Digital Preservation

So I guess copyright is a discussion for next week, my mistake.

In Preserving Digital History Cohen and Rosenzweig give us the doom and gloom to digital preservation.  I think they are over-analyzing the situation a bit.  For instance if you are constantly developing and creating content for your website, you should be in tune with the changes in formats and standards in order to keep your website in working order.  I guess I differ from C & R a bit after that, I believe if you are no longer able to keep your web resource updated (financially or otherwise) it should be your responsibility to take that resource down.  This practice will make those that are still up a better, since the user will not be constantly wondering what will and will not work (I'm sure we've all been to websites where about half of the content is still live).

Speaking of preservation, the Utah Digital Newspaper project as described by Herbert and Estlund provides a great look into the inter workings of a large scale digitization effort.  Herbert and Estlund take time to explain the perils of digitization and the time it takes to create these records.  The Utah Digital Newspaper project uses OCR for the text of the articles, but enters in the headlines and sub headlines manually to preserve 100 per cent accuracy (which is a fallacy but we'll let them dream) with headlines.  The work being done by the Utah Digital Newspaper project sets a great example, which hopefully other states will follow.

Cohen and Rosenzweig also discuss crowd sourcing, here they go back to using the online communities you have developed to create a more user friendly content area.  I have a few examples of this in history sites, bear with me.  When we look at Old Weather there are transcription options for users to transcribe the original records of the past.  If you look at the transcription pages, you will find that the transcribers (or indexers) are not meeting the need of the project.  This project is dated at the bottom as 2012, hopefully it is new to the game and only getting started.  Looking at another project, the Museum of Old and New Art in Tasmania uses a mobile platform called The O to curate their collection for the visitors.  Using The O users vote on the art they enjoy weather they love or hate that specific work of art.  This crowd sourcing option has worked very well and has provided the Museum of Old and New Art with some valuable feedback on their collection.  One final example of crowd sourcing is a glimpse into the future.  As more and more records are digitized at the Washington State Digital Archive we have an increased need for indexing (or transcribing) our records to create metadata.  Unfortunately our budget is what it is, so we are putting the finishing touches on a system called Scribe, in which volunteers and employees can index our records.  As we have seen with Old Weather, and is talked about in Cohen and Rosenzweig, the key to making Scribe a success will be getting the public interested and willing to participate.