Foreword
So you’ve been chosen by fate, or more likely you’re the only one with any interest and capability to understand what you’re doing and why you need to do it.
Congratulations, this is both the most rewarding and the most painful job all at the same time. From dealing with family that have little understanding of the value of those important videos or photos they threw out, needing to be the decision maker about how much quality is enough and how many of those 10,000 photos you should scan, to diagnosing hardware and software problems just to do your basic archiving job only to realise you made a wrong decision and have to start all over again to meet your quality requirements, it will take some strong will and patience. And then where do you store it all? How do you ensure your effort lasts the test of time and is of value to future generations? Do you stop with just digitising what’s there into masters that other people can wade through? Or do you try to repair some of the inevitable damage? The problems are many and just like the ‘tongue in cheek’ photo, often you will likely be considered the Einstein of the family – even if your IQ is pretty normal! This site aims to become a support network for like minded people, to help you to make the right decisions that fit your particular requirements.
Don’t expect it to be easy
We are in an age of extreme carelessness and waste. On one hand, our ability to take photographs and video of important memories has never been greater, on the other hand most people do not possess the ability to understand how to select, look after or store this important data.
The current direction of travel is likely to result in the most forgotten generational and historical imagery the world has ever seen. Due to the norm being to take 100 careless pictures of a moment, never choosing a best picture and never exporting it to somewhere for permanent storage – instead leaving it up to the will of the encrypted cloud with risks of forgotten payments, death, technology outages, lost passwords and personal mistakes, all of which can instantly erase every precious recorded moment. The lack of appropriate skill instilled upon the masses whom think that Facebook is a backup is truly remarkable. When we compare this to previous generations whom had physical media that could be left in a box for decades with little harm and revivable degradation, all without management, we begin to see the problem. I leave this paragraph here to provide thought provoking context to what we as digital archivists do and how we should do it.
For most people, this will be a multi year job and it will almost certainly get longer as people in your family hear what you’re doing and you find more important sources to archive in a quality befitting that of future generations. In the many years I have now been doing this, I still have not archived all the things I set out to archive. Recently a family member informed me they had the missing 8mm film I have been looking for for years, despite my having asked before and being told they didn’t have it. What a wonderful Christmas present that was. And now I begin th long journey to understand how best to archive this (send it away, buy a machine myself or build one). And all of this only takes into account the previous generations media, but at least future generations will have a better understanding of where they came from.
With the combination of deteriorating physical media from generations past and the limited foresight surrounding the challenges of digital technologies, never has there been a more pressing need for digital archivists to prevent a multi-generational loss of history.
I welcome you to the Digital Archivist and look forward to our discussing, debating and learning from each other as we navigate these challenging waters.
Marshalleq
