---
title: History and Digital Preservation
layout: post
image:
  feature: header_digital_preservation.png
doi: "https://doi.org/10.59348/1z1p2-nn569"
archive: "https://wayback.archive-it.org/22123/20241101171236/https://eve.gd/2024/12/28/history-and-digital-preservation"
---
This week, over Christmas 2024, I have read two pieces about digital preservation: Ian Milligan's _Averting the Digital Dark Age_[^1] and Ageh _et al._'s "The Preservation of Knowledge in the Digital Age" for Arcadia.[^2] It is, in truth, fairly difficult to reconcile these two accounts of the state of digital preservation. Milligan opts for the bold, but he hopes not hubristic, "The digital dark age was largely averted by 2001, at least in terms of the most apocalyptic predictions made only a half-decade earlier". Meanwhile, Ageh's report opts for the more pessimistic "We conclude that knowledge will almost certainly be lost unless new robust and intentional arrangements are put in place to preserve and provide future access to electronic literature". So which is it?

In some senses, these two approaches to digital preservation are appraising different things. Milligan's case study is 9/11 and he rightly points out that the rapid mobilisation of the Internet Archive, alongside more conventional library partners, meant that the events of this day were preserved and remain accessible, almost 25 years later. That is to say that, when we can detect "history" happening, we have the technology and standards to be able to record and preserve public web resources. If we can work out what we _care_ about in the present, we _can_ preserve it.

The difference comes in the fact that Ageh _et al._ are looking at certain types of literature that can be paywalled or locked behind convoluted authentication systems: academic texts, for example. (Would that it were not so...) My own study of 7 million objects with a digital object identifier (DOI) determined that a significant proportion of this literature is _not_ well-enough preserved, given that much of our society rests on contemporary science and scholarship.[^3] However, if the scholarship and research of our age is not preserved, have we really averted a digital dark age? I am sceptical.

While not disparaging the amazing work of the Internet Archive, it is also the case that this service can only scrape what it finds on the surface web. But what if a historian wanted to know about the criminal practices of, say, drug dealing in the twenty-first century? To preserve authentic primary sources of such activity would require a crawler that could scan hidden/darknet TOR/onion sites, against the will of the criminals who run them. But we are only documenting a small portion of material that actually exists and that could serve as future historical sources.

It is also almost certainly the case that historians will wish to study events that we did _not_ deem important at the time. If we knew, ahead of time, exactly what to preserve, the job would be a heck of a lot easier. As it actually stands, though, we snapshot events like 9/11 extremely frequently, but most "normal" days do not receive such attention. Yet who knows when a particular moment may attain retrospective significance?

Milligan does also address the perpetual challenge of the Internet Archive's sustainability, but I feel he tends to play this down somewhat. What we really need is an Internet Archive on each continent, affiliated with national research libraries, each duplicating the work of the other. But legal barriers and differing "risk appetites" (I hate that phrase) among these institutions make this unlikely.

I don't have any grand conclusions from this, other than to say that the "memory" of the internet that Milligan ascribes, basically, to the Internet Archive, has held up so far. It's the possible sudden disintegration of that memory that worries me; I would be much happier with eggs in many, many different baskets -- and with a higher proportion of our scholarship and research preserved.[^4]

[^1]: Milligan, Ian, _Averting the Digital Dark Age: How Archivists, Librarians, and Technologists Built the Web a Memory_ (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024)
[^2]: Ageh, Tony, Michael Bayler, Chris Durlacher, and Julian Turner, "The Preservation of Knowledge in the Digital Age" (Arcadia Fund, September 2024) <[https://arcadia-fund.files.svdcdn.com/production/The-Preservation-of-Knowledge-in-the-Digital-Age.pdf?dm=1733309971](https://arcadia-fund.files.svdcdn.com/production/The-Preservation-of-Knowledge-in-the-Digital-Age.pdf?dm=1733309971)> [accessed 28 December 2024]
[^3]: Eve, Martin Paul, ‘Digital Scholarly Journals Are Poorly Preserved: A Study of 7 Million Articles’, _Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication_, 11.1 (2024), doi:[https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.16288](https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.16288)
[^4]: One final note that is just me being pedantic... Milligan cites Goggin and McLelland in his first chapter as saying "It is still somewhat astonishing that the QWERTY keyboard—originally developed to avoid the jamming of commonly occurring letter combinations in English words . . . in nineteenth-century typewriters—is still the main human/computer interface". However, I found this not be true in Eve, Martin Paul, _Theses on the Metaphors of Digital-Textual History_ (Stanford University Press, 2024), p. 93.