For this blog, I read Robert Bee's article "The Importance of Preserving Paper-Based Artifacts in a Digital Age," published in The Library Quarterly vol. 78, no. 2, pp. 179-194.
In this article, Bee advocates for the continued preservation of paper objects and argues against the idea that digitizing a document is the same as preserving it. For his case, he presents how the objects themselves can contain information about the document and its culture that can be lost in the reformatting process. As examples, he uses the way publishers will structure and decorate a book to convey its nature and how the process of microfilming newspapers loses information related to the history of comics, print ads and photography.
In this way, his philosophy on the role of preservation as a method of recording cultural history and creating a collective memory is similar to the ideas behind the Cloonan article and those discussed in class. Awareness of this role and how the context and form of a document are important for understanding its full meaning should impact the decisions we make as preservation managers regarding retaining artifacts, reformatting artifacts, allocating funds, and prioritizing projects.
While Bee focuses on paper, I think that this argument for preserving the physical object rather than just the "information contained within" can also be applied to other, non-paper objects. Preserving floppy disks, audiotapes, and similar artifacts in such a way that they can be used as they were originally may never be practical, but the idea that the information stored on these objects can be reformatted without losing any cultural information is as erroneous as the idea that paper objects can be reformatted and discarded with nothing lost. Can someone really understand what it was like to play Oregon Trail in the 80's without sitting in front of a Compaq computer, sliding a large floppy disk into the "B" drive, clicking it closed, and typing in the run command followed by "*,8"?
Cloonan, Michele Valerie. (2001) "W(H)ITHER preservation?" The Library Quarterly. 71(2). 231-242.
This is interesting to me because it raises the question of which modern objects we will choose to preserve? It is difficult to know what people will be interested in in the future. Will they want to play Oregon Trail? I agree that if they do, it would be unfortunate to have lost the original format.
ReplyDeleteMaybe preservation administrators have to be more realistic and face the fact that it is not possible to preserve experiences. In contrast to that we can think that we provide means for people to live new experiences with objects/information of the past.
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