RE: [-empyre-] authenticity

[Luciana Duranti <luciana@interchange.ubc.ca>]

At 04:43 AM 2/9/2005, you wrote:
> Dear Luciana
>
> > to know whether they can trust their sources, and any spectator wants to 
> > know whether is looking at the real thing or some forgery, imitation, or 
> > surrogate.
>
> By way of an excuse to tell another story, I'm just a little puzzled about 
> the strength of your concern for authenticity of digital forms. Sometimes 
> one of useful qualities of digital material is its ability to be free of 
> its container and change form. In a previous posting I think that I also 
> suggested that a lack of contextual residue might also be a weakness.

Dear Simon:

I am so concerned because I am an archivist. The primary quality of 
archival material we swear to protect with our life is authenticity. This 
is where the weaknesses of interdisciplinary discussions come up. What 
unites us is digital preservation. What divides us is the nature of the 
material we are trying to preserve and the set of values that we are imbued 
with in the course of our professional education. I will use your own 
example to explain.


> At the risk of being scorned, your posting made me recall a message sent 
> to me in on 28th April 2003 12:18 PM from the (then) Research Director of 
> the Strehlow Research Centre in Australia's centre (message contained in 
> link below). The Strehlow Research Centre had published an out of print 
> book on its website that I had (without guilt) immediately appropriated. I 
> had done this not just because I was a hunter-gatherer-collector but 
> because it had been badly marked up and was full of character encoding 
> anomalies. Playing the archival role, I re-marked it up into a pristine 
> version with appropriate metadata and allowed it to join the rest of the 
> Strehlow related material on its journey into the future via The Flight of 
> Ducks.
>
> http://www.duckdigital.net/FOD/FOD1020.html
>
> Anyone searching for an authentic version of the content of the book would 
> have been better served by my appropriated version than by the official 
> sanctioned version. If you go to this link and press the [removed] link, 
> you will see yet another example of the action of cultural values. My 
> solution was to use comments (see source of FOD1020.html).
>
> As it turned out, this story became far murkier than I had imagined, but 
> this is not the place to go into that. If nothing else, this illustrates 
> how the residue of its stewards can indeed encrust or contaminate digital 
> material depending on how you see it.

This is a wonderful example because it shows the difference between my and 
your profession. The object of your care is a book, an autonomous item 
meant for dissemination in multiple copies. A book is not authentic with 
respect to its creator and even less with respect to its owner. It is 
authentic with respect to itself and the message it is meant to convey by 
itself. You did the right thing. You brought it back to what it was meant 
to be.

Now, let's say that the same book (also in electronic form) was owned by a 
literary critic, that the critic annotated and interspersed it with his 
reflections, and then used this annotated version as the basis of his own 
essays on the book's author, which were published and for which he won the 
Governor of Canada award. A year later the critic dies and his wife gives 
his material to the Library and Archives of Canada. The librarian says: I 
want the book to add to the collection of this author as I am missing this 
one. The archivist says: forget it. This item was a book when bought by the 
critic, but it is no longer a book, it is a record (a natural, 
interrelated, impartial, authentic, unique by-product of the critic's 
activity), and I have to protect its authenticity with respect to its 
creator (the creator is the person who makes, receives or accumulates 
records as means and residue of his activities), the critic. Its papers 
would not make sense without the book with its annotations. So, if the 
librarian wants to make the book available as part of the collection, the 
archivist will create a pdf or TIFF version of it to ensure that none of 
the annotations will be lost and allow the librarian to establish a link 
from the collection of the books of the same author to that book in 
particular.

I do not know whether it is clear what I am getting at. The web is a 
portal. Anything can be there, publications, artifacts, or records. I only 
care about web sites when they contain records and, if they do, I must 
ensure that their authenticity is protected. Take the InterPARES 1 website, 
which PADI has. It is a publication, it is meant for dissemination. But the 
restricted area of the web site contains all the correspondence of the 
InterPARES researchers, the documents generated in the common workspaces in 
their various versions, the databases in which we analyse metadata sets, 
terminology, etc., proceedings of meetings, case studies interviews, 
surveys. These are all records of the InterPARES activity; they are the 
natural, interrelated, impartial, authentic, unique residue of it as it has 
accumulated over time. I am not giving it to a library because I want those 
qualities protected in the way archivists do, exercising archival functions 
according to archival theory, methods and standards.

So, art. Well, digital art falls in between the cracks, doesn't it? 
Music...if the work is the performance (carrying its message on its own, 
autonomous), the score is a set of instructions necessary to do the 
performance (a record?). And the score of each musician and the conductor 
are different, and they are annotated by the individuals....This is why 
InterPARES studies digital art...although it is a product, not a means to a 
purpose, a by-product; although it is meant for dissemination, it is 
authentic, it is unique, it is interrelated.... it is to be protected in 
the form that the author considers the most accurate, cannot be left to the 
popular vote...

I apologise to everyone for being so long...or just passionate...

Luciana