appreciation for the risks to
our data posed by “solutions” to
other problems (such as DRM),
and understand that data preservation is becoming a struggle
with active adversaries—
malware authors, political partisans, and scammers conducting
phishing attacks. Commercial
organizations have a mixed
record as long-term custodians
of personal artifacts and of cultural works.
So in the light of all this, what
are some approaches designers and other stakeholders may
be interested in exploring?
After all, service, application,
and interface designers will
be the ones implementing the
experience now, and thus have
a direct impact on the future
of our personal and collective
digital memories. And who are
the stakeholders whom we need
to be talking to and designing
with, for, and around?
Here are our top five clusters
of points and questions on this
emerging area. These are overlapping, and there are more, so
consider these a seed list.
1. Guide users between
backups, archives, and collections. Good design for archival
services can help users make
decisions based on anticipated
future uses and perceived risks.
For starters, it is helpful to
distinguish between archiving
and backup. Apple’s Time
Machine, which is part of Mac
OS X Leopard, is an interesting step in the right direction.
People report learning that
a backup is not the same as an
archive when old (but important) versions of files have been
overwritten by backup software
whose check boxes were clicked
(or not). The options the check-
boxes offered required knowing
the distinction. Perhaps systems
need to ask questions like the
following: “Are you sure you
want to overwrite this file with
all future versions?” Yes, that
means overwrite it. Not store
another version and keep track
of all that you have done with
the file.
Users must choose between
a wide range of file format and
compression options (think of
ZIP, TAR, JPEG, MPEG, PDF…).
Some are proprietary, some may
be unsupported in the future,
and some are “lossy,” meaning
file sizes shrink by reducing
resolution. Purists in the archival community rule out the use
of lossy compression (MP3 or
MPEG 2) altogether when there
are non-lossy options available
(FLAC or JPEG2000). But for personal collections of audio and
video, lossy algorithms may be
the best way to limit storage
costs. Systems that allow users
to preview the difference, or
that explain the implications of
loss, may help.
As professional librarians and
archivists know, you cannot
have archives without cura-tion. At a more personal level,
psychologists view strategic
forgetting as what constructing a (more or less) stable sense
of self is all about. In this case,
a question posed to the user
might be, “Are you sure you
want your kids to see this when
they go through your archives?”
The importance of forgetting should not be lost on us.
However, we need to guide users
through these concepts with
intelligently designed systems
and interfaces if people are not
going to inadvertently lose the
digital materials they want to
keep. Unfortunately, the consequences of bad decisions may
be felt only days, months, years,
and decades later. It is hard to
learn best practices when there
is this lag, so once again designers need to surface the results
of choices and knock-on effects
at the time of action.
2. Be involved in conversations
about the differences between
algorithmic search and human
memory. Over time we may be
able to follow Google’s directive, search don’t sort, because
improvements in search algorithms and applications will
eliminate the need to file
content manually. This search-don’t-sort perspective is also
reflected in David Weinberger’s
book, Everything is Miscellaneous,
in which he explains how the
ordering of our collections
can be reworked on the fly, as
the situation demands. This
argument is most compelling
if metadata is well designed
and standardized. So, for this
approach to work, we should be
active in communities where
forms and standardization of
metadata are discussed. Simply
asserting that people can be less
careful about providing metadata because search is improving is an unacceptably risky
approach for materials that are
worth saving.
A complementary approach is
to leverage our understanding of
the way in which human memory works—by recreating context to facilitate retrieval. This
would entail providing time
frames punctuated by memorable events (salient or regular
events), congruent activities (“I
was working on the Rosebud
project when I took that picture”), and so on. The point is,