Been there, done that?
As 21st-century recordkeepers grappling with the dilemma of long-term retention of born-digital documents – preserve in native format, or print to paper? – we may well consider the dilemma itself to be born digital, as it were. But concentration on the novelty of digital media masks a more persistent concern.
“Who does not know how great is the distance between script and print? Script if it is applied to parchment will be able to last for a thousand years, but print is a paper thing and how long will it last? Two hundred years at the most.”
(Trithemius, Abbot of Sponheim, in his De Laude Scriptorum of 1490, justifying his advice to monks to copy printed books onto parchment to ensure their long-term preservation.)
Trithemius is not the only commentator to prefigure the problems of the digital age, with its vast proliferation of material both official and unofficial, public and private – particularly the unofficial and private, the diaries, the online musings, the torrential (b)logorrhoea added daily in its terabytes of information overload. A quick step back to the future of 1621:
“New books every day, pamphlets, … stories, whole catalogues of volumes of all sorts, new paradoxes, opinions, schisms, heresies, controversies ... Now come tidings of … entertainments, … revels, sports, plays: then again, as in a new shifted scene, treasons, cheating tricks, robberies, enormous villainies in all kinds, … now comical, then tragical matters.”
“Any scurrile pamphlet is welcome to our mercenary stationers ...; they print all – cuduntque libellos In quorum foliis vix simia nuda cacaret”
(Robert Burton, preface to The Anatomy of Melancholy. The Latin – I translate more modestly than accurately – intimates that even a monkey would scarcely bother to use the effusions in question as a substitute for Andrex; a secondary use that rather eludes their web-based equivalents.)
If there is a serious point in this, it lies in the recognition of concerns and themes in the production, organization and preservation of information / records / documents that persist through major – even revolutionary – changes. And in the further recognition, that many of the ERM problems that are so exciting, challenging, or plain vexatious to us as contemporaries can only ever be judged in hindsight, a luxury not included in the package. We may not know until a far later date whether we are being confronted, on this project and elsewhere, with genuinely new, revolutionary, socio-technical phenomena or with fresh evolutionary forms of persistent concerns. But we may surely, with a bit of luck, avoid the task of copying our institutions’ paper records onto parchment …
2 comments:
I shutter to think there are rank and file records managers among us earnestly pondering the option of printing information objects out on to paper or preserving information on the native media.
While I accept Trithemius, Abbot of Sponheim’s quote was well ahead of his time -- accurately anticipating long term preservation issues needed to be addressed -- his answer to the dilemma was untimely short sighted. The resources required to scribe all source documents to parchment while making the information available to all who desire to consume such was not viable option then and even less so now.
Clinging to the way we used to work is not the answer. Yes, limited organizational resources and lack of management support may tie our hands on what technology we deploy and thus keeping us from implementing the best practice solutions, however, I trust the true records managers among us would not choose to print out e-mails over embarking on the challenge required to maintain the data born on a digital format.
Elizabeth Albee
Hi Elizabeth,
Thanks for your contribution
I entirely agree with your point in principle, but I am also all too well aware that many rank-and-file records managers are in reality faced with situations where there is no organizational understanding of, let alone strategy for, maintaining born-digital records beyond the immediate context.
Where technology is specified, sourced and procured by IT departments who think 5 years is the distant future and where the records manager is not part of the decision process, there may be little choice other than to print out documents scheduled for medium, long-term or permanent retention.
Naturally, this is not a viable option in the long run and is impossible for more complex digital objects, but is still the only realistic way of ensuring that at least the informational content of vital e-records are kept while the records manager tries to educate and inform senior managers and colleagues. I don't think any records manager worth their salt would actually choose to print out e-mails as their default option rather than maintain and curate them in digital format, but the choice may be forced upon them.
In some workplaces, the future can seem a long way off ... which is, I suppose, one of the reasons our project is necessary in the first place after 25-odd years of near-universal use of computers to create documents and records in the workplace. Ideally, the perspectives brought by the different professional communities, users, and other stakeholders in the course of the research and through engagement via the blog and other routes will make a useful contribution to breaking this impasse.
Regards,
Rachel.
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