Menu Close

Category: context

Chapter 2: Curbing the Online Assimilation of Personal information by Paulan Korenhof

The second chapter in Partners for Preservation is ‘Curbing the Online Assimilation of Personal Information’ by Paulan KorenhofGiven the amount of attention being focused on the right to be forgotten and the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), I felt it was essential to include a chapter that addressed these topics. Walking the fine line between providing access to archival records and respecting the privacy of those whose personal information is included in the records has long been an archival challenge.

In this chapter, Korenhof documents the history of the right to be forgotten and the benefits and challenges of GDPR as it is currently being implemented. She also explores the impact of the broad and virtually instantaneous access to content online that the Internet has facilitated.

This quote from the chapter highlights a major issue with making so much content available online, especially content that is being digitized or surfaced from previously offline data sources:

“With global accessibility and the convergence of different contextual knowledge realms, the separating power of space is nullified and the contextual demarcations that we are used to expecting in our informational interactions are missing.”

As the second chapter in Part 1: Memory, Privacy, and Transparency, it continues to pull these ideas together. In addition to providing a solid grounding in the right to be forgotten and GDPR, it should guide the reader to explore the unintended consequences of the mad rush to put everything online and the dramatic impact that search engines (and their human coded algorithms) have on what is seen.

I hope this chapter triggers more contemplation of these issues by archivists within the big picture of the Internet. Often we are so focused on improving access to content online that these questions about the broader impact are not considered.

Bio

Paulan Korenhof

Paulan Korenhof is in the final stages of her PhD-research at the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society (TILT). Her research is focused on the manner in which the Web affects the relation between users and personal information, and the question to what degree the Right to Be Forgotten is a fit solution to address these issues. With a background in philosophy, law, and art, she investigates this relation from an applied phenomenological and critical theory perspective. Occasionally she co-operates in projects with Hacklabs and gives privacy awareness workshops to diverse audiences. Recently she started working at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (HVA) as a researcher on Legal Technology.

 

Image credit: Flickr Commons: British Library: Image taken from page 5 of ‘Forget-Me-Nots. [In verse.]’: https://www.flickr.com/photos/britishlibrary/11301997276/

SXSW Panel Proposal – Archival Records Online: Context is King

I have a panel up for evaluation on the SXSW Interactive Panel Picker titled Archival Records Online: Context is King. The evaluation process for SXSW panels is based on a combination of staff choice, advisory board recommendations and public votes. As you can see from the pie chart shown here (thank you SXSW website for the great graphic), 30% of the selection criteria is based on public votes. That is where you come in. Voting is open through 11:59 pm Central Daylight Time on Friday, September 2. To vote in favor of my panel, all you need to do is create a free account over on SXSW Panel Picker and then find Archival Records Online: Context is King and give it a big thumbs up.

If my panel is selected, I intend this session to give me the chance to review all of the following:

  1. What are the special design requirements of archival records?
  2. What are the biggest challenges to publishing archival records online?
  3. How can archivists, designers and developers collaborate to build successful web sites?
  4. Why is metadata important?
  5. How can search engine optimization (SEO) inform the design process?

All of this ties into what I have been pondering, writing about and researching for the past few years related to getting archival records online. So many people are doing such amazing work in this space. I want to show off the best of the best and give attendees some takeaways to help them build websites that make it easy to see the context of anything they find in their search.

While archival records have a very particular dependence on the effective communication of context – I also think that this is a lesson that can improve interface design across the board. These are issues that UI and IA folks are always going to be worrying about. SXSW is such a great opportunity for cross pollination. Conferences outside the normal archives, records management and library conference circuit give us a chance to bring fresh eyes and attention to the work being done in our corner of the world.

If you like the idea of this session, please take a few minutes to go sign up at the SXSW Panel Picker and give Archival Records Online: Context is King a thumbs up. You don’t need to be planning to attend in order to cast your vote, though after you start reading through all the great panel ideas you might change your mind!

Archival Photographs as Art: A Part of Larry Sultan’s Legacy

EvidenceLarry Sultan was famed as both a photographer and archives researcher. He passed away on Sunday, December 13th, 2009 and his obituary in the New York Times describes his use of archival photographs as “harnessing found photographs for the purposes of art while using them as a way to examine the society that produced them”. The 59 photographs, selected in collaboration with Mike Mandel from a broad assortment of corporate and government archives, were originally displayed and published as a collection named ‘Evidence’ in 1977. A reprint of Evidence was published in 2004, including a new scholarly essay and additional images not in the original.

The Stephen Wirtz Gallery has a number of images from the 2004 exhibition available online and features this great summary of the original project:

Sultan and Mandel created the series Evidence with documentary photographs mined from image banks of government institutions, corporations, scientific research facilities, and police departments. An NEA grant gave the artists a persuasive edge in gaining access these resources, and images were selected for their mysterious and perplexing subject matter. The series was presented in an exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1977, and simultaneously collected in the book Evidence, which is recognized among the most important publications in the history of photography. Removed from their original contexts and repositioned without references to their sources, these images challenged the viewer to examine the conceptual concern of identifying meaning and authorship in the creation and consideration of the art photograph.

I used WorldCat to find the closest copy of Evidence and happily found a copy of the 1977 imprint at the Art Library at the University of Maryland, College Park. It had been a long time since I had looked at photographs on paper and bound in a book rather than on a computer monitor. I love the idea of re-purposing of archival image – but I was also fascinated to realize that the word ‘archive’ does not appear anywhere in the publication. Even the description above mentions ‘image banks’, not ‘archives’.

The organizations thanked at the start of the book included major corporations, U.S. federal agencies and a long list of highway, fire and police departments. Sultan and Mandel seemed to focus their research efforts in California and Washington, DC – perhaps due to a need to limit their travel. While today one would likely still need to travel to many archives to find images like those used in Evidence, there are so many images available online (at least for preview). How would someone approach a project like this now?

It is so easy to create a slide show or website featuring images from repositories from around the world. Even the images that have not been digitized have a decent chance of at least being mentioned in an online finding aid. The recently introduced Flickr Galleries make it easy to select up to 18 images from across Flickr – like my November Flickr Commons Photos of the Month Gallery. Also, much of the online culture of reuse encourages giving proper attribution for materials.

Part of Evidence’s power is the extraction of the images from their original context and their unexplained juxtaposition with one another. Finding and harvesting an image online would make it much harder to entirely strip that context away to leave the raw image behind. I can imagine a web-wide hunt for an image’s origin. While that might be fun (maybe an archives answer to the DARPA Network Challlenge?), it would not be the same as a sleek hardback book with 59 stark, unlabeled, black-and-white photos that sits on the shelf of an art library.

I find it poetic that Evidence’s photos are a perfect example of a ‘secondary value’ of archival records, even though the images were literally evidential records necessary for the carrying out of daily business. That said, I don’t believe that ‘possibly useful to future artists’ is a typical reason given for retaining and preserving archival records. We are just lucky that artists have been (and will almost certainly continue to be) innovative in their hunt for inspiration.

If you have the opportunity, I encourage you to sit quiety with a copy of Evidence. The images include landscapes, explosions, deep pits, plants, rocks, people, planes, machinery, wires and a car on fire. My laundry list of contents cannot begin to do the images justice – but I hope that they might wet your appetite.

This combination of gallery exhibition and book has inspired me to wonder about other similar projects that specifically leverage archival images for artistic purposes. Please list any that you are aware of in the comments (be they in gallery exhibitions or published volumes).

SEO Evaluation of an Archival Website: Looking at UMBC’s Digital Collections

Flickr Commons: Do-it-yourself-womanEach week brings announcements of archives launching new websites. Today both my email and Twitter told me about  University of Maryland, Baltimore County’s new Digital Collections site. Who can resist peeking at new materials available online?

I have spent much of the past year learning the details of Search Engine Optimization. Usually shortened to SEO, this simply refers to the use of techniques which improve the traffic sent to a website via organic search. Want your webpage to show up at the top of the list for a specific search in Google? You want to work on your SEO.

So when I look at new archives website, I can’t help but keep an eye open for how well the site is optimized for search engines.

I hope that UMBC will forgive me for nitpicking their new site. A lot of their choices are great for SEO,  but they also have room for improvement.

Things Done Well for SEO

  • Home Page Title & Description: The site’s home page has a good meta description. This is the text displayed below the link on a search results page – as shown below:UMBC Digital Collection Google Result
  • Unique Page Titles At Collection Level: Each photography collection homepage has a unique page title and a nice block of explanatory text. Google can only read words – so the more unique text on a page, the better the job Google can do in figuring out what your page is about. Example: Ardsley Park Album
  • Good anchor text: (also known as link text) The words used in anchor text tells search engines information about the destination page. For example, the blue text below is anchor text. UMBC Anchor Text Example

Areas for SEO Improvement

  • Unique Page Titles At Item Level: Individual images and documents all use a generic page title such as ‘UMBC | Digital Archive | Document Viewer’. Document Example: Accidental Death of an Anarchist Image Example: 10 year old Bootblack
  • H1 Tags: In the HTML of each page, the dominant heading of the page should use the <h1> tag. This helps Google know the phrase you are targeting with this page. It is your 2nd best place to emphasize your content after the page title. In the case of the item pages, there seems to often be a headline type title at the top of the page – but it currently is not an demarcated with an <h1> tag.
  • Think About Search Results and Indexing: Pages displaying results of internal searches on your site are not likely to be useful as indexed pages in Google. The thinking here is that they can dilute the focus on the item and collection level pages on your site if Google also has many search results pages in the index. If UMBC wanted their search pages to be indexed, then those pages’ URLs should be simplified and the search results pages need a page title that somehow includes the search criteria. There are two ways that I know of to disable this indexing – blocking via the site’s robots.txt file or via a robots meta tag in the header of the search results page. Both of these methods tell obliging search engines to not crawl certain parts of your site.

Final Thoughts

There are plenty of other things that UMBC could do to support this new website. They could create an XML sitemap of all their pages and submit it to Google (maybe they already have). They might re-title some of their pages based on using a tool like Google Insight to see what variations of a phrase is searched on most frequently. My goal here was to give you a taste of the sorts of things that catch my eye. Also, SEO is still more of an art than a science – so you will sometimes notice that what one SEO expert recommends is the opposite of what the next expert would tell you.

In many cases changes, such as the Unique Page Title at the Item Level mentioned above, may not even be possible due to software or programmer resource limitations. The trick is to take advantage of every option that is available. There are also trade-offs to be made. UMBC’s site provides some very slick interfaces for viewing the details of a group of documents, such as theater programs and other materials related to a theatrical production. The imlementation elegantly handles the situation of multiple scanned images which relate to a coherent set of documents. Sometimes you can’t have both your innovative UI and perfect SEO. Then it gets down to what your goals are for your website. Are you trying to make a specific community of existing users happy by providing them with tools they can use? Or does your mission focus more on reaching out to a broader audience?

There is no silver bullet to search engine optimization. It just takes knowledge of the available tools and techniques combined with a willingness to keep learning and experimenting. Like the ‘Do-It-Yourself-Woman‘ pictured above in the Nationaal Archief‘s photo I found out on the Flickr Commons, you too can learn the basics and do-it-yourself. A great starting point is Google’s free SEO Guide. Also, please remember that the best time to plan your SEO strategy is before you have built your site in the first place!

I would love to do research on how much progress archives websites can make in their organic search traffic after SEO improvements. My thinking is to take a snapshot of a month of analytics (the statistics that tell you how many people are visiting your website) and then apply some SEO inspired changes. After a suitable delay (it takes some time for SEO to do its job) we consider another month of analytics to determine any change in organic traffic.

Do you want me to do a quick review of your archives website to see if there is room for SEO improvement? Please contact me or add a comment to this post. I feel like there is a conference presentation in all this if we can find a good set of websites to optimize.

Finally, thank you to unsuspecting UMBC – your new website really is beautiful.

Image credit: Doe-het-zelf vrouw /Do-it-yourself-woman from Nationaal Archief on Flickr Commons.

Preserving Jewish Memory: Family Photos Join Oral History in Centropa Movies

Centropa. org features video photo montages that combine Jewish family photographs with oral history. I found my way to Centropa from the Time.com article Old Nazi News Makes Headlines in Germany which includes Kristallnacht in Words and Photographs from Centropa, but Centropa’s mission reaches beyond recalling the Holocaust. Centropa bills itself as “an interactive database of Jewish memory”.

The first oral history project that combines old family pictures with the stories that go with them, Centropa has interviewed more than 1,350 elderly Jews living in Central and Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, and the Sephardic communities of Greece, Turkey and the Balkans. With a database of 25,000 digitized images, we are bringing Jewish history to life in ways never done before.

Their fleet of 140 individuals conducted extensive oral interviews and digitized thousands of old family photos. They are quite intent on clarifying that they do not create videos during their sessions with their interviewees. Instead, they record audio of their multi-hour sessions, transcribe these sessions and combine them with the digitized family photos to create their movies.

The juicy center of their website is found in the Centropa Movies which are alternately billed as a “library of rescued memories” and a “digital bridge back to a world destroyed”.  Their movies are also available via iTunes and on the CentropaOffice YouTube Channel. The movie I have included below tells the story of Judit Kinszki and focuses on her father Imre Kinszki, a budding photographer from Budapest, Hungary. From this movie’s Centropa Movie page you can also navigate to Judit Kinszki’s biography , the full family photo album and a study guide for this movie.

The amount of detail provided with each posted interview is really incredible. Biographies, detailed notes on each photo, the study guide, a family tree and a currently grayed out but promising link to “Discuss Movie”. This site has clearly given great thought to how to support teachers and has followed that vision through in the form of tons of supporting materials. Centropa has chosen the path of quality over quantity with the 17 movies currently posted.

Upon further reflection, I realize now that the movies are an outgrowth of the database of photographs and biographies. The detail was not added to support the videos – but rather the videos are the next step of evolution beyond the photos and interview transcripts.

In addition to the movies they offer a Recipe Archive, downloadable eBook versions of some of their interviews as well as Centropa Student, aimed at high schools in Europe, North America, and Israel. For those of you working on your own oral history projects, there is the Centropa Oral History Tool Kit, available in 5 languages. The Centropa Glossaries are less glossary and more a detailed list of people, social groups, events and terms that can be searched by country, type or keyword. Finally, don’t miss the ‘Narrated Stories and Introductions’ featured on the right sidebar on the Centropa Movies page, such as Maps, Central Europe and History or the Introduction to Centropa for US Students.

Reading Centropa’s claim that they are the first to combine the use of family photos and oral histories made me recall the University of Alaska Fairbank’s Project Jukebox. This project launched back in 1988 and aims to ” integrate oral history recordings with associated photographs, maps, and text.” The original was written using Hypercard!

They have a map showing all the communities in Alaska currently included as part of the project. A good example of an individual photo with accompanying narration is Harry Cook in his Garden from the Kiana Village History Project. No – it isn’t as elegantly assembled as the Centropa Movies, but the intention is much the same. They use old photos as a catalyst for helping individuals being interviewed and then combine the audio and images to improve end users’ understanding of the context of individual photos.

I have signed up with Centropa to be notified when they launch the promised ‘Add Your Family Photos’ feature. Until then I will keep scanning my own family’s photos, such as the one below featuring my grandfather (back row on the right), and working my way through all the Centropa Movies and their supporting materials.

Of Pirates, Treasure Chests and Keys: Improving Access to Digitized Materials

Key to Anything by Stoker Studios (flickr)Dan Cohen posted yesterday about what he calls The Pirate Problem. Basically the Pirate Problem can be summed up as “there are ways of acting and thinking that we can’t understand or anticipate.” Why is that a ‘Pirate Problem’? Because a pirate pub opened near his home and rather than folding shortly thereafter due to lack of interest from the ‘very serious professionals’ who populate DC suburbs – the pub was a rousing success due to the pirate aficionados who came out of the woodwork to sing sea shanties and drink grog. This surprising turn of events highlighted for him the fact that there are many ways of acting and thinking (some people even know all the words to sea shanties without needing sheet music).

Dan recently delivered the keynote speech at a workshop at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The workshop brought together dozens of historians to talk about how the 16 million archival documents of the Southern Historical Collection (SHC) should be put online. He devoted his keynote “to prodding the attendees into recognizing that the future of archives and research might not be like the past” and goes on in his post to explain:

The most memorable response from the audience was from an award-winning historian I know from my graduate school years, who said that during my talk she felt like “a crab being lowered into the warm water of the pot.” Behind the humor was the difficult fact that I was saying that her way of approaching an archive and understanding the past was about to be replaced by techniques that were new, unknown, and slightly scary.

This resistance to thinking in new ways about digital archives and research was reflected in the pre-workshop survey of historians. Extremely tellingly, the historians surveyed wanted the online version of the SHC to be simply a digital reproduction of the physical SHC.

Much of the stress of Dan’s article is on fear of new techniques of analysis. The choppy waters of text mining and pattern recognition threaten to wash away traditional methods of actually reading individual pages and “most historians just want to do their research they way they’ve always done it, by taking one letter out of the box at a time”.

I certainly like the idea of new technologically based ways of analyzing large sets of cultural heritage materials, but I also believe that reading individual letters will always be important. The trick is finding the right letter!

And of course – we still need the context. It isn’t as if when we digitize major collections like the SHC that we are going to scan and OCR each page without regard to which box it came out of. We can’t slice and dice archival records and manuscripts into their component parts to feed into text analysis with no way back to the originals.

I like to imagine the combination of all the new technology (be it digitization, cross collection searching, text mining or pattern recognition) as creating keys to different treasure chests. Humanities scholars are treasure hunters. Some will find their gems through careful reading of individual passages. Others will discover patterns spread across materials now co-existing virtually that before digitization would have been widely separated by space and time. Both methods will benefit from the digitization of materials and the creation of innovative search and text analysis tools. Both still require an understanding of a material’s origin. The importance of context isn’t going anywhere – we still need to know which box the letter came from (and in a perfect world, which page came before and which came after). I want scholars to still be able to read one page from the box – I just want them to be able to do it from home in the middle of the night if they are so inclined with their travel budget no worse for wear.

Dan ties his post together by pointing out that:

… in Chapel Hill I was the pirate with the strange garb and ways of behaving, and this is a good lesson for all boosters of digital methods within the humanities. We need to recognize that the digital humanities represent a scary, rule-breaking, swashbuckling movement for many historians and other scholars.

In my opinion, the core message should be that we just found more locked treasure chests – and for those who are interested, we have some new keys that just might open those locks. I enjoyed the Pirate metaphor (obviously) and I appreciate that there are real issues here relating to strong discomfort with the fast changing landscape of technology, but I have to believe that if we do something that prevents historians from being able to read one letter at a time we are abandoning the treasure chests that are already open for the new ones for which we haven’t yet found the right keys. I am greedy. I want all the treasure!

Image credit: key to anything by Stoker Studios via flickr

Digital Preservation via Emulation – Dioscuri and the Prevention of Digital Black Holes

dioscuri.JPGAvailable Online posted about the open source emulator project Dioscuri back in late September. In the course of researching Thoughts on Digital Preservation, Validation and Community I learned a bit about the Microsoft Virtual PC software. Virtual PC permits users to run multiple operating systems on the same physical computer and can therefore facilitate access to old software that won’t run on your current operating system. That emulator approach pales in comparison with what the folks over at Dioscuri are planning and building.

On the Digital Preservation page of the Dioscuri website I found this paragraph on their goals:

To prevent a digital black hole, the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB), National Library of the Netherlands, and the Nationaal Archief of the Netherlands started a joint project to research and develop a solution. Both institutions have a large amount of traditional documents and are very familiar with preservation over the long term. However, the amount of digital material (publications, archival records, etc.) is increasing with a rapid pace. To manage them is already a challenge. But as cultural heritage organisations, more has to be done to keep those documents safe for hundreds of years at least.

They are nothing if not ambitious… they go on to state:

Although many people recognise the importance of having a digital preservation strategy based on emulation, it has never been taken into practice. Of course, many emulators already exist and showed the usefulness and advantages it offer. But none of them have been designed to be digital preservation proof. For this reason the National Library and Nationaal Archief of the Netherlands started a joint project on emulation.

The aim of the emulation project is to develop a new preservation strategy based on emulation.

Dioscuri is part of Planets (Preservation and Long-term Access via NETworked Services) – run by the Planets consortium and coordinated by the British Library. The Dioscuri team has created an open source emulator that can be ported to any hardware that can run a Java Virtual Machine (JVM). Individual hardware components are implemented via separate modules. These modules should make it possible to mimic many different hardware configurations without creating separate programs for every possible combination.

You can get a taste of the big thinking that is going into this work by reviewing the program overview and slide presentations from the first Emulation Expert Meeting (EEM) on digital preservation that took place on October 20th, 2006.

In the presentation given by Geoffrey Brown from Indiana University titled Virtualizing the CIC Floppy Disk Project: An Experiment in Preservation Using Emulation I found the following simple answer to the question ‘Why not just migrate?’:

  • Loss of information — e.g. word edits

  • Loss of fidelity — e.g. WordPerfect to Word isn’t very good

  • Loss of authenticity — users of migrated document need access to original to verify authenticity

  • Not always possible — closed proprietary formats

  • Not always feasible — costs may be too high

  • Emulation may necessary to enable migration

After reading through Emulation at the German National Library, presented by Tobias Steinke, I found my way to the kopal website. With their great tagline ‘Data into the future’, they state their goal is “…to develop a technological and organizational solution to ensure the long-term availability of electronic publications.” The real gem for me on that site is what they call the kopal demonstrator. This is a well thought out Flash application that explains the kopal project’s ‘procedures for archiving and accessing materials’ within the OAIS Reference Model framework. But it is more than that – if you are looking for a great way to get your (or someone else’s) head around digital archiving, software and related processes – definitely take a look. They even include a full Glossary.

I liked what I saw in Defining a preservation policy for a multimedia and software heritage collection, a pragmatic attempt from the Bibliothèque nationale de France, a presentation by Grégory Miura, but felt like I was missing some of the guts by just looking at the slides. I was pleased to discover what appears to be a related paper on the same topic presented at IFLA 2006 in Seoul titled: Pushing the boundaries of traditional heritage policy: Maintaining long-term access to multimedia content by introducing emulation and contextualization instead of accepting inevitable loss . Hurrah for NOT ‘accepting inevitable loss’.

Vincent Joguin’s presentation, Emulating emulators for long-term digital objects preservation: the need for a universal machine, discussed a virtual machine project named Olonys. If I understood the slides correctly, the idea behind Olonys is to create a “portable and efficient virtual processor”. This would provide an environment in which to run programs such as emulators, but isolate the programs running within it from the disparities between the original hardware and the actual current hardware. Another benefit to this approach is that only the virtual processor need be ported to new platforms rather than each individual program or emulator.

Hilde van Wijngaarden presented an Introduction to Planets at EEM. I also found another introductory level presentation that was given by Jeffrey van der Hoeven at wePreserve in September of 2007 titled Dioscuri: emulation for digital preservation.

The wePreserve site is a gold mine for presentations on these topics. They bill themselves as “the window on the synergistic activities of DigitalPreservationEurope (DPE), Cultural, Artistic and Scientific knowledge for Preservation, Access and Retrieval (CASPAR), and Preservation and Long-term Access through NETworked Services (PLANETS).” If you have time and curiosity on the subject of digital preservation, take a glance down their home page and click through to view some of the presentations.

On the site of The International Journal of Digital Curation there is a nice ten page paper that explains the most recent results of the Dioscuri project. Emulation for Digital Preservation in Practice: The Results was published in December 2007. I like being able to see slides from presentations (as linked to above), but without the notes or audio to go with them I am often left staring at really nice diagrams wondering what the author’s main point was. The paper is thorough and provides lots of great links to other reading, background and related projects.

There is a lot to dig into here. It is enough to make me wish I had a month (maybe a year?) to spend just following up on this topic alone. I found my struggle to interpret many of the Power Point slide decks that have no notes or audio very ironic. Here I was hunting for information about the preservation of born digital records and I kept finding that the records of the research provided didn’t give me the full picture. With no context beyond the text and images on the slides themselves, I was left to my own interpretation of their intended message. While I know that these presentations are not meant to be the official records of this research, I think that the effort obviously put into collecting and posting them makes it clear that others are as anxious as I to see this information.

The best digital preservation model in the world will only preserve what we choose to save. I know the famous claim on the web is that ‘content is king’ – but I would hazard to suggest that in the cultural heritage community ‘context is king’.

What does this have to do with Dioscuri and emulators? Just that as we solve the technical problems related to preservation and access, I believe that we will circle back around to realize that digital records need the same careful attention to appraisal, selection and preservation of context as ‘traditional’ records. I would like to believe that the huge hurdles we now face on the technical and process side of things will fade over time due to the immense efforts of dedicated and brilliant individuals. The next big hurdle is the same old hurdle – making sure the records we fight to preserve have enough context that they will mean anything to those in the future. We could end up with just as severe a ‘digital black hole’ due to poorly selected or poorly documented records as we could due to records that are trapped in a format we can no longer access. We need both sides of the coin to succeed in digital preservation.

Did I mention the part about ‘Hurray for open source emulator projects with ambitious goals for digital preservation’? Right. I just wanted to be clear about that.

Image Credit: The image included at the top of this post was taken from a screen shot of Dioscuri itself, the original version of which may be seen here.