An awesome project to preserve 78rpm records by recording and publishing the audio of hundreds of thousands of discs in the Internet Archive.
Check out the Preservation page, which explains the process in detail. I love the cool four tonearm turntable!
A fascinating long article on the BBC Domesday Project from 1986. This huge project celebrated the 900th anniversary of the Domesday book, with an ambitious modern-day take on documenting all of Britain.
The technology was so unique that became obsolete almost immediately. It required a special LaserDisc player connected to a BBC Master computer with a special controller. The price tag put it out of reach of almost everyone, even schools and libraries.
It’s a prime example of the challenges of digital preservation.
Moreover, copyright issues — as well as the sheer volume of content — have raised questions over whether some the content could ever be used again. It is certainly difficult to replicate the original experience (although a few YouTube videos give a flavour).
This article goes into some of the thinking behind the technology decisions, and makes a valiant case that the Domesday Project is not a failure, as some like to think of it.
The significance of the Twitter archive at the Library of Congress
The Library of Congress has now stopped preserving all public tweets. In the words of Dan Cohen in this article, “The Twitter archive may not be the record of our humanity that we wanted, but it’s the record we have.”
I am amused at the idea of future historians having a highly detailed record of everything on Twitter up to the year Donald Trump got elected, and the year before Brexit is due to happen. What a cliffhanger.
See also: Future historians probably won’t understand our internet, and that’s OK
Future historians probably won’t understand our internet, and that’s OK
The internet once promised to offer archivists an unprecedented opportunity to record and track our era. But with social media silos offering “pervasive, unique, personalized, non-repeatable” experiences, it is proving increasingly difficult to preserve our internet.
Every major social-networking service uses opaque algorithms to shape what data people see. Why does Facebook show you this story and not that one? No one knows, possibly not even the company’s engineers. Outsiders know basically nothing about the specific choices these algorithms make. Journalists and scholars have built up some inferences about the general features of these systems, but our understanding is severely limited. So, even if the LOC has the database of tweets, they still wouldn’t have Twitter.
The archives to doctorvee, my old blog, have now been restored. It would have been so easy to just not bother restoring it. But I am glad I did. Read full article
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