Comments on: Paper Calendars, Palm Pilots and Google Calendar

By: Jeanne

Jeanne — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 18:54:57 +0000

Aes: Exactly! A born digital record is a record which was created in the computer. It was ‘born’ as 1s and 0s – there is no analog original (while in some cases an analog version is created after the fact – as is currently done for films created digitally but distributed on analog film).

By: Aes

Aes — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 11:21:12 +0000

Lovely blog, Jeanne, there’s something very calming about it. I’ve never heard the term “born” digital record. Is it one that was created digitally and exists in no other form?

By: Rob Jenson

Rob Jenson — Tue, 25 Jul 2006 12:14:35 +0000

Yup … big questions to wrap one’s brain around. Things are getting complicated by the fact that ordinary people are starting to get used to the Internet being there, but don’t comprehend the fact that the WWW facilitates access, but it is not permanence.

I did not know what Archive-It.org
was charging. They are a service of the Internet Archive (IA) … and that should be a big caveat emptor. While IA is doing great things for preserving some parts of the Internet, their policies are very cautious, and they are, IMHO, more of a library than an archives. One big issue I have is with the fact that their WayBack Machine (and probably the underlying data set) is keyed to Domain Names in URLs instead of something more accurate over time (Domain Name + Registrar Entity … for example). Here is the problem … I own Spotch.COM … today. In whois, you find the domain registered to my corporate entity. I like IA, so I don’t block their spidering my site with robots.txt, and my web site is archived. Tomorrow, I die — the corporation is dissolved … my non-geek executors let the domain registration lapse, and the domain is bought up by a smart porno promoter who wants to take advantage of the millions of people who hit my site daily to come to his site instead. By default, he sets an IA block in robots.txt, as it only creates overhead on his site — no commercial benefit. The next time that IA spiders that domain, it is removed from their spidering list (good) and, I believe, that the past archived pages become inaccessible or deleted from the IA (not-so-good). I suppose I should raise this with the IA folks … I realize that there are practicalities involved and they are trying to minimize their LCQPH (legal counsel queries per hour), but it seems to me that an unrelated entity buying a domain name should not cause archived records to be deleted.

More later (much more) … I’ve gotta go to work.

By: Jeanne

Jeanne — Mon, 24 Jul 2006 15:25:28 +0000

Linda: Yes, I suppose I did start with a hard question first.. but then again I think those are the sorts of questions that leave lots of room for brainstorming and pondering. That’s what makes them interesting to me!

I don’t know how folks will know about life in our times – I would love to think that blogs will be easier to archive in the long term than paper diaries were (easier to copy exact replicas of digital records if you bother to do so). I will think on this more (more fuel for a full post).

By: Jeanne

Jeanne — Mon, 24 Jul 2006 15:18:14 +0000

Ben: I love your idea about some default rollover to the pages on http://www.archive.org. A new development in that world is the http://www.archive-it.org/. Probably worth it's own post - archive-it.org is aiming to provide an archiving solution to 'subscribers'. For a cost of $10,000 a year archive-it.org will provide on demand archiving of up to 10 million web documents. By default these 'curated web collections' are public - but can be made private. Definitely more on this in another post.

By: Linda

Linda — Mon, 24 Jul 2006 13:48:55 +0000

Great start for your blog. You’re going for the toughest questions first. We have a journal of one of your college presidents from the 19th Century. It is fascinating and reveals a lot about the students and the college at that time. These days journals, including my own, are blogs or other born digital objects. How will researchers in the 22nd Century know what college life was like?

By: Walter

Walter — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 12:29:04 +0000

Nice work, I’ve been using Word Press alot at work lately, we have branched out to using it for things other than just blogs, its easy enough to use that the untrained monkeys (editors) can create content and posts for sites. One of my sites is using it to post podcasts (well only one at this point) http://www.advancedimagingpro.com. I could go for ages about the arhiving issue, I have to archive a lot of material, most of the time there is only one correct way to do it, if you make it another way (with various changes) you lose something from the orginal content. Can’t get many of my co-workers to understand that.

By: Benjamin Rosenbaum

Benjamin Rosenbaum — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 03:13:22 +0000

This isn’t just calendars — it’s a general problem, e.g. for website links, too.

The solution that I hope will eventually be worked out is that everyone will put important content in static, REST-friendly, spiderable — and thus archivable — formats. Things are tending to head that way anyway, I think. And then you’ll be able to find the external content on http://archive.org. And I think browsers need to start incorporating support for archive.org — if a link or XML query (like the ones google calendar is presumably using) comes up 404, the browser should try the archive.org page. In fact there should really be two anchor elements… a href=”http://bla” archiving=”current” and a href=”http://bla” archiving=”snapshot”. The first would try to get the last available page http://bla, the second would try to bring up the http://bla page contemporaneous with the last update of the referring page.