Digital Archeology: Starting from Scratch

I'm lucky to have incredibly interesting classes this semester. Interesting does not equal easy. Digital preservation is blowing my brain out of my ears.

While its becoming more and more important to understand and plan for, its also laden with problems and a lack of evidence as to what really works.

An alarming amount of literature on the topic calls for no action; a sort of wait-and-see and maybe there will be a cure-all. But in the meantime, what happens to the information that gets lost until this magical cure appears out of the mist?

But on the other hand, there is no tried and true method we know will work. So for now, we're saving imperfectly. We're altering the bit-streams, therefore not saving the document, but saving a representation of the document. So how much is okay to change? Do we use emulators to save the "look and feel" of each item (still altering the bit stream), or do we migrate and save the content, albeit altered content? And on and on and on.....

So anyhow, my project for the semester is to reconstruct as best as possible, with whatever digital archeology techniques we can find, with a small group of peers, a website that has been lost. The Pittsburgh Project established a model for electronic record-keeping. Ironically enough, it was lost due to a server glitch, having not been backed up. Whoops!

I like the idea of doing this, from scratch, and figuring out what works and what doesn't, cause I think this is going to become a huge obstacle/common problem in the near future. At the same time, its a big undertaking. Since this was a project that happened in the mid-1990's, none of us have ever seen the original site, and here we are, trying to make an as-exact-as-possible replica. So along with the actual doing of the project, we're tracking our methods and results and trying to get them published.

Its gonna be a hectic semester. See everyone in April.