Steve,

Thanks for the post. I read your blog more closely after I posted my comments. :)  Barn, horse, and open door (mouth) come to mind.  What fascinates me about this issue is that we are alive in a transitional phase within human existence.

 

I would say that the archival profession and records managers are seeing a change in their profession which is on par with the change from a spoken language to a written language.  The ancients relied upon mnemonic tricks and other memory devices to retain the important information about their societies.  Once writing began, those skills and the structure of society, that was based upon it, began to change.  One could argue that the second wave fully worked itself out into the bureaucratic state roughly around 1950ish and the rise of the computer readable form.

 

Now we are entering (by fits and starts) a third age, where the paper based age is giving way to an electronic age in which all our transactions are becoming electronic.  In this arena the service providers like Google and Microsoft will play a part, but only as enablers.  They are not providers, which is where archivists and records managers have a role. 

 

In terms of where  the future of digital preservation does lie, I doubt it is with the major providers in part because that it not their business case.  Just as newspapers are not in the archive business, (although they may have archives) neither are the web service providers (yet) in that business.  The challenge is that archives as opposed to storage, is guided by the key question of who and why.  To archive something is based upon a distinct community fixed in time and space.   Archives as opposed to mass storage has to work by what it refuses as much as by what it includes.

 

Best,

 

Lawrence

 

 

 

Hi Lawrence,

 

Thanks for your comments.  Firstly, I guess I should clarify and say ‘don’t shoot the messenger’, Peter was only circulating a link to the post.  I’m afraid I’m the one responsible for its content J

 

I should also say that the blog post was by necessity only a very brief summary of what is a much more detailed argument in the full paper I gave in Geneva.  One of the key points that I missed in the post, but which is very relevant I think to your comments is the following:

 

“It is at this point perhaps worth pausing to note that the question I have just offered an answer to is not in whose hands should the future of digital preservation lie, but in whose hands does it lie – a very important distinction indeed”

 

I hope that helps clear up any misunderstanding that this is a vision of the future that I welcome, in fact the whole point of the paper was to point out some of the implications and risks of drifting in this direction.  Some of which you allude to (as do I) in terms of the unstable nature of this industry, to quote again from the same paper:

 

“Now it may seem unthinkable to us today that global leviathans such as Google and Microsoft will ever go bust.  I’m sure people in the 19^th century said exactly the same about cotton mills and coal mines.  But even if the biggest of the big do survive into and beyond the next century the same is unlikely to be the case for most of the Small Medium Enterprises which make up much of this industry.  And we should remember that these are often very small businesses indeed with virtually no tangible assets relying on an unproven business model.  If we are lucky we will get advanced warning, as when Yahoo shut down GeoCities or AOL its Members.com and time to move our data elsewhere, but we cannot guarantee that that will always be the case.”

 

So I reckon we are definitely singing from the same song sheet in terms of the desirability of this trend (or lack of) and risks which are associated with it.  Where, however, I think we might disagree is the inevitability of a cloud-based future.  As we all know, predicting the future when it comes to IT is a risky business and certainly I have no more a crystal ball on these things than anyone else.  However, based on my observations of this area for the past 3 years or so all I see is an ever growing drift in this direction.  To quote again (and for the last time I promise!) as an illustration of just one example of this ‘drift’:

 

“Twelve months ago there were several British Universities who were embarking on projects to outsource their student email to Google.  None at the time were planning to extend this to include staff email, on the basis that this risked raising too many thorny issues relating to intellectual property rights and the management of institutional information.  Now, 12 months later, I could point to half a dozen or more institutions that are now using Google Apps not only for their students but for their staff as well.  Once again, I do not say that this is right or wrong, foolish or wise – simply that it appears inevitable and that we would do well to prepare ourselves for it.”

 

To be honest I don’t know enough about ‘bit only processing’ to know whether this does offer a likely alternative future, but certainly when you look around at consumer ICT gadgets at the moment (iphone, ipad, Blackberries etc) the trend seems to be towards allowing faster and better connectivity with the web as opposed to assuming the local storage of content and services on the device itself (or plus ins to it).  In fact I remember posting something a couple of years ago relating to Apple’s decision to stop selling their largest capacity ipods as a nod in this direction.   The personal data scandals of recent years have also promoted a backlash against local storage.

 

Anyway, I hope these few thoughts and extracts hope to put the rest of my initial post in context – not to say that this makes any of it necessarily more convincing though J

 

Cheers

Steve

 

Steve Bailey

Senior Adviser (Records Management)

JISC infoNet

Northumbria University

Room 303, Hadrian House

Higham Place, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 8AF

Tel: 07092 302850

Fax: + 44 (0) 191 243 8469

Email: [log in to unmask]

Web: http://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk

Blog: http://rmfuturewatch.blogspot.com/ 

Linkedin profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/sjbailey 

Twitter ID: @sjbailey

 

 

 

 

For any technical queries re JISC please email [log in to unmask] For any content based queries, please email [log in to unmask]

Help protect our environment by only printing this email if absolutely necessary. The information it contains and any files transmitted with it are confidential and are only intended for the person or organisation to whom it is addressed. It may be unlawful for you to use, share or copy the information, if you are not authorised to do so. If you receive this email by mistake, please inform the person who sent it at the above address and then delete the email from your system. Durham County Council takes reasonable precautions to ensure that its emails are virus free. However, we do not accept responsibility for any losses incurred as a result of viruses we might transmit and recommend that you should use your own virus checking procedures.

For any technical queries re JISC please email [log in to unmask] For any content based queries, please email [log in to unmask]

For any technical queries re JISC please email [log in to unmask] For any content based queries, please email [log in to unmask]