Back
to the Archives: The Ghost of Parchment Future
by
Anne M Carley
Faced with a
profusion of electronic information, many of us experience overload
while trying to decide what to notice and what to store for later
use. These questions arise: Is this newly received information really
new to me? Will I want to find it again later? How much later? In
what context? In how much detail? Can the information remain in its
native environment or should it be somehow transformed or transported?
As you quickly
breeze through one of the innumerable pages of possibly new information
on a website, you may ask yourself: Do I want to keep it? If so, what
does "keeping" mean? And, if I decide to keep it, what is the "it"
I'm imagining I will want to access later? With electronic information,
by "keeping" you probably mean retaining access to it, but perhaps
not removing it from its current state (committing it to paper, or
CD-ROM or other physical storage medium). By "it" you refer to the
facts listed, the ideas expressed, and / or the extra meaning provided
by the web design, and / or the deeper layers provided by the links
to other websites maintained and created by others.
Similarly, Information
Technology managers in big corporations are struggling to establish
reliable long-term information storage. They ask the same questions:
Is this information worth keeping, and if so, what constitutes "keeping"?
Even choosing the best storage medium presents problems. Recent testing
indicates CD-ROM's are not the stalwarts against deterioration we
had hoped. They can be harmed, it seems, by oxidation, magnetic fields
and humidity, and the disk media themselves can decay. What is to
be done? One interesting notion, aside from the acknowledged benefits
of redundant data storage, is that the Internet, midwife to such a
mushrooming body of information, may also provide a way to save some
of the data. It is possible now to store important files at offsite
locations. Rather than trucking boxes of papers to a locked warehouse
storage bin, that can mean transferring the files electronically for
secure storage on a file server elsewhere. The risks common to all
digital information remain, however. Digital storage on servers is
also susceptible to system crashes, power surges, glitches of unknown
origin; and to hackers maneuvering through security measures to meddle
with the data, hide or destroy files, or distribute their contents
to unauthorized recipients.
An important
additional risk exists as well: even if the digital storage has retained
flawless digital copies, twenty years from now there may be no way
to retrieve the data. The methods used to create and read the data
are likely to have become obsolete, gone the way of eight-track audio
systems, magnetic-card-reading typewriters, and other antiques of
the 1970's.
One begins to
appreciate physical archives - with their look, feel, smell, relationships,
life-sized objects and textures - grouped intelligently together in
a more material reality. Nothing in such an archive has been flattened
into the uniformity of pixel patterns on a screen; nothing has been
enlarged or reduced to standardize the proportions and sizes; the
handwriting on the document is not a mere likeness - it was made by
another human, working with this same document, at another time. The
fortunate scholar who can handle these objects while studying them
no doubt can learn certain things simply not available to clone-studiers.
On the other hand, the materials do degrade, some rapidly. Paper deteriorates,
color photos fade, celluloid film turns to powder, early recordings
made on cylinders of wire corrode, adhesive tape and self-adhesive
labels yellow and fall off. Parchment scrolls, centuries old, can
be more legible than faxes of ten years ago.
By its nature,
there is only one unique set of original archived material. The entire
depth of experience provided by the original cannot be more widely
distributed. It is however possible simultaneously to retain the original,
with its special glow, and diffuse the information in many clones
of identical quality, none quite like the physical original.
The Archives
of American Art accumulates analog information from artists, collectors,
dealers, galleries, scholars and others, and stores the originals,
while distributing copies on microfiche, available for research at
the Archives' regional sites throughout the United States. Their web
presence is developing. But already for twenty years or more their
initiatives have been of enormous help to scholars and writers wanting
access to primary sources (even tiny black-and-white photographs of
them).
Alternatively,
one can jump from parchment right into the digital realm, creating
as many clones as desired, all with equal fidelity to the first digital
copy. Working with IBM, the Vatican Library's archiving project brings
ancient original manuscripts directly into digitized form, available
online to scholars worldwide.
Another such
digitization of primary materials is the American Memory Project.
It is an ambitious initiative, now underway, to collect, catalogue,
digitize and post for unlimited free access a great magnitude of cultural
documentation from the Library of Congress of the US government.
Where the "original"
itself is digital - a web-based work of art for example - no intermediate
steps of photography, microfiche-creation or digitization are required
to duplicate the work. What may be harder, however, is defining what
constitutes the work and how much context is essential. Now that art
museums have begun to accession web-based art forms into their permanent
collections, they must ask the same questions as the corporate IT
managers, or you and I: If it's worth keeping, what is to be kept,
and what does "keeping" mean?
With works of
art, answering the questions can be quite difficult. If part of the
art, as created, was its links to other Internet entities, what exactly
is acquired, if only the artist's own web data is accessioned? When
a museum curator or registrar (those lines blur, too, here) accessions
web-based art, will the artwork be archived, taken out of action,
and frozen onto a CD-ROM, or will it remain an active, changing work
on the Internet? If it keeps changing, which part is the artwork the
museum owns (and, perhaps, insures)? What is the expected life of
this work, if CD-ROM's deteriorate, offsite file storage of clones
is still vulnerable, and work created for today's Internet, stored
on today's media, is unlikely to be readily accessible in a few years?
How much alteration
of such a work is permissible before the artist's work is no more?
When the digital art is first conveyed to the museum, will an artist
describe the work by title, date, and "variable
media" thereby agreeing to future, unknown modifications of the
work, to accommodate future technologies of communication and perception?
As infants must
learn the crucial truth that when a parent disappears from view, the
parent may still be There - present and reliable, if unseen - we users
of electronic information must learn to rely on the continued availability
of the binary data we value. We also must decide how much reliance
each of us can tolerate, calibrated depending on the gravity, or irreplaceable
character of the underlying information.
We can all probably
recall, when first learning to use computers, that phase of urgent
disbelief that computer files stored digitally were really There.
We can all probably recall, too, printing out multiple copies of seemingly
important documents, to keep in more than one safe place. (So much
for that Paperless Office of the Future.)
We could try
to blame the developers of electronic media for irresponsibly making
all this data available, then dumping on us the problems of selection,
security, and less than certain permanence. (For that matter, even
an unaltered website, accessed at different times from different computers
with different monitors and browser software, will yield quite different
results.) We could try to blame our discomfort on that hard-wired
human urge to gather and collect, now thwarted by these invisible
electrons. Practically, we can try to apply principles of redundant
storage, and focus carefully on appropriate retrieval structures.
Maybe we can also learn to relax, to live with intangible data.
Undeniably there
is a very rich sense of connectedness to be had perusing archives
full of unique collections of related materials committed by humans
to physical media. Could a similar sense be provided by an electronic
storage medium or method? Perhaps not. But there may be an equivalent
approach, if not a similar one: We still live as physical, biological
beings in a material world. But how physical is our knowledge, really?
First, before they were recorded, those scrolls, images and typewritten
pages were ideas and forms of human expression. At present, many of
us are already accustomed to straddling the digital and analog worlds
- writing a first draft, perhaps, on a computer, but requiring hard
copy for the final edit. Now, we have the ability to return new creations
of the brain, psyche and spirit, after a quick pass through the material
world (typing, scanning, recording), to something more like their
native habitat. Now, more of our knowledge - as intangible as can
be - can remain that way. Can we learn to live with that?
Resources:
The
Archives of American Art, part of the Smithsonian Institution,
based in Washington DC, assembles and maintains collections of letters,
memoirs, photographs, exhibition announcements, shipping invoices,
bills of sale, loan agreements, scrapbooks, museum catalogues and
other documentation of the visual arts in America.
The
Vatican Library Project site includes sample image files with
explanatory material. Methodologies (scanning, watermarking, etc.)
used in the digitization project are explained in a paper available
at http://www.rese
arch.ibm.com/journal/rd/mintz/mintzer.html
The
American Memory Project, part of the Library of Congress of the
United States government contains an astonishing wealth of information.
Topics include: Early American Mutoscope & Biograph Films of D.W.
Griffith; Ex-Slave Narratives collected during the 1930's by the Federal
Writers' Project of the WPA; Meeting of the Frontiers, the story of
the dual exploration of Siberia and Alaska during the late-eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries; Revolutionary War Maps from British, American
and French cartographers. American Memory materials are organized
and searchable by broad topics, by time (beginning with 1400's-1699),
and place (regions of USA). There is also an extensive list of the
many more sets of materials currently being prepared for inclusion.
The three resources
listed above provide examples of archives about arts and letters.
This one is a work of web art about archives about arts and letters:
The Unreliable Archivist,
at the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, MN) includes an essay by Steve
Dietz, and work by the artistic trio of Janet Cohen, Keith Frank and
Jon Ippolito. The Unreliable Archivist explores, celebrates, and ridicules
the limitations of web-based artforms placed in cold storage by museums.
Using archived material from the important early web project, äda'web, the artists provide the visitor
with limited maneuverability around preselected elements of the äda'web
source materials. Distorted archival materials result.
The notion of
Variable Media is discussed
at http://www.three.org/variable_media/
Anne
M Carley, editor of the Arts4All Newsletter, manages collections
of art and archival materials. She has performed music of many centuries,
and writes songs of this one.
