Golden Canon: Custodianship vs. Technology

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gary frost
Fri, 20 Feb 1998 07:45:29 -0600


Martin Greenberger wrote:
> Surely custodianship and form of media are both essential ingredients in the future of preservation. The eye opener for me in this time-and-bits discussion has been that whereas digital media and Internetting may be expected to affect custodianship very positively, so far they are having just the opposite effect with respect to media continuity.>

This is a great help in mapping the discussion. I also sense another
momentum in the discussion. There is actually a focus on the
preservation of a reading mode...rather than preservation of content.
This is apparent in interest in "dynamic" rather than "static" documents
and in the concern for future emulation of the presentation of the
content.

This is probably new territory. Library and archive preservation has
focused on the material collections. The various reading modes applied
to these materials has been the separate product of historical periods
and their technologies which have been poorly preserved. For example the
important advent of silent reading, as opposed to oral reading, must now
be reconstructed by great efforts of scholarship using indirect
evidence.

If the mission is the preservation of a reading mode associated with
networked computers, that should be clarified up-front.


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