The University of Puerto Rico delegation was lucky to receive a personalized tour of the Library of Congress coordinated by Senior Acquisition Specialist and alumna Inés Flores. That afternoon, we decided to stay for the LOC/ALA Symposium presentations in the Mumford Room. The presentations we saw focused on LOC partners who are collecting and preserving digital content that is at risk of loss: geospatial data, social science data sets, business records, cultural expressions and many other kinds of content were discussed. There were a lot of presentations in the session, so I will focus only on the ones that made the greatest impression on me.
There were two presentations on geospatial data preservation, one by Steve Morris of North Carolina State University (Collection and Preservation of At-Risk Digital Geospatial Data and Content and Practice:Background to the NC Geospatial Data Archiving Project contain most of the information he presented at LOC), and another by Julie Sweetkind-Singer of Stanford University (you can see a paper she co-authored on the subject here: Digital Preservation of Geospatial Data). The main thrust of both of these presentations ties in directly with what I had already heard before about geospatial data: 1) It is incredibly useful, so much so, that we don’t even fully grasp the possibilities. 2) The volume of data created and lost is enormous, measured in terabytes and exabytes 3) There are serious technical difficulties with formats and standards, and no open source solutions (at this time). If this is something up your alley, please go check out their projects.
Micah Altman of Harvard University discussed the issue of social science research data loss and presented the Data-PASS project. I was shocked by Altman’s revelation that most of the original data sets for social science research are not archived, or even available from the researchers themselves: it’s just lost. These were large projects, with published findings and large grants. A publication is a summary and interpretation of data, it is not the research itself. If the data is not available, how can other researchers re-analyze and re-interpret the information gathered? Altman discussed how preservation efforts are now focusing not just in selecting, archiving and organizing data sets for posterity, but how the project partners were also working to raise awareness amongst their colleagues about integrating data preservation procedures into their workflow.
The final presentation was by David Kirsch of the University of Maryland and titled The Business of America and the Birth of the Dot Com Era: Preserving the Digital Sock Puppet. It’s a pity I couldn’t locate his slides online, they were hysterically funny. It’s a good thing when the last speaker is engaging. Kirsch had previously done research on the electric car companies of the turn of the century. Thinking about all these short lived enterprises led him to thinking about the dot com bust of the nineties. He had been able to research 100 year old companies because their paper records had been preserved…would the business scholars of 2090 be able to do the same? In an era where business record destruction is a matter of self-preservation and data is digitally native, how can we work to preserve this historical information for the future? There are several projects underway to try to preserve these business documents, such as the Business Plan Archive, which proposes to collect and preserve “business plans and related planning documents from the Birth of the Dot Com Era so that future generations will be able to learn from this remarkable episode in the history of technology and entrepreneurship.” Kirsch also commented on the legal battles he has faced when attempting to gain access and preservation rights to the business records from failed companies. I had never before considered how the ends of business record keeping, with their emphasis on retention periods and cyclical destruction is at odds with historical pursuits. Kirsch’s argument for the historical importance of these documents was compelling, and I hope that other projects spring up dedicated to preserving business records for posterity.
