Digital preservation
Digital preservation is about protecting digital information to ensure it’s available for a long time into the future. Libraries and archives have old manuscripts and papers from centuries ago; digital preservation is about trying to give digital media a similar lifespan.
I’ve always been a digital packrat, saving fanfiction as a teenager when it became clear I couldn’t rely on my favourite websites to stay up.
I formalised those ideas when I went to work for Wellcome Collection and the Flickr Foundation, where I helped to build services to store digital collections.
Sub-topics:
Meeting my younger self
I reviewed 150,000 fragments of my online life, and I was reminded of the friends I found, the mistakes I made, and the growth I gained.
Hard problems in social media archiving
Preserving social media is easier said than done. What makes it so difficult for institutions to back up the Internet?
The Internet forgets, but I don’t want to
I don’t trust platforms to preserve my memories, so I built my own scrapbook of social media.
What I learnt about making websites by reading two thousand web pages
How to write thoughtful HTML, new-to-me features of CSS, and some quirks and relics I found while building my personal web archive.
Building a personal archive of the web, the slow way
How I built a web archive by hand, the tradeoffs between manual and automated archiving, and what I learnt about preserving the web.
What I’ve Learned by Building to Last
There are patterns in what lasts; people skills matter more than technical skills; long-lasting systems cannot grow forever.