Time, bits, and nickel: Managing digital and analog continuity

TL;DR

This paper discusses digital and analog archiving methods, exploring their management challenges and future visions to ensure long-term preservation and access to information across decades and centuries.

Contribution

It compares digital and analog archiving approaches, highlighting their challenges and proposing a framework for long-term information preservation.

Findings

Digital and analog archiving have distinct management challenges.

Long-term archiving requires balancing time, space, and innovation.

Future visions of archiving aim for enduring access to knowledge.

Abstract

In 1998, the Getty Center hosted the ''Time and Bits: Managing Digital Continuity'' conference, gathering the founders and thinkers of two San Francisco non-profit organizations interested in long-term thinking and archiving: the Internet Archive and the Long Now Foundation. This chapter proposes to discuss two different ways of archiving through time, in digital and analog formats, for virtual web contents and physical paper-based ones. It explores various types of archiving methods and tools and the management challenges they raise, in terms of time and space, but also innovation, maintenance, and ''continuity''. It depicts two distinct visions of the future of archiving which nonetheless converge in their mission of safeguarding, sharing, and giving access to information and knowledge for the decades and centuries to come.