Forgetting to remember

After a Sunday Times article prompted yesterday's piece of whimsy, a Tweet from my standard Twitter search ( (digital OR data) AND (preservation OR curation), since you ask) produced an interesting article by Chris O'Brien, a columnist for MercuryNews.com: "Time to clean up your digital closet". He goes quite nicely through the various ways in which our personal digital content is more at risk than we might think (media degradation, device and format obsolescence, and the sheer anonymity of large quantities of digital stuff). But he has a prescription for dealing with some of it, part of which I reproduce here (I hope fair use covers this, since you'll have to go to the original to read the rest!):

"However, all is not lost. There are some strategies for storing your digital archives. But you'll have to do a lot of work. You will need to start thinking like a librarian and become an active curator of your files. That means relentlessly organizing, labeling and tagging, backing up and deleting.

The first and most important thing to do is to begin deleting files. Whittle things down to the essentials. What do you really want to maintain and pass along? You must be ruthless and vigilant.

Next, develop a system for organizing files online and offline. If you're going to store stuff on removable media, like DVDs, place them in cases that have extensive labels, and index them. And don't store files like text documents or photos on propriety formats that are not widely adopted. Experts recommend photos in JPG forms and documents in PDF formats or basic text formats.

Label every file and tag them with as much information as you can. Being obsessive now will pay off in the long run. This is a lot of work, which is why you want to cull your archives as much as possible.

Once that's done, make multiple copies. You can also explore "cloud" backup services..."

Thinking like a librarian? Being an active curator of your files? Sounds like a good place to start. Interesting that he sees deleting as being an important part of remembering! We probably need better tools for the average person for a lot of this (eg tagging files in a filestore), but I suspect there's enough around for any reasonably competent researcher to use. However, laziness, forgetfulness and sheer pressure of work are our enemies here. Will we forget to do the things needed to remember?

Remembering to forget

Are we getting this digital preservation thing all wrong? An article in today's Sunday Times quotes Viktor Mayer-Schonberger that we're creating a "digital memory that vastly exceeds the capacity of our collective human mind". James Harkin reports that Viktor wants us to forget more. Mind you, the main (and earliest) example given concerns an unfortunate photo from as recently as 2006. I'm sure the lady concerned would have remembered it only too well, whether or not the Internet example had come to light.

It's a daft story, but there is an interesting angle. Many preservation "systems" carry the risk that things will be preserved that some would prefer forgotten (eg the famous Bush speech). When the powerful want to change the record, the Web both facilitates and resists them. Web sites (and archives) are generally under some kind of centralised control, and subject to pressure, which they may or may not be able to resist. There are rumours of web-based reports being retrospectively "fixed". But once reports have got out into the wild, as it were, it is much harder to "fix" them, as the example above shows.

This doesn't mean that archives are a bad thing. They bring professional standards to the keeping of history. But perhaps it's a Good Thing that there's an uncontrollable un-system of citizens keeping (probably illegal) copies of some important and uncomfortable records. Even if it does mean that the lady's embarrassing photo stays around longer than she would like!

On hearing the first cuckoo in spring

We heard out first cuckoo a week ago (27 April). It set me thinking: "The Times has been publishing 'first cuckoo' letters for a hundred years or so. Surely by now someone will have turned it into a database, as some kind of climate change proxy?".

A Google search - nay, several Google searches - found little direct evidence of this. Best I could find was Nature's Calendar, a site from the Woodland trust for the UK Phenology Network; the page pointed to defaults to plants, but you can select birds and then cuckoos, and see reports of first sighting by date on the UK map. You can even compare different years; I compared 2008 with 1998; several times more cuckoo reports in the later years, but maybe this is because 1998 was the earliest year and their network got better entrenched since then. Nature's Calendar also reports average sightings by year, which did show a later tendency, but usually such averages are suspect if you can't see the underlying data. Anyway, a far cry from my hope of a hundred year proxy database!

But then shock horror, I discovered the underlying premise is false; the Times has not been publishing first cuckoo letters since 1940 or so. They do occasionally publish something, eg:

'On April 21, 1972, Mr Wadham Sutton got away with a letter to the Editor reading: “Sir, Today I heard a performance of Delius’s On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring. This is a record.”'

Bah, humbug!