Preserving the Born-Digital: Lessons from a Decade of Web Archiving
When Daniel invited me to contribute a guest post to The Pinakes, I knew exactly which subject I wanted to raise: the strange, slippery problem of preserving things that were never printed. We have centuries of practice keeping paper alive. We have barely two decades of practice keeping a website alive, and the website is winning.
Callimachus could walk the stacks of Alexandria and point to a scroll. Our born-digital collections have no stacks. A single blog like this one is really a tangle of a database, a theme, a dozen plugins and a hosting account that renews, or does not. Lose any one piece and the whole thing can vanish between one capture and the next. The crawler that visits today may find a healthy page; the crawler that visits next spring may find a parked domain.
Three lessons from the trenches
First, capture early and capture often. The best preservation decision is the one made while the material still exists. Second, keep the context, not just the file. A PDF without its catalog record is an orphan; a web page without its stylesheet is a ransom note. Third, assume formats will rot. Plan for migration the way a gardener plans for winter, because the Flash players and proprietary readers of one decade are the dead links of the next.
None of this is glamorous. It is closer to plumbing than to scholarship. But it is the plumbing that lets the scholarship survive, and I think the old librarians of Alexandria would have recognised the instinct immediately. You index what you have, you copy what you love, and you hope the next generation is paying attention.
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