's permanent holdings, while digital journal subscriptions often give them cheaper per-issue prices, but in return it's more like renting access to the journal-controlled archive, which goes away if the library cancels the subscription. Most don't allow a library to mass-download the archive into the library's own digital holdings, though some do have some self-archival arrangements (e.g. a library might be allowed to self-archive issues that came out during their period of subscription, but not the whole back catalogue).
  - noonespecial 12y ago
    >The best-case for "born digital" archiving at the moment are probably publications that still produce a full PDF version of each "issue". I'd go so far as to say that publishers who do not do this and provide these to the Library of Congress should receive much less copyright protection from the government. Copyright and preservation should go hand in hand.
    - walterbell 12y ago
      > Copyright and preservation should go hand in hand. How would this apply to out-of-print books?

vitovito 12y ago

Absolutely. We know how to archive paper pretty well. Your box of magazines will last another 20 years in your garage. Maybe twice that in a climate-controlled vault. But they're still made of cheap paper, and will eventually decompose, or your garage will flood, or bugs will eat them, or mold will be particularly bad one year. And, like anything physical, unless someone makes a pilgrimage to your garage (or that vault), no-one else will ever (re)discover them, or share them. That's the problem with physical things: they can be controlled, hoarded, kept secret, or destroyed. Born-digital artifacts, and digitized physical ones, can be much more discoverable than physical ones. They often can be repurposed and remixed much more easily. And they absolutely can be copied and distributed widely in ways that physical artifacts can't. Sticking to paper isn't the answer. Figuring out better ways to index, preserve and distribute digital artifacts is.

_delirium 12y ago
I agree that paper per se isn't the advantage, but the fact that something comes in a relatively unencumbered and self-contained unit does help a lot with digital archiving. That is so far still more common with paper on average. A library can build a more or less complete digital archive of a paper newspaper by simply subscribing to it and setting up a routine digitization process. Building a complete archive of an online news site is much harder: you have to figure out how to scrape it in full, and many sites actively try to stop you from doing so. As publications have discovered that selling access to their own archives (or "vault" as some call it) is profitable, they are even less likely to want free third-party archives to be available. The best-case for "born digital" archiving at the moment are probably publications that still produce a full PDF version of each "issue". For example a library could archive The New Inquiry by simply subscribing and downloading each month's subscribers-only PDF, rather than trying to scrape the website. A publication that put the full content in an RSS feed would also be fairly easy to "subscribe" to and archive. But most don't have an easy way of subscribing to full updates that can be archived and stored/viewed independently of the original site, and many are even kind of hostile to the idea. Journals are another problem. Paper journal subscriptions go into a library's permanent holdings, while digital journal subscriptions often give them cheaper per-issue prices, but in return it's more like renting access to the journal-controlled archive, which goes away if the library cancels the subscription. Most don't allow a library to mass-download the archive into the library's own digital holdings, though some do have some self-archival arrangements (e.g. a library might be allowed to self-archive issues that came out during their period of subscription, but not the whole back catalogue).
- noonespecial 12y ago
  >The best-case for "born digital" archiving at the moment are probably publications that still produce a full PDF version of each "issue". I'd go so far as to say that publishers who do not do this and provide these to the Library of Congress should receive much less copyright protection from the government. Copyright and preservation should go hand in hand.
  - walterbell 12y ago
    > Copyright and preservation should go hand in hand. How would this apply to out-of-print books?