Perhaps more surprising however are the challenges not identified in the report.
These might be termed the 'gaps between the gaps' that were not recognized and
therefore not addressed. Of all the things not stated in the report, the actions of
humans seem the most important and impactful. Digital preservation may indeed
be a systemic problem and need systemic solutions: but it is also anthropogenic.
In the very broadest sense, digital preservation is a problem for people, created by
people and addressed through people. If that had been recognized sooner, then
perhaps it would be less surprising to find that continued efforts are required.
Arguably the digital preservation challenges we face now have been shaped by an
emphasis on systems and solutions without fully engaging with the ever-changing
dynamics of the human beings that are its cause, its solution and its ultimate
purpose.
Obsolescence as a choice
The challenges with digital preservation are typically framed in technical terms,
and though the wider context in which we operate is better understood, technology
remains the dominant discourse within the literature. Issues like file format
obsolescence, media degradation, emulation and the loss of representation
information are significant concerns. As early as 2003, Nancy McGovern and Anne
Kenny had observed that policy and resources were also critical concerns for digital
preservation, which alongside technology, were described as the three legs of the
'three-legged stool' of digital preservation.
In the last decade, though, there has been more attention to the role of agency in
what might be termed the causes of obsolescence. Working on the assumption that
data loss is almost always the outcome of some embedded socio-economic structure
that predispose specific historical contexts, then the causes of data loss are also to
some extent amenable to control. If the early decades of digital preservation were
an overt response to an emerging problem, then there has been a tendency for the
digital preservation literature to exhibit 'solutionism'9 in which problem-solving
overtakes the subtle appreciation of how problems arise. The contexts of data loss
are better understood now than they were in 2006 and with them the processes
through which it would be possible to make obsolescence obsolete.
From an historical perspective it is perhaps significant that digital preservation
came into focus shortly after the rise of the personal computer and during the rapid
expansion of the World Wide Web as a platform for office and home computing in
the late 1980's and early 1990s (there are many accessible accounts, though see
Kirschenbaum 201610 for a case study of one popular technology). The 1980s and
1990s were the decades that, without which, digital technologies may have taken
radically different directions. By extension, the economic forces and business
environments that shaped the 1980s and 1990s created the norms of the digital
universe. Had these forces been less consumerist, less disposable, more resilient, and
more sustainable, then the endemic challenges of technical obsolescence, resource
discovery and short-termism may not have arisen in the way that they subsequently
have. By some strange process that is yet to be properly delineated, digital
preservation came into existence as a response to the creative destruction implied
within neo-liberal economics.
The specific contexts of data loss have come into focus over the last decade and so
the scope of the of the digital preservation challenge has grown. The space once
occupied by risks of obsolescence or media rot is now crowded also with concerns
about ill-managed rights, out of control political interests, failing markets and
simple human frailties. As confidence with technical challenges has risen, so there
is a greater need to highlight the human behaviours behind data loss. The open
nomination process for the 'BitList' of Digitally Endangered Species has been a
significant milestone for the DPC, considering the nature of the challenge and how
to address it (see Kilbride 201811 for an overview and introduction). Corporate
abandonment, malicious deletion and ill-managed encryption have emerged as
long-term threats to our digital memory in ways that were not fully recognized in
2006. Barely a week goes by without some new evidence of a duplicitous erosion,
deletion or obfuscation by some rich or powerful agent who seeks to sanitise or erase
uncomfortable narratives to suppress unwelcome truths or conceal historical facts.
Less sensational but perhaps more harmful in the long run, is the impact of
corporate failure as a risk to the digital estate, especially in the context of cloud
computing. The subtle message in all of this is the need to situate digital preservation
quite differently within our organizations and communities: as a counter balance
to challenges more sinister than file-naming or bit rot. Obsolescence is not some
pre-ordained, invisible force. It is no longer inevitable: and being avoidable, it can
only coincide with some form of negligence.
Solutions and plans for their development were very much at the forefront of
digital preservation when DPC was established and are laid out very succinctly in
the Mind the Gap Report. As these solutions have become available so it has become
obvious that the contexts of data loss are always to some extent a choice, and that
no solution in the world could ever suffice on its own. The digital preservation
community has exposed obsolescence as a convenient excuse and a lucrative
business model. It's not yet clear what can be done with this revelation but in the
coming decades our role will be to ensure that responsibilities for preservation
are more meaningful and more widely understood.
Digital Preservation as Community
The 'Mind the Gap' report was explicit about the need to encourage a new discipline
of digital preservation and for training in new skills to become available.12 It stopped
short of calling for a new profession. Understanding how the digital preservation
has progressed over the years encourages some thinking about the changing shape of
the professional cohort that now delivers digital preservation.
By any measure that cohort is larger and more diverse than ever: a fact represented in
some simple statistics from the recent history of the DPC. The Digital Preservation
hoofdstuk 3
9 Morozov, Evgeny To Save Everything Click Here: Solutionism and the Urge to Fix Problems that Don't Exist
(Penguin, 2014)
176
william kilbride minding the gaps: digital preservation then and now
10 Kirschenbaum, Matthew Track Changes; a literary history of word processing (Belknap, 2016)
11 Kilbride, William Sic Transit Gloriae Digitalis: BitList Beta (DPC Blog, 2018) online at:
https://www.dpconline.org/blog/sic-transit-gloria-digitalis-the-bitlist-in-beta last accessed 3/10/18
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