Preservation and Care
I'm finally getting a chance to do some sustained reading, now that my winter break has begun, and so managed at last to dive into Maxwell Neely-Cohen's "Century-Scale Storage". It's good to see foregrounded the idea that preservation is not a matter of technological development (quite the contrary) but of human care buttressed by financial investment. I found myself particularly struck by this:
The advantage of print is that it can be a practice. What was printed before can be reprinted. The downside is that, in order to take advantage of the full preservational powers of the codex form, what you are saving and printing has to be valued by the public.
In the digital realm, of course, we've long heard that Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe -- and it's true -- but we still have to care enough to make those copies, and to ensure that they're properly stored and checked and migrated as needed. Perhaps the public might be enlisted in preservation efforts by being encouraged to make copies of cultural objects they value rather than by being punished for doing so. As Neely-Cohen notes, "The most enduring decentralized [preservation] efforts don’t owe their success to technological or organizational innovation, but rather by having enlisted generations of people with an emotional and intellectual investment in their worth."
The scale of the digital preservation problem is going to require massive investment, and the political will necessary to generate it -- a requirement easily generative of despair here at the end of 2024. But here we are, with stuff we care about and want to keep safe.
[I]f you, an individual reading this, want to store something and ensure it survives a century, what should you do? More than one thing. You should combine every method available to you, layers of backups, armies of copies, and most of all, practices and sites that encourage a culture of watchfulness and care. You should fight for a society that values the sciences and arts and that which they produce. And then, each day, you should do whatever it takes to keep your something safe, do whatever you can to empower the next generation to do the same, and then entrust that battle to them, to repeat into futurity.
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