Black hole of lost material: much easier than 1984

29 January 2009 - Filed under Life Outside Work

Another interesting article by The Guardian:

Historians face a “black hole” of lost material unless urgent action is taken to preserve websites and other digital records, the head of the British Library has warned.

Just as families store digital photos on computers which might never be passed on to their descendants, so Britain’s cultural heritage is at risk as the internet evolves and technologies become obsolete, says Lynne Brindley, the library’s chief executive.

Writing in today’s Observer, Brindley cites two examples of losses overseas. When Barack Obama was inaugurated as US president last week, all traces of George Bush disappeared from the White House website, including a booklet entitled 100 Things Americans May Not Know About the Bush Administration, which is no longer accessible.

There were more than 150 websites relating to the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, she continues, but these, too, vanished instantly at the end of the games and are now stored only by the National Library of Australia. “If websites continue to disappear in the same way as those on President Bush and the Sydney Olympics – perhaps exacerbated by the current economic climate that is killing companies – the memory of the nation disappears too,” Brindley writes. “Historians of the future, citizens of the future, will find a black hole in the knowledge base of the 21st century.”

(…many more insightful paragraphs)

In 1984, still in London, Winston Smith, an Outer Party member working for the Records Department at the Ministry of Truth, had to dictate Newspeak into a handheld device in order to “revise” historical records. He would then throw the original hardcopy into the “memory hole,” which incinerated that version of history.

In 2009, it takes much less effort to revise records. But conspiracies and foul play aside, making references to things written on someone else’s Web pages (a local newspaper site, for example) does not guarantee they will even be there six months’ time from now. I’d say the black hole of lost material “converges” into a set of three root causes:

• The record simply vaporised. It’s gone by accident or due to oversight, or was lawfully destroyed because the retention period applicable to it had expired, or it just had to go. No matter what the reason, what’s gone from the public eye, is gone.
• The record keeps no history. It’s still there, but was modified and is still being modified without a version control mechanism in place – at least one that’s accessible by its users. A recent example: While there are numerous news reports of how the new Obama administration unveiled a completely redesigned White House Web site, it’s kind of difficult now to see what that same Web site looked like under the previous administration, for those who want to be able to draw a visual comparison between the old and the new. To most people, the White House on the Internet always looked like what it does now.
• The record has moved without a trace. It’s still there somewhere, but cannot be tracked down with the old address (URL). Sometimes, a change of content management system or naming scheme results in individual records or documents having new addresses assigned to them. Honouring the past addresses of a record or piece of content is indeed a good practice. When I first used it, the widely publicised address of Microsoft’s training and certification Web site was microsoft.com/train_cert. That’s the address I remember after a decade, and it still works even though it subsequently and transparently takes me to another location. Who cares, my memory serves me right.

Me as a consumer of information losing a link I had bookmarked is just personal inconvenience. But organisations not keeping up with acceptable practices in records management, document management, and content management can face far more dire consequences than just an inconvenient truth, both commercially and legally.

This post will vaporise after an undisclosed duration of time.

2009-01-29  »  JK