Sharing heritage digitally is becoming more and more commonplace. In the past few years alone, a new awareness has emerged of the value of digital sharing. The National Endowment for the Humanities has initiated a new Digital Humanities Program, which awarded over $1 million in 2007. The Society for American Archaeology’s annual conference in Vancouver in March saw twice as many sessions on sharing and preserving digital archaeological content than the previous year (see here). Clearly, interest is rising and more and more projects seek a way to share digital content. How can we guarantee that the content shared will be archived and accessible for future generations to learn and build upon?

The exponentially increasing amount of digital humanities content available online raises concerns over longevity. Data loss is especially ironic in the field of archaeology, where information rests in the ground for sometimes tens of thousands of years, only to be excavated (a destructive process), recorded and then potentially lost.

At the conference in a forum “Digital Antiquity: Planning an Information Infrastructure for Archaeology”, the question was raised: How long is perpetuity? Julian Richards, of the UK’s Archaeology Data Service, informed the crowd that we now know the answer to this question: About 25 years. In another forum on “Converging Communities in Digital Heritage” an even less optimistic definition of “in perpetuity” was offered: Five to ten years.

Where are these definitions coming from and what can we do to help extend the concept of “forever”?

The challenge of “forever”
There are great challenges to storing digital content for the future. The best solution for paper storage—lots and lots of copies—may prove to be the best solution for digital longevity as well. The more digital content is used, the more copies of it are out there, protecting it from loss. Most content, whatever its medium, needs active preservation, unless you happen to write on clay tablets or stone. Digital files happen to need more active upkeep over shorter time spans (max. 25 years) than the more traditional medium of paper.

One of the key differences between digital and print, therefore, is in the instability of the medium. Paper has remained a stable medium for thousands of years, witness to countless changes in languages and scripts. Digital poses a more complicated scenario: not only can the formats changing rapidly (languages, coding systems, etc), but the media are also changing (floppy discs, hard drives, cds, dvds, etc). Digital content that is relevant and widely used will have a greater chance of being updated to new formats. Here is where the need for open access and Creative Commons licenses becomes paramount: Digital content that carries clear and transferable metadata that allow for its use and reuse will stand a far better chance of being copied, converted to new formats and media and saved into perpetuity.

Taking small steps to the future
Complicating matters is the extreme diversity of digital content produced worldwide. In a related article entitled “Collating online collections: A comparison of cultural heritage collections online” Francis Deblauwe illustrates this diversity in his survey of digital cultural heritage collections. Each shared collection will have unique goals and will want to highlight specific content. The diversity of content, institutional and organisational motivations for online access to cultural heritage collections, as well as the myriad of different cultural heritage taxonomic and classification systems typically mean a great deal of development of highly customised technology platforms for putting heritage collections online. This means little transferability of technology solutions developed for one specific collection. It is usually only the best-resourced and well-staffed organisations that have the capacity to put collections online. This problem also makes interoperability difficult, since linking these customised systems together represents a host of technical and semantic problems. We are now faced with the problem of an inundation of digital content that is stuck in silos, unable to be used and unable to communicate with other online content.

Content in such silos is harder to build upon and reuse, making it less relevant and valued by the larger community, Therefore, closed silos with little data interoperability represent a preservation risk. How do we free this threatened content from silos and assure that it is used and kept safe? My own organization, the Alexandria Archive Institute (AAI), is addressing this issue from a number of angles, the general premise being that content becomes safer the more it is used.

The more valuable information is, the more likely it is to survive in digital format. Openness can go a long way to increase the value of content. Open Context, a free, online content dissemination system developed by the AAI, aims to increase the value of digital content through open licensing and open standards. It makes all content available globally for use, reuse, and commentary. It implements “faceted browsing” to facilitate exploration and discovery of its holdings. Ease of use, discovery and interoperability, therefore, are paramount features for assuring that data can be accessed and their value appreciated. Open Context is generalised to work with lots of content, rather than being a specialised custom solution for one collection. Heritage collections typically contain a diversity of structured data and Open Context offers a way to share such data without requiring custom development for each new collection. It converts data to a common, non-proprietary XML format, and future developments will use web services to expose data in common XML formats (such as Atom to make Open Context easier to use and “mash up” with other systems.)

As Deblauwe’s article demonstrates, not all digital heritage projects take a clear stand regarding access and reuse. Recognising that online content with restrictive or unavailable copyright is less likely to be used, Open Context makes crucial permissions explicit with Creative Commons licenses. Clear attribution and citation information are available for every item in the system. Clear information about how content can be used increases its impact and also assures that authorship is archived along with original content. This is important for encouraging scholars, who are often the custodians of cultural heritage content, to participate in openness.

In addition to examples of ways to increase the impact and exposure of data, creators of digital content would benefit from general guidelines for understanding user experience with digital humanities collections (that is, what are people using and why are they using it?). The AAI is initiating an assessment of community needs around digital cultural heritage resources, specifically with regard to Open Context. This study will identify the diverse needs of the various communities served by cultural heritage data dissemination and produce a set of guidelines to enable projects and individuals to broadly and intelligently distribute their content, make it useful to others, and assure that it retains its integrity for long-term future use.

There is no lack of digital content out there. Each community, institution or individual creating and sharing it needs to also take responsibility for preserving it. Currently, content isolated in silos stands the least chance of survival because of its inaccessibility and the lack of portability and re-usability of content. An open access (and open licensing and open standards) approach will go a long way towards preserving our digital cultural heritage in perpetuity, albeit a few years at a time.

tags: San Francisco United States education local-context-global-commons digital-archives cultural-heritage open-context

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