>in the future
preservation will mean copying,
not maintenance of an artifact<
On this basis, Peter places the medium of preservation
on a lower priority than his other concerns, particularly
his very insightful concern that authenticity can be lost
in digital documents.
Peter, there is a connection between copying and this
dangerous erosion of the record, don't you think? After
all, the alteration takes place during a copying process. So
we should be addressing how the copying process is done
with an eye toward preserving the exact record. Hence,
the medium may be important, if it is one designed to
preserve the record, rather than one that can easily
be altered.
This may sound far fetched, but indulge me in a sci-fi
mind game. Suppose the medium for duplication was self-
duplicating, something like DNA but designed for exact
copies not combinations of pairs like our genes. I'm not
really sure what form this might take. We tend to think in
terms of solid materials: paper, tape, discs, etc. It does
seem a more than a little far fetched to have our history duplicating
itself in some kind of chemical soup. Yet, since you've raised
the question about preservation by duplication and in the
same voice expressed fears about authenticity, I think a
little work ought to be done to combine the two topics
and make their weaknesses into a unified strength. We might
consider that media ought to be tested by a criterion that
weighs the ability to self-regulate the accuracy of the
reproduction. One way to insure this might be to have the
document self-reproduce.
BTW, I did propose in another equally speculative submission
to this group, that we transmit data by radio wave to be
captured on its return through the space/time continuum.
I mention this, because it posits one way that theoretically
we could preserve data without duplication. I know it's only
a theory, but what I have done is ask that question: does
everything have to be a noun? What about verbs? In other
words, can energy be used to preserve information? We
are simply used to the idea that the information is preserved
on a physical medium and experienced through a transducer
in the form of energy. That is a bias that might blinker
our perception of the deep future. We have learned a great
deal about the origin of the universe by looking at the
energy expelled at its birth. I don't think anything or
anyone has been tampering with that record!
However, it is not lost on me that Peter is calling upon
the "energies" of the conservators to keep copying the data
record. The underlying assumption that librarians will go
on in perpetuity knocking off copies is a librarian's natural
perception of the future, and I certainly hope that this
proves to be the case. However, since conservation is the
goal, not the conservation of conservationists, we can also
entertain means and methods of duplication that maintain
themselves without our intervention. This will answer to
some extent Peter's fear that the duplications will be tampered
with.
Tom