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Interview
Preserving History in Multimedia: An Interview with Stanford's Michael Keller
7/9/2008
For instance, if we were to acquire the papers of a governor of California--and we actually have some governors' papers--most likely, the governor and his family would say, "Well, there're some things we don't want to be made public for 25 years," or "... until my children die," or something like that.
But ultimately, those materials can become grist for the scholarly mills.
CT: So it's complicated.
Keller: Yes it is. But once again, the same principles apply to physical items and digital items. We have to develop some new means of coping with the digital items. That's what we're working on. But the principles are well evolved.
CT: I wonder if you can give me an example of something that you've been able to preserve that you might not have, had you waited longer to begin this project.
Keller: A little while ago, thanks to support from a local family, we were able to acquire a collection of almost 400 antique maps of the colonial period of Africa, particularly Southern Africa. This collection was based in Johannesburg but there wasn't the local interest or maybe the local wherewithal to acquire and take care of this collection. But in acquiring it, we agreed to make these map images available to the world and especially to people in Southern Africa and South Africa.
So we digitized them, and they are accessible. But we need to be able to save those digital images so we don't have to redo the digitization, the scanning, because some of these maps are quite old.
That's an example of something that goes into the digital repository, where it will be maintained and as a result be accessible, regardless of the way you view it, over many, many, many generations.
Linda L. Briggs is a freelance writer based in San Diego, Calif.
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