Roy Rosenzweig, Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era, American Historical Review, June 2003. Rosenzweig goes beyond a very competent overview of the problem of digital preservation to unsettling reflections on how the discipline of history will change, not entirely for the better, the more we succeed in preserving our digital effluvia. Excerpt: "Computer scientist Jeff Rothenberg may have been over-optimistic when he quipped, 'Digital documents last forever —or five years, whichever comes first.'...If historians are to set themselves 'against forgetting' (in Milan Kundera's resonant phrase), then they may need to figure out new ways to sort their way through the potentially overwhelming digital record of the past. Contemporary historians are already groaning under the weight of their sources. Robert Caro has spent twenty-six years working his way through just the documents on Lyndon B. Johnson's pre-vice-presidential years —including 2,082 boxes of Senate papers. Surely, the injunction of traditional historians to look at 'everything' cannot survive in a digital era in which 'everything' has survived." (Thanks to Klaus Graf.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/04/2003 10:15:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
