Digital Archivists: Protecting Public Data from Erasure

No it isn't. It's merely a cause du jour for data hoarders to justify their hobby in light of this Chicken Little hysteria.

30 years ago it was thought collecting every issue of magazines like TV Guide was important. No one even knows what that is anymore.

No one is ever going to look at 99% of this data. In the meantime, send more hard drives for my NAS!!

It might be of some interest to cultural historians in the future. But I think it makes more sense to take sample+curated data. But in any case if we can afford it, eh why not.

I think the data being discussed is quite a bit different than old TV Guides...

My wife takes thousands of photos every year, when my daughter was young she took even more.

When we were moving out of our apartment there was damage to a door hinge that we never noticed when we moved in but that had definitely been there from the onset of our two years of living in that apartment.

Guess what? I had a photo from the day after we moved in of that door hinge in a state of damage! Not because we took the photo for that intention, but because my daughter was playing in the hallway and my wife snapped a photo and it just happened to capture the damage. Saved me several hundreds of dollars in repair costs from my landlord.

You are right, 99% of the data will never be looked at. But do you know what the 1% is today? I'm guessing you don't.

We don't know now what to curate for the future. We should preserve as much of everything we can - we don't know what will be important in 50, or 500 years.

Case in point: retrocomputing is my hobby. I buy, restore, preserve, and use old computers. Most of them are home computers, because business computers go directly from the office to the recycling facility or the landfill. Unless someone deliberately preserved, say, a Burroughs B-25 desktop, or the similar from Data General, they are gone.

Your example of personal family photos is in no way comparable to storing terabytes of essentially unindexed data for which one has no detailed knowledge about, under the notion that the government is somehow lighting a match to everything, and they're going to save it.

The government doesn't delete anything. It might be moved or inaccessible to the public but that data is somewhere in perpetuity.

It's one of the most deranged larps I've ever seen, then they pat each other on the back on BlueSky, desperately wanting to be a part of something.

These people envision themselves as folk heroes when what they really need to do is go outside and touch grass.

My son is into retrocomputing, mostly using older hardware I have from when I was younger, and we have a stack of old compaq desktops where you can't access the bios because it requires a specific floppy that is nearly impossible to find online. This is 486/pentium era stuff, the older stuff is even harder to find.

If it's inaccessible to the public, it might as well be deleted. What's the difference? If you can't get it, you don't have it.

Patently false. https://www.archives.gov/personnel-records-center/fire-1973

Among the deleted data there was the police accountability database. You probably won't have to deal with thugs now feeling omnipotent and immune from prosecution because of this.

https://www.police1.com/federal-law-enforcement/national-law...

I was, believe it if you wish, thinking about old TV guides just this morning and wondering how one would even go about archiving those. Most of the stumbling blocks for taking apart the glued binding for scanning have been figured out, of course, but for any given week there may have been as many as 60 or 70 editions (for each television market, I think). None of these have proper ISSN numbers as far as I'm aware, and other than the listings they can be visually indistinguishable. Then there is the challenge of finding those, and not knowing whether this or that edition is missing (from time to time, the company would create new additions for new regions, or fold old ones back into some other are) along with even parsing the content. Many of these tv shows aren't on themoviedb or thetvdb, and if the shows are, then there won't be episode listings (there were 6000 Donahue talk show episodes, after all). On top of all of that, you can't necessarily know what was on tv at a given time and day, with federal government preemptions, commercials, unreported last-minute rescheduling, etc.

But I can also see why people might want to keep more interesting data, like when the Federal Cheese-Sniffing Agency moved offices back in 1982 and they have meticulous records of the 483 filing cabinets that had to be moved from the original location to their new home in Furrytown, Pennsylvania.

I wonder if those would be useful in identifying the potential contents of specific Marion Stokes tapes (my understanding is that they're sorted, but are only labeled with channel and date/time and are being archived slowly): https://libwww.freelibrary.org/blog/post/5393

I’ve had the idea of recreating tv channels on my plex server by using tv guide data from the late 90s early 00s

The insurmountable part of that project would be getting the guide data.

You don’t know what other people will want in the future

That's a great idea.

There's are sites that stream old content with a old tube tv UI wrapped around the video frame but they don't have all the commercials and they don't follow the old schedules like you suggest.

I've got a friend who has hoarded digitized copies of VHS recordings of old cartoons from that era complete with the commercials, so the content is definitely out there.

> The government doesn't delete anything. It might be moved or inaccessible to the public but that data is somewhere in perpetuity.

If the government is democratic and values integrity? Sure.

Otherwise I wouldn't bet on it. My own country's history books and my parents' own life stories have already warned me about how fickle democracy is. No democratic country is free from that fact. Some think "checks and balances" ought to be enough to prevent it, but I wouldn't be so sure.

Typo that I can't correct anymore: that would be "won't want to deal".

I've been looking for a DEC terminal with Sixel, Tektronix and ReGIS graphics for a while, with zero success. They weren't rare at all - they were a massive success, and, yet, it seems almost all ended up in a recycling facility or an e-waste dumpster. Many other terminals emulated them and expanded on their feature set.