Beyond Cryogenics: Getting Serious about Digital Curation
Jean-François Blanchette
Assistant Professor
Department of Information Studies
University of California, Los Angeles
2:00-3:30 pm on Friday, March 2, 2007
Indiana University Bloomington, Herman B. Wells Library, Room LI001
Cookies, tea, and coffee will be available.
ABSTRACT
Cultural and scientific industries are today massively turning to digital media as the primary medium for the production and distribution of their products, either through digitization of cultural artifacts, creation of new forms of cultural expression and scientific experimentation (e.g., videogames, distributed simulations), or reliance on digital tools in the creation process itself (special effects, CAD). Yet, there are today no known solutions to the problem of preserving complex digital objects over time. At the heart of the problem lies a fundamental distinction between traditional (paper-based) and digital documentary resources.
While in the context of paper an information resource is typically conflated with its presentation, an electronic document is better characterized as an aggregation of stored resources and a computed view. In this context, only the stored resources (software code and data) have temporal persistence while the computed views (i.e., the intelligible content) are by essence evanescent — that is, the persistence of views is limited to their performance (i.e., the computation and rendering process). Because of the rapid obsolescence of software and hardware, the preservation and re-enactment of a digital document necessarily involves transformations, migrations, or emulations of the original. This is a fundamental departure from the traditional archival paradigm founded on the integrity of the documentary resource.
Yet, most digital repositories (e.g., Dspace) focus on the long-term preservation of a digital object’s underlying bitwise representation, in the hope that in the future, methods will appear that can somehow render the bits again — in short, resort to digital cryogenics. This talk argues that a focus on bit preservation diverts energy, resources and attention from the real problem of transmitting the cultural and technical competences that are both necessary to “read” objects over time.
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Jean-François Blanchette received a B.Sc. and a M.Sc. in Computer Science from the Université de Montréal in 1995 and 1997, and a Ph.D. in Social Studies of Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2002. Between 1999 and 2001, he was an invited researcher at the CNRS in Paris, where he investigated the definition of a new legal framework for recognizing the evidential value of electronic documents, Between 2002 and 2004, he was a Post-Doctoral Fellow with the InterPARES project at SLAIS, University of British Columbia.
Professor Blanchette’s current research focuses on developing the theoretical and practical tools necessary for the long-term preservation of complex digital objects. He teaches and conducts professional training in the area of electronic records management, digital preservation, and social dimensions of computing.
