00:00:26
starting from lcs follow the traffic on
00:00:28
main street
00:00:34
[Music]
00:00:36
just thinking of the world wide web and
00:00:37
its pointers every human being has these
00:00:40
spaghetti things going out to every
00:00:42
other computer and human being and
00:00:43
there's this gigantic mass of spaghetti
00:00:46
spanning the entire globe
00:00:49
and if you want to find out something
00:00:50
how do you find it out
00:00:53
the bits are moving around so fast that
00:00:55
hardly anyone has thought to preserve
00:00:57
them to archive them
00:00:59
and
00:01:00
the way the technology is changing
00:01:01
hasn't helped us either you know a piece
00:01:04
of paper sticks around for 500 years and
00:01:06
by golly it's legible
00:01:09
to human eyes so it's not likely that
00:01:11
human eyes are going to change in
00:01:12
another 500 years
00:01:14
but of course
00:01:15
discs and memory and data formats change
00:01:19
every couple of years
00:01:20
[Music]
00:01:22
as the huge and vastly growing human
00:01:25
record
00:01:26
all the data that we as mankind
00:01:28
accumulate is growing so rapidly
00:01:30
who has tom who has the energy who has
00:01:32
the resources to keep looking back and
00:01:34
seeing if old information still useful
00:01:38
is being transformed to the new media
00:01:41
before the old media are essentially
00:01:43
unusable
00:01:47
we're voyaging into brave new worlds
00:01:50
digital worlds
00:01:52
go to the future
00:01:54
electronically recording gathering
00:01:56
creating and connecting a universe of
00:01:59
information and knowledge
00:02:01
and making it available at our
00:02:02
fingertips
00:02:04
[Music]
00:02:09
but the sheer quantity of digitized
00:02:11
information and the dynamics of an
00:02:13
evolving computerized world create
00:02:15
complex problems
00:02:17
one of the most serious is that we pay
00:02:19
little attention to preserving
00:02:21
electronic writings for the long term
00:02:23
to making sure that important and
00:02:25
irreplaceable work will be saved and be
00:02:28
available not just for our own use but
00:02:30
for generations to follow
00:02:32
[Music]
00:02:35
what's increasingly at risk is the
00:02:37
survival into the future of recorded
00:02:39
knowledge the survival of collective
00:02:41
memory the core of civilization the
00:02:44
human record
00:02:46
[Music]
00:02:57
foreign
00:03:13
do
00:03:14
[Music]
00:03:20
august 25th 1992
00:03:23
sarajevo
00:03:26
in the war for bosnia-herzegovina in an
00:03:29
act of hatred calculated to destroy
00:03:32
collective memory and erase the culture
00:03:34
and identity of a people
00:03:36
gunners targeted with hundreds of
00:03:38
incendiary rockets
00:03:40
the national library
00:03:44
tens of thousands of rare islamic texts
00:03:48
unique 16th century manuscripts
00:03:50
important works of bosnian croat and
00:03:53
serb writers and poets
00:03:55
three million volumes the irreplaceable
00:03:58
history of a people consumed in flames
00:04:02
even as exhausted citizens joined hands
00:04:04
to save what they could of the soul of
00:04:06
their city
00:04:13
catastrophe has always loomed as a
00:04:15
threat to portions of the human record
00:04:17
through fires and floods earthquakes and
00:04:20
wars
00:04:21
and also in the past 100 years through
00:04:23
the slower fires of acid in the paper of
00:04:26
printed materials
00:04:27
much of the history of civilization has
00:04:29
been damaged or destroyed
00:04:31
[Music]
00:04:34
but it's not only the physical survival
00:04:37
of recorded information that's crucial
00:04:38
to preservation the ability to decipher
00:04:41
and comprehend its meaning is essential
00:04:43
as well
00:04:48
[Music]
00:04:50
for over a thousand years scholars tried
00:04:52
but lacked the knowledge to interpret
00:04:54
egyptian hieroglyphics
00:04:56
though perfectly preserved through
00:04:58
millennia their meaning had been lost in
00:05:00
time
00:05:04
in london's british museum intricately
00:05:07
carved is a four foot long black stone
00:05:10
over two thousand years old
00:05:12
discovered in the sands of egypt in 1799
00:05:15
it is the fabled rosetta stone
00:05:19
the information the stone records is
00:05:21
unexceptional
00:05:23
except for the remarkable circumstance
00:05:25
that identical text is presented in
00:05:27
three languages hieroglyphics demotics
00:05:30
and finally readily comprehended greek
00:05:33
[Music]
00:05:35
the rosetta stone was the key to
00:05:37
deciphering and understanding the
00:05:39
writings of an entire ancient
00:05:40
civilization
00:05:43
stone has long given way to paper and
00:05:45
today paper is fast giving way to new
00:05:47
means of recording and accessing
00:05:49
knowledge
00:05:54
the communications complex at goldstone
00:05:56
in california's mojave desert
00:05:59
the huge antennas are part of nasa's
00:06:01
deep space network
00:06:03
able to receive and process digital
00:06:05
electronic signals from unmanned
00:06:07
spacecraft millions of miles away
00:06:11
since 1958 nasa space probes have been
00:06:15
generating vast quantities of
00:06:19
um give data a call we're unable to
00:06:21
assign a couple to these nets
00:06:27
space missions studying the earth's
00:06:29
environment have generated even greater
00:06:31
amounts of data
00:06:33
information regarding ozone depletion
00:06:35
global warming the growth of deserts and
00:06:38
other potential threats to life on the
00:06:40
planet
00:06:42
acquired at enormous cost much of this
00:06:45
priceless information stored on magnetic
00:06:47
tape
00:06:48
is in jeopardy
00:06:50
20 years ago or more the projects were
00:06:53
so focused on building the spacecraft
00:06:56
and getting the fundamental technology
00:06:58
proven and getting to the first visit of
00:07:00
the planets that people really didn't
00:07:02
look at saving the data for when the
00:07:03
mission was over for example viking
00:07:06
that went to mars
00:07:08
the key part of the mission was around
00:07:09
1976.
00:07:12
well this is 20 years later those tapes
00:07:14
are decomposing now that was a heavily
00:07:17
investigated planet and mission and a
00:07:19
lot of people were familiar with the
00:07:21
data but now enough time has passed many
00:07:24
of the people have retired or it's not
00:07:26
easy to access the tapes
00:07:27
and it becomes much more important to
00:07:29
have them in an archive form
00:07:32
historically magnetic tapes which was
00:07:35
the main storage media used until just
00:07:37
four or five years ago
00:07:39
you can take one out of the box record
00:07:41
it and then try to read it and have an
00:07:42
error on it that's how bad it is
00:07:45
and some of the conversion efforts that
00:07:46
we've done over the last few years we're
00:07:48
finding 10 or 20 percent of the tapes
00:07:51
have errors on them so
00:07:54
magnetic tape is just a disaster for an
00:07:57
archival storage media
00:08:01
[Music]
00:08:03
the problem with preservation is one
00:08:05
which archivists and librarians think
00:08:08
about because that's their business
00:08:11
but unfortunately computer science as a
00:08:13
field has not had very much interest in
00:08:16
this problem i'm not sure that it
00:08:18
isn't aware of it but it has a mindset
00:08:21
that says you know we're we are in the
00:08:23
business of charging ahead into the
00:08:25
future and
00:08:27
and dropping the past behind us and not
00:08:30
carrying the baggage of old obsolete
00:08:33
systems people are more interested in
00:08:36
what's the new paradigm how are we going
00:08:38
to create new more exciting hyper media
00:08:41
with new capabilities that have never
00:08:42
existed but those new capabilities those
00:08:46
paradigm shifts leave old documents
00:08:49
stranded in the past with no bridge to
00:08:52
to the future
00:08:56
washington dc
00:08:58
the national archives
00:09:02
over 200 years of the official records
00:09:05
of the nation including the founding
00:09:07
documents
00:09:14
there are miles and miles of shelving
00:09:16
containing every type of government
00:09:18
record
00:09:19
treaties letters patents maps
00:09:22
architectural drawings
00:09:24
three billion pieces of paper the
00:09:26
information infrastructure of the nation
00:09:29
everything determined by the archivist
00:09:31
to be of enduring value
00:09:32
[Music]
00:09:34
there are also millions of microfilms
00:09:36
photographic negatives motion picture
00:09:39
films phonograph records and video and
00:09:42
audio recordings on various formats
00:09:45
now machine readable materials are by
00:09:48
law included as well
00:09:51
it's anticipated that by the year 2000
00:09:54
fully 75 percent of all federal
00:09:56
transactions will be handled
00:09:58
electronically
00:09:59
[Applause]
00:10:01
flowing into the archives center for
00:10:03
electronic records in maryland are over
00:10:06
800 digital data streams
00:10:09
vital statistics on health and welfare
00:10:11
surveys on crime data on population and
00:10:14
housing
00:10:15
and from every government agency
00:10:17
tolerance of email communications
00:10:20
the amount of archived electronic
00:10:22
materials is doubling every year
00:10:25
you can't have a democracy
00:10:28
if the government is not accountable to
00:10:30
people
00:10:31
and one of the ultimate ways that this
00:10:33
government is accountable to people is
00:10:35
by maintaining records of what the
00:10:37
government did
00:10:38
what it said its policies were and
00:10:41
therefore enabling the people to figure
00:10:42
out whether the government acted in
00:10:43
accordance with policy and law
00:10:46
traditionally we like basically all the
00:10:48
archives in the world that deal with
00:10:49
electronic records
00:10:51
ask the originators to send it to us in
00:10:54
a form that's not dependent on any
00:10:55
specific hardware or software
00:10:57
because we have to presume that most of
00:11:00
our customers who haven't been born yet
00:11:02
are going to want this information at a
00:11:04
time when all of the technology used to
00:11:06
generate it has disappeared from the
00:11:07
marketplace
00:11:09
[Music]
00:11:10
a highway in new
00:11:12
york every day hundreds of hazardous
00:11:15
waste shipments each authorized by a
00:11:17
permit crisscross the state on their way
00:11:20
to one of a thousand different disposal
00:11:22
sites
00:11:26
the center for electronic records in
00:11:28
albany manages more than a thousand huge
00:11:31
databases
00:11:32
the hazardous waste permitting system is
00:11:34
just one but a very important one
00:11:40
there are certain kinds of information
00:11:42
increasingly created in electronic form
00:11:44
but for society to survive are going to
00:11:47
have to be accessible for a very long
00:11:49
time
00:11:50
knowing where we've deposited poisons
00:11:53
radioactive materials and hazardous
00:11:55
wastes is one of them
00:12:00
through the state's computerized
00:12:02
geographic information system
00:12:04
waste sites can be located and studied
00:12:06
in relation to freshwater wetlands and
00:12:09
centers of population
00:12:10
the operation is critical to future
00:12:12
generations to avoid repeating such
00:12:15
costly tragedies as the love canal
00:12:18
this is one small example of the kind of
00:12:21
information which must be preserved
00:12:23
forever faithfully replicated in each
00:12:25
new digital technology standard as it
00:12:27
comes along
00:12:28
it's an obligatory one-way monologue
00:12:31
with the future
00:12:33
we have to have
00:12:35
experts that understand systems and how
00:12:38
to migrate them we have to have routines
00:12:42
in place for migrating information from
00:12:45
one form to another and those kinds of
00:12:48
organizational issues need to be put in
00:12:50
place and routinized
00:12:52
so that they are part of the cultural
00:12:54
fabric not something new that we have to
00:12:57
fret about
00:12:59
they have to be ordinary events in our
00:13:01
daily lives and it's moving from a
00:13:04
period where we don't understand all the
00:13:07
pieces that have to be put in place and
00:13:09
they're in our relationships to a point
00:13:11
where we are naturally dealing with
00:13:13
digital information and moving it
00:13:15
forward as interest requires that is the
00:13:17
major
00:13:19
cultural change and the nub of the root
00:13:21
of the problem that we're really facing
00:13:22
here
00:13:24
amid the stored records and archives of
00:13:26
states and municipalities businesses and
00:13:29
institutions are the train wrecks of the
00:13:31
information age
00:13:32
important digital information which can
00:13:35
no longer be read
00:13:36
in oregon the primary national database
00:13:39
for people with disabilities
00:13:41
vanished
00:13:42
in new york the corporate records of the
00:13:44
pennsylvania railroad erased
00:13:47
in several large states irreplaceable
00:13:49
data on land use indecipherable because
00:13:52
of missing software
00:13:54
the losses though immense are silent and
00:13:57
invisible we're aware of them only when
00:13:59
it's too late
00:14:01
whether records survive or not depends
00:14:04
on whether we as a society think it's
00:14:07
important to see that they survive and
00:14:09
one of the differences between
00:14:12
digital preservation and preserving
00:14:15
traditional formats of records is that
00:14:18
digital records don't just survive by
00:14:21
accident we have to make a conscious
00:14:23
decision that they're worth keeping
00:14:26
we have to think about that when we
00:14:28
create them in the first place in terms
00:14:30
of the standards that we use
00:14:32
we have to really make a commitment to
00:14:35
keeping them alive in a way that we
00:14:38
haven't had to in the past
00:14:40
that's not to say that we haven't dealt
00:14:42
with fragile materials
00:14:45
but we would run across things by
00:14:47
accident that had been stored in an
00:14:49
attic or a basement and
00:14:52
50 years later 100 years later still be
00:14:55
able to read and retrieve and understand
00:14:58
them that won't be the case with digital
00:15:00
records unless we make some kinds of
00:15:03
conscious plans and have regular
00:15:05
vigilance over them
00:15:09
at the american library association
00:15:11
annual convention publishers who've been
00:15:13
reinventing and redefining the concept
00:15:16
of publishing gather to show off their
00:15:18
digital wares
00:15:22
i keep asked to log into arabic windows
00:15:31
what i can now do is say i want to go to
00:15:34
oops i'm going to go
00:15:36
and search for text yeah
00:15:38
call level
00:15:39
or we can customize our search
00:15:42
and recall that level two
00:15:45
and we have the african american
00:15:46
experience the american revolution the
00:15:49
civil war
00:15:51
expansion
00:15:53
with the advent of electronic books and
00:15:55
digital networks librarians are
00:15:57
increasingly concerned that they're not
00:15:58
be created information haves and
00:16:01
have-nots
00:16:02
new york's science industry and business
00:16:04
library counts itself part of the
00:16:06
solution few families in new york have
00:16:09
the means to have internet access at
00:16:11
home
00:16:12
so for those who don't
00:16:14
this
00:16:15
is our attempt to level the playing
00:16:18
field
00:16:20
you could get off the airplane at
00:16:21
kennedy from zambia
00:16:24
take a taxi in to the science industry
00:16:27
and business library
00:16:28
no one will ask you for a piece of
00:16:30
identification for a library card for a
00:16:33
fee but you just walk in the door sit
00:16:35
yourself at a computer get on the
00:16:36
internet pull down the database do it
00:16:38
whatever you wish for free
00:16:42
one of the things that concerns me most
00:16:44
is that there's such an enthusiasm for
00:16:48
putting information into digital form
00:16:51
many libraries are rushing into digital
00:16:54
projects and
00:16:56
sometimes at the expense of their
00:16:59
preservation microfilming projects and
00:17:01
the worst nightmare i can imagine is
00:17:04
that all of the money that have been
00:17:06
going into preserving
00:17:08
books in the traditional way
00:17:10
microfilming or conservation projects
00:17:13
will be diverted to providing access to
00:17:16
digital information without making any
00:17:19
provisions for preserving it so that
00:17:21
money is being drained from the
00:17:23
traditional preservation projects and
00:17:26
nothing is being done about preserving
00:17:28
the new digital information and then
00:17:30
we'd lose twice
00:17:36
a lot of the new
00:17:38
material that's getting created
00:17:40
artistically and in a scholarly sense is
00:17:44
being created electronically to begin
00:17:45
with doesn't exist on paper doesn't get
00:17:47
published in magazines anymore only gets
00:17:50
published on the web or published in
00:17:53
electronic form of some sort and so
00:17:55
we're in danger of losing all of that
00:17:58
if we if we don't solve this problem
00:18:03
the new york home of the voyager company
00:18:06
a leading producer and publisher of
00:18:08
electronic books
00:18:09
here the creative possibilities of
00:18:11
digitization are very exciting and
00:18:13
immediate
00:18:14
while future preservation and access
00:18:16
issues are a more distant concern what
00:18:19
you'll be able to do is
00:18:20
access a movie
00:18:22
which would be through this mirror
00:18:24
there'll be a timeline
00:18:26
a map of where dracula exists
00:18:31
what i'm working on is called witness to
00:18:33
the future it's a cd about environmental
00:18:35
activism what i have to do before i give
00:18:38
everything to my programmer is make sure
00:18:40
all the content is correct and
00:18:41
everything's laid out so all the
00:18:42
graphics are fixed and everything
00:18:44
i can't imagine that anything that we
00:18:47
are making today
00:18:49
will be available 100 years from now i
00:18:51
don't even think it'll be available 25
00:18:52
years from now in fact a lot of stuff
00:18:54
that we made seven or eight years ago
00:18:57
can't be played
00:18:58
i mean there are two problems one is the
00:19:00
durability of the media itself
00:19:03
and the other is the machines they play
00:19:05
on
00:19:06
and
00:19:07
nobody really knows how long the media
00:19:08
will last although our indications are
00:19:11
that entropy takes over fairly quickly
00:19:13
and these things have a tendency to
00:19:14
degrade
00:19:15
much faster than anybody
00:19:17
at least in the companies that makes
00:19:18
them
00:19:19
willing to predict
00:19:21
and the second problem though is that
00:19:22
the machines go out of style and nobody
00:19:25
bothers at the time to sort of make a
00:19:27
translation program
00:19:29
and if you go out 100 years from now the
00:19:30
possibility that somebody will you know
00:19:32
have remembered to make a machine that
00:19:34
runs
00:19:35
microsoft windows 2.2
00:19:39
you know it's just it's
00:19:41
impossible it won't happen
00:19:45
each of the media seems to be racing the
00:19:47
others towards obsolescence as fast as
00:19:49
it can and in a sense that's because
00:19:51
they're each trying to improve as fast
00:19:54
as they can and so the new versions
00:19:57
come faster and faster and new versions
00:19:59
make the old versions obsolete and
00:20:01
unreadable so it's a natural process
00:20:04
but it's one that we have to recognize
00:20:07
is not helpful from a preservation point
00:20:08
of view
00:20:22
we get stuff that's three years old now
00:20:24
outdated
00:20:26
we pick up scrap computers from
00:20:28
many companies in this valley national
00:20:30
semiconductor lsi logic cypher
00:20:33
semiconductor
00:20:34
i mean the list goes on but i don't want
00:20:36
to mention my customers i have
00:20:38
competition
00:20:52
that's a good chip
00:21:04
i estimate about 300 million dollars
00:21:07
for this load of mainframes is what they
00:21:09
paid for
00:21:10
and they're outdated in eight years
00:21:23
computers were created essentially to
00:21:25
service giant organizations
00:21:28
and they were tended by a sort of a
00:21:29
priesthood of technicians
00:21:32
but once computers went from being
00:21:33
something that exclusively belonged to
00:21:35
large organizations to something that
00:21:37
served and belonged to individuals
00:21:40
a tremendous amount of translation
00:21:42
psychological and sociological
00:21:44
translation needed to be done what i did
00:21:46
was translate some of the ideas that
00:21:48
belong to the
00:21:49
priesthood of technicians and made it
00:21:52
accessible and usable to civilians to
00:21:55
ordinary people
00:21:57
as more and more information is stored
00:21:59
electronically we are increasingly
00:22:01
vulnerable at any time to catastrophic
00:22:03
loss
00:22:05
i have a power book
00:22:07
the 5300 and it was supposed to be the
00:22:09
latest newest model and
00:22:11
apparently it had some problems
00:22:13
in its development and the logic board
00:22:16
cracked and
00:22:17
shortly thereafter i lost
00:22:19
my hard drive and
00:22:21
everything my world
00:22:23
[Applause]
00:22:28
when computers crash all is not always
00:22:30
lost there are professionals who
00:22:32
specialize in recovery in breathing life
00:22:35
back into fragile intricate disk drives
00:22:38
just long enough to coax off and capture
00:22:40
the data
00:22:41
[Music]
00:22:46
crash is where the drive doesn't work
00:22:48
anymore
00:22:49
the crash can be a multiple of different
00:22:51
things though a crash can be where the
00:22:52
head actually makes contact and starts
00:22:54
scraping off the medium that's on the
00:22:56
platter that holds the data
00:22:58
that's the disc right there that's the
00:23:00
metal that is that the data is saved to
00:23:02
now we're going to show you where we are
00:23:03
magnifying onto each track
00:23:05
see these lines they're sectors where
00:23:08
data is kept like a filing cabinet it's
00:23:11
kept in a particular spot data is stored
00:23:13
in between these these marks and
00:23:15
everyone has an address or an
00:23:17
identification
00:23:19
if the data is all scraped off or gone
00:23:21
there's nothing we can do but if there's
00:23:23
something on that in that device that we
00:23:26
can get to we get to it within about a
00:23:28
95 ratio
00:23:34
from cafes and offices to homes
00:23:36
libraries and schools people are rushing
00:23:38
to embrace not only computers but also
00:23:41
the network of networks connecting it
00:23:43
all the world wide web a technology of
00:23:46
which it's been said the only thing it
00:23:48
changes is everything
00:23:51
people go online
00:23:53
they play with aspects of themselves
00:23:55
they express pieces of themselves that
00:23:57
they're not always aware that we're even
00:24:00
there it's like sereno de bergerac
00:24:01
finding
00:24:03
in the
00:24:04
virtual reality of writing something
00:24:07
about himself a capacity for love and
00:24:09
passion that he didn't even know was
00:24:10
there people are discovering that online
00:24:22
we're talking about fundamental
00:24:23
infrastructural changes in our society
00:24:26
with this new electronic technology so
00:24:28
it's not any one particular application
00:24:30
and so on it is just a fundamental new
00:24:33
kind of wiring for our society like 100
00:24:36
years ago we put in the electricity
00:24:39
system we put in the telephone system
00:24:42
and so on those completely transformed
00:24:45
how we lived today we're moving into
00:24:47
that same kind of almost punctuated
00:24:50
evolution to the infrastructure
00:24:52
having now to do with things like the
00:24:54
world wide web that
00:24:56
absolutely transform our ability to
00:24:58
connect to others
00:24:59
our ability to basically view all the
00:25:02
information in the world in one kind of
00:25:04
homogeneous type of
00:25:06
access structure and form
00:25:10
it was a combination of the web
00:25:13
the browsers and the underlying internet
00:25:15
that existed for 15 years
00:25:18
which created what we now see
00:25:20
as the web browser phenomenon that
00:25:23
everyone is using there's so much talk
00:25:25
today about technology leading to
00:25:26
unemployment and causing difficulty but
00:25:29
i think we forget that technology is
00:25:31
humanity's child we have created it to
00:25:34
love it is to love ourselves
00:25:36
and second it does help us
00:25:38
the web was the creation of a young
00:25:40
british scientist tim berners-lee now as
00:25:43
director of the consortium controlling
00:25:45
the web he works from his office at mit
00:25:47
to try to guide its future
00:25:49
a future which by redefining what we
00:25:52
mean by documents has greatly
00:25:53
complicated the obligation to preserve
00:25:57
if you remember the world before the
00:25:58
world wide web it was a question of
00:26:01
getting information from one place to
00:26:02
another by tracking down a group of
00:26:04
experts who could log on to the right
00:26:06
computer find out how to extract
00:26:08
information from the relevant program
00:26:10
how to put it onto a floppy disk then
00:26:12
how to read the floppy disk on your own
00:26:14
computer then what to do with the data
00:26:15
when you've got it all this was a
00:26:17
question of conversion and
00:26:18
incompatibility in the world was full of
00:26:20
incompatibility it was incompatible
00:26:22
because a lot of the formats were
00:26:24
proprietary formats owned by one
00:26:25
manufacturer to which another one
00:26:27
manufacturer would not commit
00:26:29
so in order to get the interoperability
00:26:31
you have to have open standards
00:26:34
that was the way i saw it
00:26:36
the web isn't open universal medium like
00:26:38
paper
00:26:39
the web itself doesn't constrain what
00:26:41
information you put on it
00:26:43
you've got to expect all kinds of
00:26:45
information there's some indecent
00:26:46
material out there
00:26:48
there is advertising material out there
00:26:51
there's material from hate groups which
00:26:53
you wouldn't want to
00:26:54
anybody to read there is information you
00:26:56
really sympathize with there's some
00:26:58
beautiful stuff out there so
00:27:00
the commercialization of it is used in
00:27:02
advertising for example is used for
00:27:03
trade it's all part of the world and
00:27:05
it's very important
00:27:07
that a universal medium should accept
00:27:09
all types of information the whole
00:27:11
concept of linked non-linear documents
00:27:14
makes preservation very tricky because
00:27:17
where do you draw the boundary around
00:27:19
the document
00:27:20
if my document references 16 other
00:27:23
documents by having links to them then
00:27:27
what does it mean to preserve my
00:27:29
document do we also have to preserve all
00:27:31
of those other 16 documents and
00:27:34
transitively all the documents that they
00:27:36
reference and point to and you can think
00:27:38
of the web as one huge interlinked
00:27:41
connection of documents
00:27:43
you could think of it as a single
00:27:45
document if you wanted to it's not quite
00:27:48
where we are at the moment but it's but
00:27:49
it's a reasonable model and if you do
00:27:51
that then what does it mean to preserve
00:27:54
that how do you even describe what
00:27:56
you've got and it's dynamic it's
00:27:58
changing every moment people are adding
00:28:00
things to it modifying things to it so
00:28:03
we just don't have the
00:28:05
understanding yet the the conceptual
00:28:08
understanding of what we're doing and
00:28:10
where it's going
00:28:11
that would enable us to make sensible
00:28:14
decisions or choices about preservation
00:28:23
information highway
00:28:25
electronic publishing
00:28:27
i think will sound
00:28:28
in 20 years like horseless carriage
00:28:31
sounds to us now because they're all
00:28:33
analogies to something that's an old
00:28:35
technology to highways to libraries
00:28:37
and i think this technology really
00:28:40
changes everything
00:28:41
it changes the way we communicate and we
00:28:44
basically need a new language to
00:28:45
describe these new relationships and the
00:28:48
new styles of seeing and teaching
00:28:51
and learning
00:28:53
if you begin from thinking about it as a
00:28:54
communications medium
00:28:56
then the social policies
00:28:58
have to concern free speech have to
00:29:00
concern education have to concern public
00:29:03
access
00:29:04
so it's the narrow focus on
00:29:07
transportation of commodities on an
00:29:09
information highway that i think limits
00:29:12
our field way too much
00:29:20
one of my favorite
00:29:21
examples of of longevity
00:29:24
is a wonderful line from one of the
00:29:26
shakespeare sonnets and in fact this is
00:29:29
a
00:29:29
photograph from the folger library of
00:29:32
their
00:29:33
1609 quarto edition of the sonnets that
00:29:36
was when the sonnets were first
00:29:37
published so nearly 400 years ago
00:29:40
and the 18th sonnet which is one of the
00:29:42
most famous which begins shall i compare
00:29:44
thee to a summer's day
00:29:46
ends with the couplet
00:29:47
so long as men can breathe or eyes can
00:29:50
see
00:29:51
so long lives this
00:29:53
and this gives life to thee and what i
00:29:56
love about that is that this in the
00:29:58
couplet is the sonnet itself
00:30:01
it's a it's a poem that's referring to
00:30:03
itself as a work of literature
00:30:06
and the inference is that he knew or
00:30:10
guessed that this thing that he was
00:30:13
writing under his hand as the ink came
00:30:15
out would last forever
00:30:17
well it's only been 400 years but i
00:30:19
would say there's a fair chance that if
00:30:21
anything lasts the shakespearean sonnets
00:30:23
will
00:30:25
we need to do something equivalent for
00:30:27
digital information
00:30:29
we have
00:30:30
at the moment a very poor chance that a
00:30:33
current shakespeare writing deathless
00:30:35
prose deathless
00:30:37
poetry at the moment
00:30:39
will see their lines last for anything
00:30:42
like the next 400 years
00:30:50
this gives life to thee
00:30:52
it is the human record caught at this
00:30:55
point in time between the world print
00:30:57
and the new and demanding world of
00:30:58
electrons and photons that gives
00:31:00
civilization its life
00:31:03
somehow the substance of that record
00:31:05
must continue to be preserved
00:31:13
[Music]
00:31:34
[Music]
00:32:33
[Music]
00:32:40
you
