the future of archives
At the Chronicle of Higher Education I read this:
Leslie Morris is used to handling John Updike’s personal effects. For decades, Mr. Updike had been sending a steady stream of manuscripts and papers to Harvard University’s Houghton Library, where Ms. Morris serves as a curator.
But in late February, several weeks after the iconic writer died, some boxes arrived with unexpected contents: approximately 50 three-and-a-half and five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy disks — artifacts from late in the author’s career when he, like many of his peers, began using a word processor.
The floppies have presented a bit of a problem. While relatively modern to Mr. Updike — who rose to prominence back when publishers were still using Linotype machines — the disks are outmoded and damage-prone by today’s standards. Ms. Morris, who curates modern books and manuscripts, has carefully stored them alongside his papers in a temperature-controlled room in the library “until we have a procedure here at Harvard on how to handle these materials.”
Harvard isn’t the only university puzzling over new media from old — and not-so-old — masters. Emory University recently received four laptops, an external hard drive, and a Palm Treo personal digital assistant from Salman Rushdie. The University of Texas at Austin recently acquired a series of Zip disks and a laptop containing Norman Mailer’s files.
(Zip disks! — God help us. Mailer’s technological judgment was evidently a match for his literary.)
There’s something a little odd about this article, and that’s its temporal scheme: you’d think from reading this article that writers started using computers about three years ago. Five-and-a-quarter floppy disks from “late in the author’s career”? Those are probably about twenty years old, which places them roughly in the middle of Updike’s career.
But the article reads like that because libraries are just now starting to get archival materials from authors in the PC age. And they’d better not set those disks aside for too long: it’s hard enough these days to find a floppy drive that reads 3.5-inch disks, much less the old five-and-a-quarters.
What especially intrigues me is Salman Rushdie’s Palm Treo. Will such devices be the mainstays of future biographers? Will they spend untold hours scrolling through calendar applications to discover lunch dates and article deadlines? And what will happen if the next generations of writers buy into cloud computing and keep all their appointments in Google Calendar or 30boxes? And what if they end up using Google Docs to write their novels? I can imagine a future in which Sotheby’s and Christie’s get libraries participating in fierce bidding wars not for typescripts or notebooks or iPhones or laptops but for just this: a username and a password.
(Cross-posted at Text Patterns.)
“(Zip disks! — God help us. Mailer’s technological judgment was evidently a match for his literary.)”
Before portable storge devices and cds, zip discs were the standard for transfering large files. There was nothing wrong with them. Everyone used them all the time back in the 90s when I was a graphic artist.
— cw · May 14, 02:39 PM · #
In my view, the problem is not locating a 5 1/4 floppy drive or the necessary software — even if you don’t have them at hand, those items can be borrowed from someone, somewhere for whatever time is required to copy the contents onto some more current form of digital media. My concern would be that the disks themselves are not all that stable over a time frame of decades. Theoretically, there is no reason that a floppy preserved in a cool dry place shouldn’t last a very very long time; in practice, shelf lives of 2 to 10 years are more common.
— alkali · May 14, 05:45 PM · #
alkali, you’re absolutely right, and that’s what I meant to imply but (I now see) failed to: people shouldn’t let the lack of a handy floppy drive keep them from copying the digital contents to some newer medium. They had better find the proper drive and get the copying done ASAP for the very reason you point out.
— Alan Jacobs · May 14, 06:27 PM · #
Is part of the problem that libraries are keeping these electronic media thinking that there is some value to the “original copy” the way they’d value manuscripts and notes in the writer’s handwriting?
Or is it just a backlog? Too many floppy disks and not enough manpower to copy all the files to a hard drive, back it up, then throw the floppies away?
— Michael Straight · May 14, 08:58 PM · #
Do we get to read mobile emails from rushdie wooing padma? that’d be.. entertaining.
— jackal · May 14, 09:16 PM · #
This post is awesome. Thanks!
— Klug · May 14, 10:44 PM · #
You know, Michael, I think that many librarians/archivists are trained primarily in caring for something in the state in which it is given. Preservation, prevention of deterioration and damage, that kind of thing. And they know how to do that with paper. But it’s apparently taking a while for education in caring for electronic media to filter down: note that guy from Harvard who is just storing the disks in a “temperature-controlled room,” under the evident assumption that an environment that protects paper from deterioration will do the same for disks. In any case, the idea of caring for something by transferring it to another medium is certainly alien to the archivist’s training and mindset. (Though it won’t be for long.)
— Alan Jacobs · May 14, 11:39 PM · #
It’s not alien to what they’re teaching us in library school nowadays (I’m in my second year of the Library Science Master’s program at Missouri).
While I haven’t taken any classes specifically on archiving, I know from all my other classes that in the profession at large there’s a strong understanding that keeping materials in single formats is terrible for preservation — particularly for electronic media.
I think there is significant value in preserving the original media, even for electronic works. It may well have some significance to future researchers (I can see “Zip It: Mailer, zip discs,and the techno-hegemonic restraint of sexuality” as an article in an upcoming journal). This doesn’t have to compete with preserving electronic copies by making multiple back-ups on newer storage media.
— Ethan C. · May 15, 12:54 AM · #
Ethan C., you really ought to write that article.
— Peter Suderman · May 15, 04:57 AM · #
I have sat in on conversations with archivists talking about problems in digital media practically from the dawn of the personal computer age (I started computing on 8-inch floppy disks). Also, the problems of preserving electronic files do not end with copying the data to a new medium. If librarians copy Mr. Updike’s files to CD or DVD disks, how long will those last? How long will files last on jump drives?
— John Spragge · May 15, 11:19 AM · #
I hold an MLIS and am a Member of the Academy of Certified Archivists (impressive huh? I try to remember that when my calendar says “1 pm- Kill mold)
There are two tracks to follow here- the value of Information and the intrinsic value of “things” (artifacts is a fancier word, but it used by so many in so many ways, it does not suit here) To be able to see the development of a literary work, if possible, by forensic computing to pull out previous versions is measurable value to patrons and researchers. To have the item used by the literary great is of interest and value as well. People go to So and So’s birthplace as a pilgrimage- there are occasions when it is unlikely that So-and-So ever went back. Serious questions may also be attached to these items: How does it affect of writing and such today to have a screen ? that reflects change with a click of the back space?
Most donations come to historical archives at the will of the donor. In other kinds of archives, it is part of the policy and procedure. In my current position, I jestingly explain what I do as “I’m the person who will be reading your e-mails in so years. And IT backs up every night!” Not exactly, but close enough to make sense to the public.
How many unaccesable formats are in the collection I manage?
Well, the 2 projectors for 16 mm we have need repair, there is no Beta machine or U-matic , 2in video tape deck. Not even a filmstrip projector, unless I bring in my own. If someone gave me the machine along the files/material etc, that would make it SO easy! It seems a lovely way to deal with several issues, as long as the batteries take a charge or you have a system with a data port that is compatible……
But that is a whole different facet of concerns.
— Gypsye L · May 15, 02:07 PM · #
John, I think hard drives and their descendants are the way to go on this, backed up the same way we back up the computers we use regularly.
Every time I buy a new computer, I copy the entire hard drive of the old one to the new one, each time taking a negligible percentage of the new hard drive.
As long as electronic storage keeps getting cheaper, I think that’s the sort of model libraries should use. Store everything on hard drives (that get backed up with whatever is currently the best practice for making backups) and regularly copy the entire collection to new hard drives as bigger and bigger ones become more affordable.
That way, the only barrier to accessing the data is software, which is a much easier problem to deal with. If some author has a bunch of files made with SpeedScript on a Commodore 64, you can just run a Commodore 64 emulator on your PC and see the files in almost exactly the same format that the author created them.
Such emulators exist for almost every computer and computer-like device that has ever existed, except for contemporary stuff that is too complex and powerful for the current generation of PCs to emulate. Getting the rights to run a copy of the BIOS for the machine in question might be a barrier, however.
And while I can see some value to future scholars in being able to hold a zip disk or hand-write a note on an Apple Newton in order to get a sense of what it was like for someone to use these devices, I don’t see much value into hanging on to a particular zip disk just because it belonged to an author. Being able to hold in your hand the actual CD-ROM on which Alan Jacobs backed up copies of his manuscripts is not going to give you any more insight into his writing than being able to hold his stapler or his Post-It Note dispenser.
— Michael Straight · May 15, 04:36 PM · #
“Being able to hold in your hand the actual CD-ROM on which Alan Jacobs backed up copies of his manuscripts is not going to give you any more insight into his writing than being able to hold his stapler or his Post-It Note dispenser.”
That’s a bit too blanket of a statement. What if Alan was a novelist, and he labeled the disks with his original novel title, but that title later got changed by the publisher? The labels might be the only indication of his original intent.
Or, let’s say he was a musician and kept all his production files on a particular medium. Later on, it is discovered that that medium might have imposed some technological limits on his music. You’d want the original data format in order to test that theory.
It’s hard to anticipate the uses scholars might have for archived documents. That’s why the best policy is simply to do one’s best to both preserve the data and preserve the original artifact.
— Ethan C. · May 18, 06:55 AM · #