I attended a debate hosted by Curtin University last night; the topic was “Digitisation is the death of history”. To my surprise, the team arguing the affirmative won what I thought was an no-win position in this day and age.
Photo credit: Dave Carter (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
You can review the night’s debate via twitter following the hash tag #digideath13 – the tweets of the evening give a pretty good picture of how the discussion unfolded.
I have a couple of tips for the negative team should a rematch occur next year – this clearly had an effect on me I’m up at 3:45am writing this post.
The affirmative side made a big deal of the concept of digital deluge – that researchers today could be overwhelmed by digital material (and then argued somewhat daringly that only selective material is being digitised which might seem a contradiction) – the negative side at this point could have pointed out that in the face of this deluge there are tools to assist the researcher:
- Data visualisation (a la Mitchell Whitelaw – view his TEDxCanberra talk on Youtube I saw him speak at ACOC 11 and it was inspirational and changed the way I think of library metadata)
- Text mining (another TED talk here)
- Your friendly archivist, librarian, record keeper (although I think we have a lot of skills to build before we can really assist in the world of big data).
The other affirmative argument that had traction with the adjudicator (according to her summation) was digital obsolescence – the idea that storage formats are changing as are file formats making data inaccessible. There is a school of thought that promotes the idea of keeping old formats and the machinery used to access them and not using modern emulators to access the data or translating the data into modern file formats. I saw a post on The Signal (Library of Congress’ digital preservation blog) this year that commented that libraries are not “museums of computer hardware” that was pretty compelling (although a couple of days later an alternative POV was presented).
I found the suggestion that selective things are being digitised an interesting idea that will need to percolate a little longer – I know at my library we are prioritising Western Australian original materials (preserving WA history is our raison d’être) . Of course, we can only really digitise what we already have so selection is made for us in that sense (again there are some exceptions, e.g. materials lent to us for copying).
Well, I’m going to go back to bed and get a couple more hours sleep. Hopefully, my sleep deprived ravings make sense, apologies if they don’t :0) All in all, a very enjoyable and thought provoking evening. Thank you to the organisers and speakers. I really hope that there is a re-match next year with a different result (I think my bias has been pretty clear throughout this post).
A Kelso Miscellany 
Sorry to have kept you up so late! Let’s hope there is a rematch as I think your points and the adjudicator’s remarks about capturing deteriorating items are two big ones.
I also found the point interesting about the influence and choices being made about what gets digitised and what doesn’t… but I suppose we’ve really always filtered by deciding what goes into collections in the first instance.
Hadn’t encountered the idea before of keeping old machines and programs rather than constantly converting file formats. This is a really nice dose of double-preservations (machines and files!) but I guess there would be hurdles of bulkiness/storage and sourcing parts if there are breakdowns.
I can’t help but wonder if more software will be developed to open old and obsolescent files in the future. A token example is XP mode in newer versions of WIndows where one can install old software that won’t work anymore and basically operate it and its files as normal. I presently use about four pieces of software in this way.