RE: [-empyre-] Who decides and what to preserve

["949Simon Pockley" <simonpockley@hotmail.com>]

Dear Margaret

> No matter how important the collection, we could never afford the
> Nicaraguan option.  Did the donor provide the money for the building, as 
> well as the collection?

I think I was heading more towards an exploration of the nature of our 
personal journeys into the datascape than to the practicalities of managing 
donated collections.

Each one of us, in our own special and private way, has formed a tentative 
relationship with this rich and varied universe of digital stuff. The 
relationship extends beyond the frustrations of 404 - File not found into 
what we keep on our hard drives, our flash drives and alas, the piles of 
unmarked CD-ROMs and floppy media I never got round to writing on because I 
couldn?t find the special pen. It procrastinates with the thousands of html 
files that I struggle to maintain and to the email I've never sorted. It 
lurks in the familiar places we go where we think/trust we might find things 
again.

Last night I was moodling around in Picture Australia (an NLA triumph) and 
discovered a photo of a painting that I wanted to keep. I chose the highest 
resolution, gave it a name and saved it to the desktop of the junked and 
rebuilt computer my neighbour's 15 year son has just set up for me solely 
for web access. This is my latest attempt at a strategy to maintain control 
of my own information space that had been overrun by viruses and spyware. 
I?ve disconnected from the network.

At some point I will temporally move this captured image onto a flash drive 
and then think about what to do with it. It?s not that I don?t trust Picture 
Australia to have it there if I lose it. But there are various reasons for 
me wanting to possess it. I don?t even bother to read the note that says I 
shouldn?t use it without permission.

I guess this is akin to the selection/harvest/possession process untaken by 
PANDORA ? although you ask permission. Having spent most of last year 
attempting to reconstruct the Flight of Ducks from various external 
captures, I can attest to the value of proliferation as a preservation 
strategy. The more things are out there and accessible, the move likely they 
are to survive.

I get the feeling that an appreciation of the quality of these relationships 
is becoming more important than we might have thought. I see this in the 
Blogspheres, and the RSS worlds where people are able to exert control and 
own their information spaces. The way access devises are getting closer to 
the body and even move inside it (e.g. Cochlear implants) parallels the way 
it becomes difficult to separate XML (as a meta language) from the content 
itself. One possible outcome is that digital material will have its own 
intelligence and find us rather than have us find it.

I'm sure there's nothing new in this, but for me the Nicaraguan library 
story conjures up something quite sensuous and compelling. It?s an analogue 
quality that one expects to encounter in the special exhibition space of the 
National Library. I guess this is more about the residue that we leave of 
ourselves when we live with and love these things. Is this missing from the 
digital world or is it so pervasive that we can't see it?

Best wishes

Simon

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