I was recently lucky enough to be invited on to a panel at Archives NZ’s 2010 Future Perfect: Digital Continuity Conference to discuss:

What impacts or solutions to digital longevity does technology innovation present?

I say lucky because the other members of the panel are people who are held in pretty high regard: chaired by Colin Jackson, with Nat Torkington (impressive bio in case you haven’t heard of him), Andreas Rauber (Vienna University of Technology), Don Christie (President of NZOSS, founder of Catalyst IT), and Oded Scharfstein (Ex Libris).

I’m not and have never pretended to be an Archives expert, but since this was a technology session and I was representing a web development company (3months) I was comfortable enough. It’s the second panel I’ve been on, the first a panel hosted by Beyond Recruitment on Agile practices.

The start of the panel was to be a 5 minute “position statement” on each of the panel member’s views on the question, which turned out to be the entirety of the discussion. Although I was there from a web technology point of view, the subject had me thinking about creativity in the digital domain and licensing (especially Creative Commons licensing). Seems like a stretch, but here’s the short version of my position:

Part A: Systems

• There’s an awful lot of digital content being created. Too much to print out and store on acid-free paper and lock in a store somewhere (I think we all know this).
• We can’t decide which digital content will be of importance in the future so can’t selectively store it in this way.
• Given that we can’t store everything offline, we have to store it digitally.
• The traditional problems associated with personal digital content are going away: hard drive failure leading to loss of photos doesn’t apply when all of your data is heading into the cloud.
• Even with online storage, some of it will fail and many of the formats in use now will not be in use in the future (another common concern).
• Shared open systems can solve the format change problem once for a large number of users/organisations (music site BandCamp as an example lets users upload in the open FLAC format and download in FLAC and other current proprietary formats such as MP3).
• Content stored in open systems (non-proprietary and publicly accessible) will outlive that stored in closed systems because it will be accessed and replicated and will often store data in an open format.
• Open systems themselves can be duplicated and replicated legally because of the nature of the licensing used (i.e. free software).

Part B: Content

• Technology can enable openness of the technology but only content authors can enable openness of the content through open (permissive) licensing.
• Open licensed content will be stored in more places because the licensing makes it legal to do so (Creative Commons licenses, for instance).
• Open licensed content enables collaboration and remixing/adaptation of content.
• Open licenses content will be shared more, because it will be reused more, because it is allowed to be reused.

Part C: Reuse

• The default position, archiving content under copyright (here’s an example from Archives NZ), creates the danger of a read-only culture (even if made publicly viewable).
• A permissive licensing culture in archived material would enable archived material to have genuine social benefit [yes, just my view], going on to be remixed and adapted for artistic, academic and commercial reuse.
• Open content in open systems will be duplicated more because it can be both legally and technically.
• I believe that open content in open systems will outlive proprietary content stored in closed systems.

A truly open archiving and record keeping environment would result in public information being stored in public systems for public reuse. The archivist would become more like an observer, watching content flourish and harvesting the results as needed but not trying to control or gate-keep the content, where it is located or how it is used. This environment, where content is primarily reused and remixed, may even result in losing the original record in some cases, but is this really an issue? Not for me: the record still serves a purpose.

An example:

ccMixter is a community remix site for music and audio. It’s a model for collaboration that traces the source document and it’s journey through different interpretations. The ccMixter model would be interesting to apply to other endeavours:

• Upload the original record/content
• License it in a way that it can be adapted on and remixed (in a range of ways that CC licenses support)
• Maintain the original record and ensure its traceability
• View adaptations of the content (which come with constantly refreshed formats)

Imagine a world where every public record was open and resuable in this way, where individuals and organisations could extract whatever value they wanted out of public records, and where digital continuity also meant reuse and remixing. I might be dreaming, but this might also be the only way to ensure the digital continuity of our public assets in a sustainable and useful way.