At the same time, it turns out, that
some people had not given up hope on creating electricity again. They
had moved far away from everyone and were researching the issue for
half a generation. Three months prior to the gathering of the elder
writers, a young researcher, often thought of as a loose cannon in
the lab, recreated a spark from a hand wrung generator. Since this
first flush of success, less than three months later due to their
zeal, the town of researchers built a gigantic generator, powered
by wood, and found enough pieces of infrastructure to pipe the power
south. So thrilled were they, hearing of the gathering of the elder
writers, and the fact that a million people were gathered nearby,
they chose to route the electricity, a mere 40 miles south west, to
that mid-western city. They wanted to ensure everyone knew that the
electricity was back on. They hoped to dazzle everyone.
In the stadium, just as an elder stood up to speak, the lights of
the stadium exploded, literally. As power fed the old housings, electrical
boxes, switches and halogen lamps blew out above the crowd. The people
panicked and stampeded each other in their wild attempts to escape.
Most of the elders were trampled”.
“But not you”?, I asked.
“Nope”, he said and smiled at me.
“But if the electricity came back on?, Why are these towers
still unused, and I have never seen electricity anywhere, I thought
it didn’t exist anymore? What happened after the stampede?”
“I organized a militia and we went and shot the bastards, all
of them. No one left that remembers how the kid found that spark”.
I finished writing down what he told me, just like he showed me.
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Archiving We
now live in the information age. Any good archivist will tell you,
if
you really want to preserve a document, print it and put it in a
folder, in
a dark drawer, with a sheet of acid free tissue, in an environmentally
controlled storage space.
Unfortunately, we are now at
the point that there is not the physical
storage space available to store every document created. Right now,
someone, is creating a document, probably electronically, via a
digital
camera or a word processor, or image enhancer; creating a TIFF,
JPEG, GIF,
DNG, PDF, MP3, MPEG4, AVI, RAW, or a website, and if we were to
print all of
this, there would be more paper than planet.
And so, digital storage continues
to evolve, proprietary sharing formats
arise and fall overnight and files are migrated from one version
to the next
in a continually marching line into the future.
Technology is a powerful, powerful tool for pulling together information.
Except when it fails. Ever hear of legacy systems? These are Information
Systems that are kept going because the data can't be migrated for
some
reason. Kind of like keeping Pac Man going in it's original operating
system. Most old businesses have these, like banks, government,
health care and police. Often times, decisions are made to abandon
information and just migrate to the new system. It's just easier.
Archiving is not easy. It is
the practice of pulling information together
into knowledge via categories like Provenance (who created the document
it),
Custodial history (who has had it, how has it been kept), Scope
and Content
(Predominant dates, descriptive headings as per description principles
- who
what, where, when, how, why etc.), Location (where the heck is it
kept).
Condition (what kind of condition is it in?). There are specific
rules
about this called
RAD
1 & 2.
Archiving doesn't care if the document is
physical or ethereal, it just
about keeping track of what is and why it is important. It's about
keeping
the original document or artifact, preserved for future, whether
human or machine readable.
Archiving is about culling too.
You don't really need to keep that old copy
of National Geographic. It is being kept in an archive in New York,
probably better than your copy sitting on a shelf in your bedroom.
And you don't need those blurry Jpeg shots in low resolution that
you took
at your brother's birthday party. Just delete them. No one will
be the
wiser.
You should keep original documents
pertaining to your family history like
photographs and important documents that are original to you and
your
activities and this applies to business as well, for legal and historical
reasons.
Sadly most of us are overwhelmed
with electronic files personally, can you
imagine how archives are scrambling? Archives are typically understaffed
and over burdened, constantly pulled between individual researchers
looking
for needles in haystacks of documents and processing, cataloguing,
new
accessions. Typically all archives are backlogged; sometimes by
more than
five to ten working years collectively. The backlog increases exponentially
as the archivist processes the documents.
Though we live in the information
age, we are at risk of losing our
collective memory due to the instability of digital documents. There
are
some preservation standards emerging, .DNG, .PDF/A and .TIFF but
few people
understand these formats. Meanwhile we're creating millions of JPEG
files
that are proven to be unstable and deteriorate over time. Information
erodes electronically unless it is migrated.
This is a concept anyone creating and relying on electronic documents
should
be aware of.
There is an important difference
between human readable information
(hearing, seeing) and machine readable information (you need a machine
to
access). Archiving tracks this and decides when and where physical
documents are created and how digital files are to be migrated.
Technology
is a tool, not an outcome.
Oh, and don't forget, respect
your elders, for they are the original
storytellers of vast amounts of knowledge categorized by subject
and context
in the grey matter we're all stuck with. For 2 million years this
has
worked pretty well for us.
At the foot of the Camel's Back Range
in the BC interior, you might catch a glimpse
of Nikki capturing relics & vistas in paintings, in words or
through the camera lens. Her anthropological
heart strings pull her along mountain passes, as she sleuths out
histories on people/places to
weave their stories.
As well as working on
"Sage Brush Country",
a painted series in oil,
she is the curator at a local museum.
www.pembertonmuseum.org
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