*Man, I only wish I could archive this. I can blog it, but putting it in a safe, long-term space where somebody can easily find it, that's beyond me.
http://networkcultures.org/geert/2015/04/17/conversation-on-digital-archiving-practices/
Conversation on Digital Archiving Practices
By geert, April 17, 2015 at 3:09 pm.
Conversation on Digital Archiving Practices
With Geert Lovink
By Davide Giorgetta & Valerio Nicoletti
DG/VN: The scanning of texts — for instance of out-of-print books — and their subsequent storage as digital files has developed a new figure: the amateur librarian. Which are the features, responsabilities and limits of this figure?
GL: I do not think in terms of amateurs vs. professionals. I’d prefer terms such as ‘geniale dilletanten’. At our applied science school here we train students to become professionals. In our emerging internet context there is a battle is about the name and description of these professions, which in turn start to appear in job adds (think of SEO professional, app designer etc.). These days, it is more and more uncertain what the role of education should be. Will you obtain a set of (technical) skills such a programming or is higher education there to offer eternal universal knowledge (which can then be applied to a variety of fields)? In short, liberal arts or professional education? This is relevant if we want to find an answer to your question. One could say that all people who work with information are amateur librarians: books, records, films, we all download them, day and night. Every computer is a library. We collect music, text files, e-books, films, photos. In the case of personal portable offline libraries (as described by Henry Warwick in his Radical Tactics of the Offline Library text) we only say that this is done in a systematic and somewhat larger scale… 50.000 e-books, 150.000 songs, 8000 films etc. Yet. these numbers no longer impress us. We want specific knowlegde, such as the librarian and the archivist had in the past. Is this work these days done by amateurs or professionals? We don’t know and in a way it doesn’t matter. An archive is a materialised condensation of memory. What’s interesting in this context is the fact that archives attract other archives. An archive will, in most cases, at some point become part of another, bigger archive. So what starts off as a personal initiative may very likely become part of an official reality. This is no different in the context of digital books. And with such a centralization comes expertise… and new professions.
DG/VN: Marcell Mars has written a vademecum for possible contributors of this amateur librarianship. Are there some features that define the ideal digital book, from the operative perspective of a librarian, eg. file formats and tools to be preferred, how to organize files and metadata, how to manage distribution and access to content?
GL: Right now, the digital book universe is exploding, not so much from the usage perspective (Nicolas Carr is right here), but in term of content. The simple reason for that is that we’re reaching the end of the digitization phase. Over the past decades lots of investments were made in terms of scanning. Scholars in my field have come to know this because of the ‘digital humanities’, a top-down meta-discipline that was invented to deal with the question what to do with all the digitized documents (recently renamed as ‘big data’). Now that there is plenty of data and tools to analyse and visualize them, we start to see the rise of boutique data collections that are neither open nor closed. That’s where someone like Marcell Mars comes into play. The problem in this field that we have is the proliferation and constant change of e-book formats of a growing number of non-compatible devices of competing players from Google, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft to Samsung, Ubuntu and Chinese hardware manufacturers. E-pub is supposed to resolve all this but many fear that HTML-5 is yet another possibility, not the ‘standard to end all standards’. In that sense it is still 1995 in e-publishing land—and maybe we get stuck there.
DG/VN: In which way, if any, are digital archiving practices (such as Monoskop Log, Aaaarg.org etcetera) stimulating new publishing phenomenons? Are there any innovative outcomes, apart the obvious relation to p.o.d. tools?
GL: I hestiate to use business terms such as innovation in a context like this. Rather, I think it is ‘data dandyism’, a phenomenon our Adilkno wrote about twenty years ago and that only recently started to manifest itself with the phenomenal rise of i-pods, smart phones and tablets. Exclusive data collections do not work according to the social media logic. The way to show off with this information is much more indirect, and hidden, in the seclusion of the sub-culture. Why should you share that on such banal platforms such as Facebook or Twitter? We all know that such one-off collections have not been built with the interest of the individual author in mind….
