Grabbing digital preservation by the roots - #DISH2011, 3

Day 2 starts out with a plenary keynote by Samuel Jones about the importance of culture for our lives. Interesting and entertaining, no doubt about that, but like yesterday’s keynotes (see earlier post) the viewpoint is rather philosophical, and thus it is difficult to determine what heritage institutions can take home from it in terms of concrete advice as to how to deal with all this on a day-to-day-level.

So, after coffee I am heading for something completely different: a workshop by Karin van der Heiden, a freelance Dutch adviser on matters of digital archiving, especially for graphic designers.

Karin van der Heiden (right) with Job Meihuizen of Premsela.

In cooperation with Premsela, a Dutch archive for designers, she has recently published a brilliantly clear brochure entitled ‘Save as …’ giving graphic designers some really basic and helpful advice about how to organize their information and archives (see post in Dutch). A really good initiative, because we all know that choices well made at the production stage can really help keeping the stuff usable over longer periods of time. Focussing on production gets to the problem of digital preservation at the root. There is a Dutch-language version and an English-language version. The website is still only in Dutch, but I have been told that a US edition with website is forthcoming from AIGA, the US professional association for design.

On Twitter, Karin advertised her workshop as ‘digital archiving for dummies’. Perhaps there were a lot of archivists who thought 'that is not for me', because there were only a handful of attendees. But Karin's intention was not to train the archivists, but to train the archivists to train the producers - to train them to get away from complex terminology like OAIS and TRAC, and to enable them to explain to their producers what to do, at the level of explaining to your father what he should do if he wants to be able to look at his grandchild's pictures in 10 or 20 years.

If you think that this is perhaps too basic a level, just remember this: more and more digital content is being produced outside the sphere of influence of heritage institutions. Can you see the boxes of junk coming your way in 10 or 20 years' time and the troubles and expense they will cause? Educating everybody is therefore important to all of us. Karin's mission is to make basic preservation measures doable, enable designers, artists, researchers and everybody else to easily integrate basic measures into their workflow:

Great stuff. I'll let you know when the US edition becomes available.

Playing the 'digital lifecycle game' #DISH2011, 2

With no set body of knowledge or best practices, training our staff to deal with digital objects remains quite a challenge. The European DigCurV project promotes the availability of vocational training for digital curation. At DISH 2011 DigCurV's Kate Fernie and Katie McCadden presented a really cool training tool: the digital curation lifecycle game. Loosely based on a Monopoly board, the game presents players with real-life questions:

Rony Vissers (Packed, Belgium) searching for answers

'Half-way through your digitization project, the chosen file format is replaced by a new standard. What do you do?' and: 'You get funding to hire a manager for your preservation department. What skills will you require?' ‘You want to digitize your collection of sound recordings, but you do not have the necessary equipment, what do you do?’

Shawn Day, Digital Humanities, seems to feel the threat

These, of course, are no yes or no questions. They are intended to prompt discussion - and in our workshop session there were plenty of inspiring discussions.

The (physical) trial version we played still has a few flaws and Kate and Katie welcomed feedback to improve the game,  but even as it was, the game had us working hard and having fun for over an hour. DigCurV intends to make the game available as a member’s bonus, so I would say: by all means, check out the website and join the DigCurV network! DEN Foundation and my own NCDD are members already, and Marco de Niet and I instantly decided that we must make a Dutch version.

How mature is your organization when it comes to digital preservation?

At the same DigCurV workshop Marco de Niet of DEN foundation drew attention to another tool that can be helpful in educating staff. It is a ‘maturity’ model developed by Charles M. Dollar, which was recently used as the basis for Dutch librarian Enno Meijers’ thesis Stapsgewijs naar duurzame toegang (on the NCDD website). The model is used to measure your own organization’s progress against a number of key criteria, and then decide where improvement is needed. Next month Charles Dollar will be speaking about his model at the PASIG Austin conference in Austin, TX, and I will write more about it then.

Are heritage institutions 'living the digital shift'? #DISH2011, 1

Today and tomorrow I am attending the DISH 2011 conference, or: Digital Strategies for Heritage, a biannual international conference organised by the DEN Foundation and The Netherlands Institute for Heritage (Erfgoed Nederland), two Dutch institutions with remits to promote (ICT) innovation in the cultural heritage sector. Paraphrasing first keynote speaker Katherine Watson of the European Cultural Foundation (ECF), the question apparently still must be asked: 'Are the arts, culture and heritage living the digital shift?'

The conference covers many angles of the digital shift, but obviously I will be on the lookout for sessions and papers dealing with long-term access. Having that focus makes it easier to make choices at this conference, which boasts three blocks of no fewer than fifteen (!) simultaneous parallel sessions - which means you always miss 14/15th of what's on offer. That's a lot to miss, and somebody tweeted: I hope the three plenary keynote presentations make up for the 'sacrifice'.

Did they? I can only give you my own answer: yes and no. Yes in the sense that they gave us a powerful picture of what present-day digital culture is all about. But for me, personally, the three keynotes pretty much covered the same ground and thus I would have been happier with just one keynote and more opportunity to attend a workshop. My preferred keynote would not have come from Katherine Watson or from Charles Leadbeater (although they made good points), but from Amber Case, a ‘cyborg anthropologist’ studying the tools we make for ourselves. These are 'no longer extensions of our physical selves, but extensions of our mental selves'. Case described the collections of digital photographs that we all have as a ‘Mary Poppins bag’  that is weightless – and because it is weightless and sheer unlimited, we do not really feel an acute sense of loss when it goes to waste .... Ah, so that's why it is so difficult to find funding for digital preservation! Yet, the stuff we put on Facebook and Youtube is as much a historical record of our lives as the murals in the Egyptian pyramids were. Only much more fragile and ‘suspended in mental space’.

Amber Case, 'living the digital age', despite her admittedly 'analogue' upbringing.
'In my own back yard, I understood the limits of my mental and physical capabilities.'

Other things we have to come to terms with are the digital age’s ‘simultaneous time’ – there is always somebody awake somewhere in the world and they may be filling your inbox to the brim. Physical proximity to people is losing relevance (‘everybody is always looking at their mobile phones and laptops’ - this conference is no exception) to ‘virtual proximity’ online. We have ‘second selves’ online which we must groom like our first selves. The games we play give us immediate rewards which are addictive. And we shed things and apparatuses like a tree sheds leaves – no more hand-me-downs from previous generations.

This world is fast, it is non-linear, it is mobile; users are actively engaging and have a million choices (Katherine Watson). And, what’s more, according to Amber Case they demand an information/cultural environment in which the interfaces and platforms and websites which we, heritage institutions, have so painstakingly built, disappear entirely into the background. Actions are reduced, queries are eliminated. 'The best technology is invisible; it gets out of the way and connects people.' Users want interfaces to make them feel 'superhuman', 'powerful'. 

Charles Leadbeater: Users no longer want to be passive receivers, they want to 'search, enjoy, make, share, do'. The world is becoming 'asymmetric': small investments may have big impacts, and vice versa. Traditional roles and responsibilities no longer work. English football, with fixed roles for footballers (offense) and kicking pushing muscle (defense), has been transformed by (Dutch footballer) Johan Cruyff. At Barcelona FC, everybody must be able to play football.

Chair Chris Batt with a breakdown of the audience of
more than 300 attendees, 75% (my estimate) from the Netherlands

Pfffffhhh ... I turn my head and look at the many familiar faces in the audience. Colleagues from museums, from archives, from academic libraries. I happen to know about the average age of their staff. I happen to know about their budgets. I happen to know about their closets full of floppy disks and cd-roms. I happen to know about their ageing IT systems. And I think, wow, we've got a long way to go ...

BTW: my 1/15th of the afternoon programme, a DigCurV workshop about digital curation education, was well worth it. More about that tomorrow!