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Experts in Digital Preservation
Clay Shirky
Following is an interview with Clay Shirky, who divides his time among consulting, teaching and writing on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. Shirky has done consulting work for the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program. He is also an adjunct professor in New York University’s graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program.
You said in 2001 that "whatever else you think about, think about interoperability. Don't think about standards yet."Do you think this statement has relevance for the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) and if so, how?
It's relevant for the early stages of any complex effort involving a large network. There are all sorts of ways of arriving at interoperability, usually involving one or more translation steps -- take Format A, convert it to Format B and send it to its final destination -- or simple loss -- ignore Filed X of Format A when converting to Format B.
These kinds of solutions are messy but expedient, and they give you enough real-world experience to decide what the standards should be. History has been very unkind to standards designed without reference to real-world systems, so getting something working, however messily, and then thinking about standards seems like the more prudent course.
[Editor’s note: There are so-called “local repositories” of varying functionality across the nation. NDIIPP is concerned about the ability of those environments to exchange information in the future. The early stages of exchange are evident and gaining maturity as these local repositories begin to share information about what works globally.]
Does an idea that you and others have discussed, that of a “LazyWeb,” whereby “if you wait long enough, someone will write/build/design what you were thinking about” pertain to the digital preservation project? In other words, has the “problem” been described – born-digital information is at risk of being lost if steps are not taken now to preserve it – with NDIIPP being the so-called writer/builder/designer of the solution?
The Lazy Web is absolutely at work here -- we have often reminded ourselves during the course of the work on NDIIPP that progress on these issues can and should come from many quarters. When we started talking to technologists about this problem, back in 2001 and 2002, we often heard them discussing it as if it were a problem of bit preservation -- store a collection of 1s and 0s now, get the same collection of 1s and 0s in a hundred years.
Now bit preservation is a critical component of overall digital preservation, of course, but format drift is really the silent killer. If you wrote your masterwork on an Osborne computer in 1985, having the 1s and 0s is only half the battle -- what computer would read the disk? What software program would display it?
A lot of what the Library of Congress’s Office of Strategic Initiatives has done is to describe these kinds of issues, so that when people are thinking about the issues, they are factoring in several different aspects of the problem at once. And this is critical, since no one can solve the problem working entirely on his or her own.