Everything decays. In the past, human heritage that decayed slowly enough on stone, vellum, bamboo, silk, or paper could be put in a museum—still decaying, but at least visible. Today, human heritage is decaying on hard drives.
Sarah Nguyen (https://twitter.com/snewyuen), a MLIS student at the University of Washington, is the project coordinator of Preserve This Podcast (http://preservethispodcast.org/), a project and podcast of the same name that proposes solutions to fight against the threats of digital decay for podcasts. Alongside archivists Mary Kidd and Dana Gerber-Margie (https://twitter.com/theaudiosignal), and producer Molly Schwartz, Nguyen advocates for Personal Digital Archiving (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_archiving), the idea that for the first time, your data is under your control and you can archive it to inform future history. Personal archiving counters the institutional gatekeepers who determined which data and stories are worth preserving.
In this episode, Nguyen cautions that preserving culture digitally comes with its own set of pitfalls, describes the steps that individuals can do to reduce the role of chance in preserving digital media, and why automatic archiving tools don’t properly contextualize.
Image (left to right): Mary Kidd, Sarah Nguyen, Molly Schwartz, Dana Gerber-Margie, and Lyra Gerber-Margie
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Transcript
Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 65. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear and the only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above.


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Everything is in a constant state of decay.

In the past, human heritage that decayed slowly enough on stone, vellum, bamboo, silk, or paper could be put in a museum — still decaying, but at least visible.

And today, human heritage is rotting on hard drives. The entire internet, everything from social media to Wikipedia, is stored on hard drives on anonymous computer, waiting for the inevitable, and not-too-distant day when they will just wear down and stop working… heritage lost forever to the sands of time.

But there is one potentially beneficial loophole to digital heritage as compared to non-digital heritage: digital files can be copied. They can be copied again and again and again, perfectly every time. The path between past and future for a digital file is to hop from one storage to another every few years in an unbroken chain: staying one step ahead of digital decay. Digital copies aren’t like a Xerox of a Xerox which just becomes unreadable over time do to increasing noise. And best of all, making a digital copy doesn’t destroy the original.


Sarah Nguyen: Wax cylinders there, you can only do it so many times. Or then the grooves we’ll be inaccurate after playing it. But then within the digital interface, because it’s so easy to pick up a