Staff Papers
Culture and Cultural Memory: Challenges of an Electronic Era
This paper was presented by Eric Wainwright, Deputy Director-General at the 2nd National Preservation Office Conference: Multimedia Preservation - Capturing the Rainbow, in Brisbane, 28-30 November 1995.
What are the issues? Clearly, there are many confronting us at present, and in the relatively near future, largely caused by the move to digitisation of all types of documents and their resulting convergence. But today, I don't want to talk about the immediate problems of electronic materials and what we might have to do about them - I just want to reflect a little bit on the history of communication. I think that we can reasonably argue that a major focus of technological development throughout history, perhaps never more so than at present, has been on improving the ability of people to communicate. These improvements really cover three facets :
- improving the ability to communicate more quickly;
- improving the ability to communicate over longer distances; and
- improving the ability to communicate over time.
Prior to the introduction of writing, we really had no ability to communicate ideas or agreements exactly, other than immediately and within a very short range, essentially limited by the time and distance that a voice could be heard. And over many centuries, what we have done through improvements in technology has been to try to get over that problem. We have had a series of technological developments aimed at helping people to move towards other people, ie, the whole series of transport technology developments. And we have invented ways in which the results of what we said or thought could be transmitted to people over a longer distance and over a longer period of time. So there have been two essential solutions to our problem of limited - we have tried to either move the people closer to more people or we have moved the results of what people said or thought to other people.
Now this is all very obvious, but it is important in thinking about what we should do now. The great majority of people in the world could not write or read until this century. Even now, there are huge numbers of people in the world for whom writing and reading is still extremely limited - although this is changing very rapidly, with economic developments in the major population countries of the Third World, in particular, China and India. This has meant that until relatively recently there was an extremely limited capability of the average person to produce a document or indeed a historical record of any kind about anything that they did. Documents of course are not the same as the events they describe. Even when we invented writing, the document that travelled from one person to another was essentially a surrogate for the idea or the event. It still is. Sometimes we all find it hard to capture in a text the ideas that are in our heads. Sometimes there are limitations of language, sometimes there are other limitations, but a documentary record is not an event. I always find it curious that we have, particularly amongst librarians and archivists, tremendous faith in the printed word, when we know that people lie all the time. They do it in print as in speech. However, I'll pass over that because that provides scope for another talk in its own right.
Prior to the invention of aural and visual capture, we had almost no ability to capture any reliable version of events or details of places. From the nineteenth century on, that clearly started to change - with radio, with photographs and then with the whole plethora of capture mechanisms which have come on stream during the twentieth century and no doubt will continue to do so indefinitely. Throughout this century we have had a rapidly increasing number of means by which we can document and record every facet of life. We can now capture any event or at least some record of any event or situation, and we can almost immediately transmit that record anywhere on the globe. I suspect that it is probably technologically possible now to capture an audio-visual record of the whole of a person's life. We might ask why we would want to do this. We might also ask why and whether we would want to permit someone to do this. And that is an issue for preservation of documentation also - how much information is it reasonable to capture, preserve and make available about people and their lives/actions?
I am arguing that the problems that we are now entering and the issues that we now face with multimedia and electronics, are simply effects of a wide sweep of technological change over several centuries. These technological changes have led to a number of effects. One of them is what I would call democratisation of the record creation and transmission process. That is, as more technological changes have come on stream, they have started to give all of us, as individuals, a greater capability to document things of importance to us (using document in the very broad sense) and then to transmit them to a wider and wider number of people. The invention of the post office allowed us to mail things to other people, we then had the phone which allowed us to reach in speech more and more people, and now of course we all sit on electronic mail systems and assume that our words of wisdom will be transmitted to an interested globe. How many people actually read what we send over the email is another question. But our capability to reach out individually and provide documents, that is records in some form or another, is increasing all the time. Similarly, the ability of smaller organisations also to reach out in much more structured ways is also increasing. Witness, of course, the move from broadcasting to narrowcasting in the media industries. The capital cost of entry into a system of broadcasting distribution has reduced so dramatically that as individuals we now have many of the same kinds of capability as large corporations used to have. Everyone is becoming a publisher and distributor, and this has all sorts of implications for archives and documentation.
A second effect of technology is the multiplication of copies. We have moved a long way from the monks sitting in cells and laboriously (and inaccurately) duplicating works one at a time. With the photocopying machine and the various crude forms of duplicating before that, and now a global network we have an almost limitless capacity to duplicate documents electronically and instantaneously. In the situation where a document is created and instantaneously transmitted to a thousand locations, what does this do about the concept of originality?
A third effect, and a very obvious one on which there has been a lot of work, is the multiplication of formats. I don't need to dwell on this, but the number of formats of transmission and storage has increased dramatically over this century, and particularly in the last twenty years. What seems to be happening is that with the multiplicity of formats, the average life time of each format as a useful device tends to be reducing. There is a technological acceleration in equipment and new break-throughs in ways of storing information electronically more cheaply and in more compact ways which is forcing obsolescence of formats at a greater rate. I suspect, unfortunately, that this is going to get worse, not better. This, of course, has many ramifications for potential users of those formats.
Fourthly, technological change has resulted in a greater diversity of ways of relating documents. Once we could really only relate documents by putting them side by side on a shelf - they needed to be physically co-located to be seen to be related. Then, of course, in libraries and archives we devised various ways of cataloguing and indexing to overcome the limitations of physical co-location. And then we invented the systems of references in articles, books and so on to relate one document across to others that weren't necessarily in the same collection. And of course we have continued to move to a greater number of ways of making linkages with the invention of databases of various kinds, so that one can now search on a visual image or full text with various forms of likeness searching, (ie, allowing a query of the type "give me a document that is like this one"), and the familiar hypertext links that we now see on the World Wide Web. Why is this important? For all sorts of evidential purposes. The relationship between documents can be just as important as a document itself. Indeed, this is a tenet of records and archival management.
Fifthly, there is the technological development of the dynamic document This must make us ask questions about the nature of a document, and a "work". Clearly, a database that is updated in real time is of a different nature to a static document, from many perspectives.
Sixthly, there is the advancing technology of preservation itself - of which probably by far the most important has been the invention of airconditioning. We now have the capability to preserve documents in all forms to a much greater extent than we did in the past. If we go back 100 years, the ability of any of our societies to preserve documents long-term, was greatly limited in practice.
Lastly, the capacity to pay has changed, that is our societies, as we get richer, have acquired an increasing ability to pay for activities that might be regarded as non-essential. Whether one regards education, research or preservation of documents as non-essential may depend on ones standard of living - but the reality is that we have more institutional and more private capabilities as individuals to preserve documents.
So we have been moving for some time at a very rapid pace - in not much more than a century from a situation of scarcity of records of human behaviour to abundance and arguably over-abundance - for all the above reasons, which are primarily technologically driven. And I think if we are looking at multimedia and electronic preservation in terms of the cultural memory issue, these facts do change the ball game. I believe we have to re-examine the issue of preservation in this new environment of over-abundance and a coming era of super over-abundance. Until recently, we really didn't have a problem, we really didn't have any significant volume of records to preserve compared with what is happening now and what is about to come. Because much more can now be documented and captured, does this mean we should try to preserve long-term access to them? Is this a reasonable thing to even think of doing in a time of over-abundance? What are we preserving for? Are records different in nature to other forms of heritage such as buildings? Most of these we knock down. Some today we keep as exemplars. Why do we keep them? What are we trying to do? Is an issue that printed documents in such short supply until recently that we treat them with a reverence they no longer deserve?
In looking at these issues, I am using cultural memory very broadly here in my title to join two streams of thinking. The library tradition of trying to preserve documents of significance for heritage purposes, that is, the idea that some documents are of sufficient importance to our historical development to be worth keeping long-term. And the separate archives tradition of trying to preserve documents as significant for evidential purposes, that is because they are of significance in illustrating some aspect of individual business transactions. In my view, both those purposes are inherently evidential - but evidential in different ways. One is evidence of the past in general, the other evidence of particular transactions. In both cases I argue that our prime task now is not about preservation of the past, it is about ensuring the appropriate future preservation of the present. It always was, but because we started late concentration has often been on the past. Of course we had a lot of catching up to do, and as our societies only recently became wealthy enough to consider the task seriously.
Now, looking at cultural heritage in particular, we have some problems. Take the excellent recent publication by the Heritage Collections Committee of the Cultural Ministers' Council on National Conservation and Preservation Policy for Movable Cultural Heritage! It defines movable cultural heritage as "objects that are of importance for ethnological, archaeological, historical, artistic, scientific or technological reasons". I'm not sure why the definition relates only to movable cultural heritage, and assume that it is equally applicable to non-movable heritage. But does it help? The key of course is "of importance". It really is a catch all phrase. I have been unfortunate enough to try to wrestle with the issue of significance in different committees over several years, and I have sympathy with all those committees that continue to wrestle with the idea of significance. I have reluctantly concluded that almost all the arguments to do with significance are circuitous, and I now hold to my own rather pathetic definition of significance, that is, an item is significant if somebody believes it to be so. And in a distributed environment what other definition could be more useful? But this does present a real problem in an age of over-abundance, and I don't quite know what we are going to do about it. Clearly, issues of significance must be impacted by those factors I referred to a few minutes ago. In over-abundance, selectivity is clearly much more important. In multiplication of copies, clearly collaboration is much more important if unnecessary duplication is not to take place. In multiplication of transitory formats, clearly attention must be given to the issues of migration because most formats in the future will not be usable - they will be around for a very short period. I think we can just take that as a given. The problems of migration start at the document creation stage because of the problems of recording the capture mechanism in order to do something about transfer later on. And in the democratisation of publishing and transmission, attention must be given to the issue of useful and bona-fide documents. Those of you who are roamers of the Web will know that there is a lot of junk out there!
What are we trying to preserve? Value for what? There are basically two types of value. An item needs to be preserved because it is important individually in its own right, because of something that happened of importance in that society at that time because of that document. There are obvious examples, the Magna Carta, the Australian constitution, speeches that changed a country, that changed the world. But equally important are documents as exemplars of a time and place. The issue for us is to capture the essence of society and transmit that captured essence to the future. That's all we're trying to do. We're trying to do it in archival organisations for evidential purposes just as much as in other kinds of organisations for society as a whole.
But the problem of capturing that essence in multimedia, as in all other forms of document, is a real difficulty. I would argue that our recent concentration on preservation has been influenced by the backgrounds of the people involved, and the scarcity of resources that might be conserved, that is, we have tended to give more importance to the preservation of intellectual activity than the essence of society. The people responsible have generally been well educated, people who have given importance to the written word.
Digitisation in no way changes the principles from which we operate. Clearly multimedia and electronic documents are now of major importance - nobody could argue any more, if they ever did, that they are documents that we can ignore. There has, I believe, been a tendency in our libraries and archives to regard some of the formats at least as either of less significance or too hard to deal with properly. We have been much happier just dealing with printed text as we always did. Clearly, this kind of attitude is no longer acceptable to any of our organisations. Multimedia electronic documents are both more important than text, and less important. They can be more important in some situations because they capture something of an event or place or a person that cannot be captured in text. But they may very well be less important, particularly for visual documents, in that they represent a record only from a particular viewpoint. Those of you who watch the news regularly will know what I mean. Ten people with an appropriately placed camera, can be made to look like a major crowd. A visual record is no more authentic necessarily than a text. But it certainly couldn't be argued to be consistently less authentic than text. Clearly, this is a growing issue. The great advantages of digital formats in terms of cheapness of storage, cheapness of transmission, ease of duplication, ease of manipulation and just general ease of use will mean that almost all forms of document will move to digital formats within a reasonable time. What we do about the documents produced to date is another issue, ie, that of the format transfer, but I cannot imagine that the great majority of documents will not be in digital format from about 25 years from now.
But we must see that task within the broad scope of a total approach to movable cultural heritage, as set out in the Heritage Collections Committee's National Conservation and Preservation Policy document. Clearly there are some extra issues that multimedia and electronic forms present. The issue of authenticity or integrity has always been a problem. I think we have had far too much faith in the authenticity of the printed document. With electronic formats, there is a greater focus now on the authenticity and integrity issues that have always been there, but which we have tended to dismiss a lot of the time. Files can be, and regularly are in most organisations tampered with and always have been. The issue of authenticity and integrity are complex questions, and are going to get more complicated in an electronic era. Clearly the ease of change of electronic documents, in relation to their evidential purpose, is a major emerging problem. In the past, it has usually been relatively easy to tell if a file had been changed. With an electronic record this may be very difficult. Certainly it is possible, and there are technical solutions. But whether we can afford fully effective technical solutions for a while is a question. I have mentioned the difficulty of the concept of the "work", with dynamic electronic documents. I think we also have the obvious problem of format migration, and losses in migration which gradually may result in a very considerable change from the original through several migrations of format. And we have the issue of originality - what does an "original document" mean in an electronic environment? Indeed, what is the role of a "copy", when "enhanced"? In many cases, the original is not the "best" document for certain purposes, because it can be enhanced or manipulated in some way for improved use. But what does this do about the authenticity issue? Ease of use and authenticity may well come into greater conflict.
The context issue I think is also an extremely difficult. How do we capture sufficient of the context in which an electronic document was operating, in the same way that we have done with, say, records in records management systems. In such systems, our file structures have generally ensured that we know the people who have created and handled the documents - through file movement records, annotations, etc. How do we ensure that our electronic systems have at least the same capabilities?
Finally, we have the complicated issues associated with roles and responsibilities, as the interests of existing organisations start to blur in a digital world. Long-term preservation of digitally created works is likely to be dependent on effective action earlier in the publishing/dissemination chain than for printed documents. The roles of authors, publishers, distributors and users are becoming less distinguishable, as are the distinctions between collecting institutions such as museums, libraries, galleries and archives. Successful preservation of electronic material of significance will require much greater cross-sectoral collaboration than in the past, particularly in sharing experience, skills development and research.
There are no easy answers, but by asking the right questions, and the good will of people from a variety of backgrounds and organisations, we can over time achieve and capture that 'essence of the past' that we all seek.
