Abstract
With connectivity spreading across the globe, online culture is becoming globally predominant, and the expanding digital universe is turning into the most powerful human memory-recording machine of all time. Never before in history was there a chance to capture our lives – from the ordinary to the extraordinary – so completely and accurately. Never was there a time when documentary heritage could reflect such a rich, high-fidelity memory of the peoples of the world. Drawing on earlier essays about digital preservation and the nature of digital heritage, the authors argue that preserving an externalised, high-fidelity digital memory is feasible and that it will give future generations the liberty to decide what is of value to them, instead of us doing that and introducing bias in the digital heritage. They observe that much in the digital universe is transient because it is not taken care of intentionally. For too long has the need for a digital memory in this space been ignored – both the ability to keep digital information for short-term memory purposes and the commitment to safeguard digital legacy in the longer term. With examples of digital archiving initiatives, such as the Internet archive, the Twitter archive and e-government archives, the authors point to some of the weaknesses and propose to fully archive digital live ecosystems in real time, as cultural monuments.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of OCLC.
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Notes
- 1.
Tech companies with a large consumer base are often seen as “private superpowers”, like Facebook, for example, which has over two billion monthly active users, and, if it was a geographical country, it would be the most populated one in the world as well as the largest “privately-owned global public sphere” (a phrase coined by Timothy Garton Ash).
- 2.
The Internet and the Web are separate but two related things. The Internet is a global network infrastructure and the World Wide Web is a layer of protocols, standards, mark-up languages and interface applications, such as the Web browser, for exchanging information and transmitting data over the Internet.
- 3.
In his book, Jonathan Zittrain presented his thesis that, for a variety of reasons (viruses, spam, identify theft, etc.), we run the risk of seeing the open Net give way to appliances and closed networks. In 2010, Wired Editor in Chief Chris Anderson went a step further and proclaimed the demise of the World Wide Web, in a cover article (op. cit.), which sparked off some heated discussion.
- 4.
World Heritage Sites are natural and cultural properties, considered to have outstanding universal value, and listed under the UNESCO World Heritage Convention on the World Heritage List. See the website of the World Heritage Centre, which is the secretariat of the Convention. https://whc.unesco.org/
- 5.
“I think across the board culturally, we’re trying to get our head around what preservation is in the age of the internet – what is safe to keep, and what data and information could be weaponized” (McKenzie 2018).
- 6.
“Digital materials include texts, databases, still and moving images, audio, graphics, software, and web pages, among a wide and growing range of formats”. See UNESCO (2017).
- 7.
The word “whole” is put in quotation marks because the Library of Congress’ Twitter archive unfortunately only received the text streams, without the accompanying links, pictures and videos.
- 8.
We published an essay elaborating on the topic of safekeeping digital government information in the 2018 yearbook of the KVAN—the Dutch Association of Archivists. See van der Werf and van der Werf (2018).
- 9.
Citation from press release (Rijksoverheid 2018), translated by the authors with their additions in square brackets.
- 10.
Read for example this account of a digital excavation project (Johan 2018).
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van der Werf, T., van der Werf, B. (2020). Documentary Heritage in the Digital Age: Born Digital, Being Digital, Dying Digital. In: Edmondson, R., Jordan, L., Prodan, A.C. (eds) The UNESCO Memory of the World Programme. Heritage Studies. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18441-4_12
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