incidents and accidents, hints and allegations

Rebecca she/they: moving image archivist, work in public TV

Shirley she/her: long-term fan, dismayed by fact that some works now unavailable, including some released just a couple years ago

Calais she/her, badge name, in professional circles goes by (name I missed); just finished Masters in Library and Information Science with a focus in Archives Management from Simmons University. in course on digital preservation, worked on MIT's Reality Hack, which is making virtual and augmented reality games over several days, involves a lot of cutting-edge hardware and software that often vanishes by next time

David he/him: attorney focusing on contracts, IP, and privacy laws. artist.

Rebecca: what stressed out the most about current state of media preservation?

Shirley: stuff is disappearing. one big class, stuff created for the web. Wayback can't get everything. Flash. websites that disappear tend to take stuff with them. mp3.com killed by record industry because courts were incompetent

David: there were a few other issues, but don't let me stop you

Shirley: could scan your discs and then you could play their copies anyway. was distributed de-duplicated (something) but term wouldn't be created for 10 years, should have won that case

Calais: is a problem in law-making of people who don't understand how the technology works

David: what, the Internet is a series of tubes?

Shirley: a lot of music that was given to site for free distribution, vanished. now streaming services vanish content.

Calais: that also very much. another thing to worry about: partial misconception that anything put online will be there forever. is hard to remove things but things do vanish. also decay: files corrupted, hardware no longer available. one of Carmen Sandiego games required specific version of dictionary. Duck Hunt, came with special gun that only worked with that kind of TV, unplayable without. if scan all photographs, throw away, and don't replace hard drive as needed ...

David: quick answer: as discussed in previous panel, large language modeling or "artificial intelligence" using data regardless of consent of owners, still working on consequences. bothers deeply both as artist and attorney and individual who understands that going to be subject to things like recorded Zoom calls that will be used for AI. what if video edited and then claimed to be oral contract? while do believe preservation important, sometimes what is being preserved is important too

Rebecca: something starting to see a lot, idea that for preservation purposes, piracy is justified, in light of streaming removal; on other hand, objections to LLM. so let's talk about ethics of piracy with regard to preservation

David: obnoxious boilerplate: not representing anyone, not legal advice. from sterile lawyer side, lot of discussion about what are purchasing/licensing when seeking media. example of purchasing paper book, know ability to enjoy will continue, right to make backup copy, if someone else puts out updated copy or tampers, can't touch what I have. licensing something online, can and frequently do discontinue without asking at all. horrible idea of actually reading contracts, though sometimes people will do "yeah, that's not what we said we would do, but what are you going to do about it?"

Shirley: DMCA means do not always have right to make backup copy, illegal to circumvent copy protections.

David: ability to make backup copies is yearly revisited/reauthorized by Library of Congress

(me: I went to find a link, as I do, and while this is not my field, (a) it's three years and (b) I don't see, in the list of exemptions, one for individuals backing up their DVDs/Blu-rays?)

Rebecca: presumes library has ability to make backup copies. Library of Congress gets DCP (digital cinema package), what is delivered to movie theaters these days, hard drives ... that are automatically code-locked after certain period of time. just what the studio was producing, not malicious

Calais: from archival perspective, definitely not saying what you should do, but brushes up against complicated issue of where do you get that stuff. some things, really glad we have, but way we got may be on scale from sketchy to straight up illegal and gross. we discuss and then say, up to archivist's judgment, which is how a lot of these moral quandaries go in library school. don't know that have a direct yes/no answer to "is piracy good?" but does matter for what purpose: preservation copy not public access unless/until removed or in public domain, legally more acceptable than just want to watch offline or on different device

Rebecca: to push on this a bit, Internet Archive bears a lot of burden of preservation, their policy is that don't have time to ask permission, just going to go take it all. difference between doing this for something intended to be work of art for public consumption, versus personal blog or video. is there responsibility to save everything, should we?

Calais: certainly can't save everything. need somewhere to put the servers and take care of them, large investment. with traditional media, is a concept in current museums/archives, if have things with difficult to check provenance, or missing documents, sometimes put things up on website saying, if this is yours let us know and we'll take it down.

Shirley: can tell Internet Archive to remove something, and flag things not to be scanned. but they store it anyway, just make it inaccessible.

Rebecca: lot easier to make selectively inaccessible than delete

Shirley: and they want to keep for historical record in case it's asked to be made available again

(me: not surprised to hear this in retrospect given the massive overreach by the Internet Archive with ebook "lending" during lockdown, which seems frustratingly possible to wreck entire endeavor)

Calais: Star Wars: The Old Republic, MMORPG (different from Knights of the Old Republic), had spy storyline, station set up to preserve everything on holonet and won't be released for 100 years and then everything out. very cool idea, completely impractical in real life. idea of delayed release of archival is a real thing.

(me: I sometimes wonder if any archive would take my journals, paper and digital, and not do anything with for 100+ years, because I don't want to reread paper especially, and don't want relatives to, but hate to throw away; maybe they would be useful for understanding timeframe in future?)

David: much meditation right now re: MLK surveillance tapes slated for release, historical importance versus horrific breach of privacy

Rebecca: idea of holding on to stuff until acceptable time; how long? legal standards around copyright, not necessarily around privacy

David: we do. state-by-state. but also what gets challenging is that USA is not an island. EU right to be forgotten versus a scrappy archivist, who prevails and how does it get solved, depending on where various people are located. question of, without international convention, how do you get, implement, enforce standard

Calais: also then cultural privacy issues, not just personal, especially re: indigenous information that is culturally restricted to specific groups, subgroups, different times. library value of universal access brushes against respecting where things come from

Rebecca: really big and important questions. bring back to media & preservation currently. media basically all digital now. if someone gave me a copy of their zine 20 years ago, no one would ask to destroy if author said wanted it back. YouTube video, mashup of two movies, is fundamentally different if someone wants that taken down?

Shirley: of course in YouTube case committed piracy, not as though someone posted mp4 file on website.

Rebecca: yes but that's how we distribute things these days

Calais: think still struggling with globally, share things much wider than before, before no reason to think zine would be accessible across the planet, whereas digital publication could be seen by literally anyone. I don't have an answer either. if you have a collection of personal papers that were given to you, can you put that online (what if they lived long enough ago that they would have no expectation that would be done)

Rebecca: paradox, much greater access and much greater possibility of total disappearance

Calais: suppose topic is now punishable in author's country, much more worry if digital than zine and someone reposts

David: biggest issue is metadata embedded in, gives many more ways to find author. challenge to example: zine usually author's own content versus mashup, so twist a little, somebody's podcast: internet still moves cost of copies and distribution closer to zero, makes redistribution more likely; also, if change a little bit or put out a reaction/response, gets very wrinkled quickly, but ultimately don't see meaningful difference between two except cost

Shirley: if zine creators do want distributable, CC licenses

Rebecca: questions?

me: please give me juicy technical details about how to archive stuff once you have it

Rebecca: lots of copies keep stuff safe = standard adage. not all copies in same basket, either technically or locationally. (not same type of hard drive that bought at same time.) for just preservation: your hard drive, online, your friend somewhere else. however many other considerations. lifespan of spinny hard disk, 3-5 years; solid state drive more dependent on how many times you use it.

Shirley: SSD in vault, about 10 years. best currently available to home users, M disks, special writeable CD/DVD/Blu-ray that instead of dyes use different medium, supposed to be 100 years or more, if have drive that can read

Calais: and store them properly

Rebecca: use LTO tape at work

Shirley: 10 year lifespan

Calais: want actually really nitty details, see NDSA levels

question: problem is stuff to play things back, have aircheck (?) cassettes of own radio appearances, but can't find working cassette players. one manufacturer in China who is crap. parts literally failing.

Calais: some public libraries have digitization suites may be able to use to listen/copy. because of nature of digital media, care about content, not much difference in text file between Open Office and versions of Word, so can try to transfer to newer media to keep content. can also talk to local archives, archival associations, Society of American Archivists website should have local groups, New England archivists

Rebecca: paradox at work, we are constantly frantically trying to digitize magnetic media, then put onto more media know will degrade and die, constant management. compared to filmstock, which does degrade but can be on shelf for 100 years which nothing digital now will

Calais: best way preserve non-AV, just print and store somewhere cool

audience: sitting in closet at Brandeis probably one of best archives of 1980s music, recordings of radio station. but who owns recording rights; don't have money to digitize. plus what's written on cassettes themselves: who played, when, who recorded it. I kept blogs of children when very young, wife printed out into books. John & Abigail Adams wrote letters, my wife and I IM'ed

(me: I occasionally think about pulling my & Chad's old blogging about the kids into print books, because the kids aren't going to go back through our sites when they want to know more detail about their childhoods, even if those sites stay up. we already make photo books of big vacations as more easily browseable than Google Photos albums, and Chad's parents do a yearly book of "Fun Times with SteelyKid and the Pip.")

Calais: brief attempt of Library of Congress to archive Twitter

Rebecca: impossible and possibly unethical

audience: for questions about how long things last, subreddit r/DataHoarder/

Calais: Library of Congress also has listing of their recommended file formats

audience: various Facebook groups passionate about old formats like minidisks or reel to reel, lot of people would be willing to help

Rebecca: archivist hat back on: time to deal with older media is now, because things degrading and because equipment being bought up by vendors to do it professionally

Rebecca: close out: what do you personally do if really love something and want to be sure continue to have access to? purchase physical medical, own digital copy, track on streaming?

Shirley: do buy video and audio on physical media for stuff I really love. if physical media doesn't exist, will try to find other ways to preserve, and keep in multiple places. NAS (network-attached storage) at home, another at makerspace, uploaded to cloud service

(I asked after panel: an NAS is more complicated than an external hard drive that I run backups to, but for my purposes that plus cloud backups is good)

Calais: actually not as good at this as should be. still buy physical books because can read on Sabbath, and they're pretty, so more with fanfiction and things like that. "I should do something about that, I should print it out eventually"--don't do this, later will be too late.

one thing about preservation: really interesting story from professor about video preservation and emulation, some official project looking to do Oregon Trail. would normally think want to preserve source code. creators said, you can recode, but what we want is how and when die, which was based on historical data, to stay same. not what a lot of people would think to preserve.

David: as fan of cartoons, for webcomics try to find artist and purchase book directly from them or dead-tree from website. one thing re: technical aspects of preservation, also overlooked, compensation to creators

Rebecca: in my experience, if reach out to creator and say, I love this so much I want to have a copy I can preserve, often will be really happy to work with you

Sara: they/them, works in higher ed; SFF writer; very interested but not a lot of expertise in topic

Alastor, they/them: (pronounced ah-LAST-or) physician, academic background in medieval lit, archives, special collections librarianship

Moniquill, she/her: author, enrolled member of the Seaconke Wampanoag Tribe and a lineal descendant of Ousamequin Massasoit, very interested in rewriting of history by colonizers & writing & rewriting problematic history

Jon: wrote Exadelic: ran the archiving of the world's open source software before writing that book

Greer, she/her: preservation librarian at Harvard for about 25 years, first microfilming & then digitizing of mountain of books, always saddened that very often original book would be discarded

Sara: favorite work that features storage/transmittal?

Greer: Library of Babel, Borges; kind of dream, because impossible to lose, infinite. OTOH: no finding aid, all there but would never be able to find

(do you all know about the Library of Babel project on the web? It does only contain lower-case letters, spaces, commas, and periods. Here is one result for “do you all know about the library of babel project on the web”, surrounded by other words.)

Jon: visited Borges library in Buenos Aires, so disappointed finite and no hexagons. cites Handmaid's Tale, which has The Library (approved works) but also illicit one, not just censorship but selective access

Alastor: always wanted to visit The Name of the Rose library, secret part of it; The Library of Ever, YA, not just print or AV, but e.g. huge globe; book has messages for kids about censoring children's reading

Sara: who controls information in those examples or others?

Greer: nonfictional example, Bodleian Library, during early 17th century Oxford setting up it, Sir Thomas Bodley refused to buy contemporary plays like Shakespeare: riffraff, genre fiction! sold 1st Folio to buy 2d when came out, ended up with 4th. took very long time for genre fiction to be recognized as something worth saving

Jon: previously answered, so different one: Anathem, guilty pleasure. monasteries, 4 corners, one opens every 10 years, one every 100, one every 1000: slow realization that this is a system that is being maintained, but left deliberately ambiguous why or by who

Moniquill: reminded of Canticle for Leibowitz: The Simplification after nuclear war, all that info must've caused society’s downfall. monk archivist doesn’t know what the information stored in archives is, but dutifully re-archives. I am a nonfictional example, I am a member of Seaconke Wampanoag tribe; the erasure of pre-colonial history in US is huge and sometimes deliberate (audience: sometimes?). when I was a kid, history in school started when Pilgrims arrived; idea that oral traditions don't count

Alastor: fictional: A Sound of Stars, YA novel, 17 year old girl keeps secret library from destruction by alien overlords. real life: very heartening: went conference for archivists hosted on Warm Springs Reservation, which has three Nations living on it, archivists there are creating online accessible archives, not only digitizing oral history and rare documents, but creating portal system to limit access to Nation members to materials that are not meant to be universally accessible; thinking about seasonal access as well; includes language reclamation project as well

(by modifying a link from the Confederated Tribes of Warms Springs, I think this is part of the Plateau Peoples' Web Portal.)

Sara: next question was going to be more about reality, any others want to bring up

Moniquill: TX curriculum on American history, very deliberate misinformation and erasure; also TX textbooks get distributed throughout country for complex reasons

Jon: ever want to feel dejected for several hours, read Wiki list of destroyed libraries. nuance: in 2027, FBI surveillance tapes of MLK will be unsealed, could make argument that should never have been made and therefore should be destroyed

Alastor: middle grade book series, Race to the Truth, meant to counter censorship efforts, all about kinds of things being omitted

Greer: some things are not erased but not allowed to happen, as demonstrated in e.g. How To Suppress Women's Writing, erasure before it starts. even when things are kept, they're erased. Parthenon sculptures, not only appropriated: 1930s, donor said, I'll build gallery if you scrub them white. was good exhibition at Harvard of reconstructed painted statutes, remembers archer wearing Harlequin checkered paints

Moniquill: bothered that used flat colors for all the paint. understand that only had bottom layer of paint but

Greer: yes, I assume that were as great artists in paint as in stone.

Alastor: palimpsest manuscripts, talked about as monks saving parchment, but a lot of it was also intentional, old pagan document don't need. some effort to use fMRI to see if can find out what is underneath, but huge loss

Moniquill: coming back to oral tradition, incredible bowdlerization of those to remove all sex and poop jokes which were very much part of original but English translators thought crass

Greer one of fave stories of English folklorists which really sanitized: Padstow Oss, Cornwall ritual, oss=horse, but it's not horse, a gigantic thing with beak, terrifying; someone dances before it to tease it and spur it on to chase people through streets. In 1920s someone wrote paper on how saw crossdressed man as the teaser, including big theory about relationship to ancient times; then next year, saw same person dressed like clown, went up to him & said, very upset, "you're doing it wrong"

Moniquill: Roger Williams' accounts of time among Narraganset and (didn't hear, possibly Mohegan?) peoples, has lot of strange theories about what happening and why, particularly re: menstruation: thought they must be descended from Jews because separated their women during this time because the women were unclean. no, it was because menstruation was regarded as physically and psychically powerful: man touches menstruating virgin, dick will fall off

Sara: back to fiction, any fictional worlds that mirror problems in meaningful way that deconstructs, or that do a better job and what can we learn

Moniquill: just came back from archeology panel (my notes), talked about looting, how in Mass Effect & Dragon Age there's a lot of deep history, little better in Mass Effect in that archeology exists, but Dragon Age there's no respect to archiving, just going around destroying archeological sites

Alastor: middle grade series, The Ninja Librarians, secret time-traveling organization to help prevent censorship and destruction. also: who is even allowed literacy, see: Butler, Kindred; Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Water Dancer

Moniquill: Nix, Abhorsen series: one of main characters after book 1 is a librarian, but of a very strange magical library, need to fight spirits and monsters, because is from before the erasure of lots of knowledge but lots of contents are cursed

(me to myself: in Welcome to Night Vale, librarians are monsters and have to be fought to get to books, because it is a friendly desert community with significant elements of dystopia)

Jon: Steerswoman series (I applaud), steerswomen are not just archivists but archives themselves. less said about series the better (Moniquill: just read it? Jon: yes. Greer: have to make the journey with it.)

Greer: books with museums where characters don't understand entirely what got. Dalemark series, there is a book about people who are the gods (note: having not read series, I'm unclear whether the series contains such a book, or whether there is such a book within the fiction). at end of series, have museum of artifacts that are not understood in way that were by actual people who used them

Moniquill: PBS special about museum in Pacific Northwest re: archive of masks looted from indigenous people and long legal battle about getting back, had to build museum to put them in, which indigenous people designed to give back the context that lacked

(it was unclear to me if the building was a condition of the return that was put on the indigenous people or was reparation that the looters had to make? is this the new hall in the American Museum of Natural History?)

Greer: English folklore, famous fight in early 20th century over who owned Morris dancing. collectors were getting very Aryan, other people were pointed out that this is part of people's lives; in addition, group of English working women wtih vibrant culture, were thrown out of the ring and not allowed to dance

Sara: before questions, anything else want to mention?

Moniquill: remembered fictional library need to get into: Belle's, Beauty & Beast

Alastor: always wanted to build library like that, rolling ladders, but also: ziplines

Jon: real world archives that are pretty SF in approach, salt mine in Austria, pocket of space being slowly covered because of currents in the salt, will stay covered for 100k years, people using as archive

(I think this is Memory of Mankind (sic)?)

Moniquill: project of trying to communicate nuclear dangers to future

Jon: this is not a place of honor

(this is definitely Expert Judgment on Markers To Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion Into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant: old Slate article rather than direct-linking to a 350-page pdf.)

Greer: general exhortation: build libraries, archives, museums; make them open in what take in and who wants to use

Q (from me): when I saw this title, I thought of the much more personal memory and erasure in Yoon Ha Lee's Machineries of Empire series and Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire, in both of which a preserved memory is implanted into another person's, and which are also very concerned, as their titles say, about imperialism. Do you think that this kind of interest in individual-level memory preservation is linked to, or can be connected with, these concerns about institutions?

Moniquill: comes up a little bit in Mass Effect, core part of plot is that Shepherd gains memories from Prothean artifact and one of first people on team is archeologist who studies that, their communication back and forth very interesting

Jon: Philip K. Dick territory, individual memory and identity, of course, but also obsessed with Gnostics, a culture whose written work was believed destroyed until 1945 discovered in Egypt

audience: wanted to mention program Mukurtu, archiving program created with Australian indigeneous people (me: and in fact the project above is built on the Mukurtu CMS); also same people have designed creative commons but for levels of knowledge access (which I think are TK Labels)

Greer: great difference in working with indigenous people is that library is the land

Moniquill: when you cut down a food forest...

same audience: group using VR to connect the oral tradition with land, not sure if go to the place with augmented reality or not, but working on

Moniquill: Minecraft archeological society, build Minoan temples

audience: when talking about erasure, we all feel emotional impact of tragedy, but can anyone articulate explicit reason other than just feels bad

Moniquill: it's cultural erasure, it's completing a genocide, the most one can destroy a society; element of violence, tragic when landslide much worse when bombed on purpose

Greer: worst Roman punishment was damnatio, when written out of history legally, judicially; everyone understood worst thing that can happen

Jon: very concrete practical purposes as well why archives are important, but the human story is actually a lot of stories mixed together

Alastor: distinction between forgetting and erasure, sadness and also anger

Moniquill: familiar with gaslighting? imagine doing that to entire culture

audience: moving to much less traumatic erasure, video game preservation. don't own them any more, also things like Flash only exist because of concerted effort. what is way to preserve things don’t actually own?

someone: panel on this tomorrow (today, as of when I posted this: 8:30 p.m. Sunday, Preserving Media in the Age of Streaming, Marina 2)

Jon: emulators are a lot of work; law isn't really structured for rights for archivists in video games, streaming; really boringly a legal question

Moniquill: early internet, lot of just gone, Wayback Machine isn't complete

Greer: was on GEnie night it disappeared, sentences literally vanishing before eyes

Moniquill: especially old blogging culture, bluetext was everything, lack of context and original meaning can't be parsed any more

Jon: aware of interesting project, fix all broken links on Wikipedia. Wayback respected people's decisions not to be archived, archivists have complicated feelings about

Greer: for durability: 100% rag paper and a dry cave

Moniquill: heard carve into granite and bury in limestone

audience: mentions Uncensored Library, project by Recorders without Borders in MInecraft because not blocked even in countries with major firewalls

audience: mentions Rachel Caine series, Great Library, YA: Library of Alexandria survived … and has monopoly on books.

audience: there's a limit to bandwidth etc., how to figure out what is not worthy of being archived?

Jon: Ada Palmer, one of advisors on open-source archive project, said all Renaissance archivists cared about preserving great works, we don't care about those, would like shopping lists

Moniquill: very divisive in book art community, what books are ok to make out of

Jon: I have made that decision, not easy

Greer: after one set of Harvard card catalog was destroyed, someone said, so much info in those: librarian notes, fingermarks showing the most used

(me: I notice that this question has not been answered. not that I blame anyone!)

audience: favorite thing to do is to find most niche reference in footnotes and try to track down and learn all about. curious if have particular niche subject of archiving exploration or passionate about

Jon: mildly interested in Gnosticism, didn't have these texts until rediscovered in 1945 … except ones not catalogued or are papyrus fragmented into popcorn size pieces

Alastor: worked in SUNY Maritime Collection, on records of first hospice for elders, "old broken-down sailors" in terms of time; were these huge double-elephant folios with info about all residents; non-profit that had some ownership rights in records was concerned about personal nature of some records, which they addressed

Moniquill: the study of how syphilis spread around the planet, very interesting and also very often deliberately hidden & destroyed

Greer: very touching archive: London foundling hospital from 18th century, would try to keep scrap of what infant was wearing in case mother ever came back. did have just one or two cases where worked, but just these books with scrap after scrap of fabric.

audience: brought to mind, Library of Banned Books in Prague, really cool place, people basically typewriting copies of favorite books to circulate under communism

Jon: Václav Havel talks about this in very long extremely good essay (is this The Power of the Powerless?)

audience: re FBI files of survelliance of MLK: when appropriate to deliberately erase or refrain from archiving?

Jon: think cases exist but are pretty rare

Greer: directions on how to destroy the universe?

Jon: if it were easy to build nuclear bomb in kitchen?

Moniquill: plenty of info about terrible things readily available

Alastor: something you get in library school, what do when get people approaching seeking info on how to do terrible things

me: what did they tell you?

Alastor: really huge answer, especially if someone under 18.

And we were out of time.

(librarian in audience after panel finished: ethical judgment, very contextual, one of The Things always spend a lot of time discussing in library school)