Published in American Archivist [5], Vol. 68, No. 1, Spring/Summer 2005, pp. 53-73.
One thing that has become clear in the short time since I was brought into the archival fold, is that online (not merely electronic, mind you) information really puts old-guard archivists into a bind. Having been to one annual conference of the Society of American Archivists, I feel that this apprehension is palpable – almost like the tension amongst people who do not wish to discuss the rather large and smelly elephant in the room. And with good reason. Hypertextual resources (Web pages, databases, and the like) dissolve the boundaries between groups of information by removing the physical constraints that have for so long defined information access. For someone who has defined their career's work in terms of discreet information objects of a physical nature, this lack of physical structure is likely to induce a sort of intellectual nausea.
Not that all archivists are cranky old dead tree advocates, but in my opinion, the momentum towards the issues inherent in the preservation of online information has yet to build up. The crux of the problem, and the solutions that are to be devised, lie in a common area -- technology. Having come from the Web design and applications development field, these challenges are still formidable, but I am not intimidated by the technology itself. A greater understanding of the technology is needed in order to make progress in preserving the information products contained therein. (much more is required than merely understanding the technology -- intellectual property [6] is one of the big ones -- but I digress)
It is to this end that O'Sullivan seems to approach. Much has been made about the influence of blogs in media and other social and political venues. From the perspective of a long time online information users, this hardly seems worthy of note; After all, BBS systems, USENET, and Web message boards have been around "forever." So what makes blogs so special?
O'Sullivan takes a literary approach to analyzing blogs, likening them to written diaries, which provides a clues as to why blogs are different. Her research into the styles and types of diaries over the centuries indicates a form of information that has changed from that of a highly formal, often religious imperative, to that of casual social observation of a very personal nature. Bringing blogs back into the picture, this is part of the hype that the ephemeral nature of email lists and BBS's were unable to capture – the highly connected, personal observations so prevalent in blogs and online journals. But that is not all. The main observation here is that blogs are the literary descendant of diaries, an assertion which is verified by the availability of non-technical tools for publishing them (like Drupal -- touché). Just as paper diaries only require knowledge of written language and simple technology (i.e.: paper and pen or some analog thereof), blogs also require language knowledge (in some cases merely spoken, as is allowed by some experimental blog transcription [7] services) and simple technology, which these days includes internet access and computer with browser – all freely available at your public library or on the cheap in numerous other ways. The diary metaphor is certain to provide much comfort to heretofore squeamish archivists -- it is a boundary, after all, that is still quite elusive, but can be grasped without too much knowledge of the underlying technology.
Having made the link between old media and new, O'Sulivan moves on to describing the magnitude of information wrapped up in blogs and some discussion of similarities and differences between the two. Using a brief explanation of the ephemeral nature of blogs, and thus the threat of a great loss of cultural information, she segues into the question of preservation. As can be predicted, the Internet Archive is brought up, to which she quickly acknowledges the WayBack Machine's inherent (ironically) archival limitations. From this, she retreats to the comfortable territory of acquisition and appraisal, that is, leaving the problem up to individual, existing collections to decide which resources are worth preserving in order to keep a more complete record, including much of the context that surrounds, and lends authenticity to, the resource. Such tactics continue, however, to support the retention of only what is deemed at the time to be "important" -- which inevitably leads to preferential treatment for high-profile resources. I might as well state at this point my undying devotion to the idea of a balanced, complete cultural record, not merely of the rich and famous. Besides, as a wise woman once challenged me, since storage is inevitably going to be cheap as air, why not keep it all? Indeed, why not?
It is here that I diverge from the reductionist view, that is, narrowing our focus to one type of online information resource, and throw out this proposition: in order to gather a complete record of the global internet, we are going to have to throw open the gates of archival process and make it available to the masses. Do I expect archival theory to become familiar to the common person? Absolutely not. What I propose is that the systems we use, and the technology of archival storage, be made easier to grasp to the common person, and as with blogs just as easy to use. These are no small tasks (the information retrieval and integrity aspects are immense in and of themselves), but they are what I have defined as a life's work for myself.
Perhaps this will be distasteful to the archival establishment, but this proposition might imply a break with formal diplomatics since we aren't talking about property records or a succession of command, but the reconstruction of a place and time with implicitly less dire consequences for imperfection serving considerably less skeptical needs. The lives of common people and organizations can contribute greatly to the understanding of the context in which greater political and social shifts occur. As our cultural record moves online, the imperative to preserve a wide swath of it increases as well. Technology alone will not provide all the answers, and O'Sullivan rightly brings together the new and the old in order to more fully engage the archival mindset in the problems at hand.
