History 390

The article “Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era” discusses the idea of what is important to preserve and what is not. As we mentioned in class Twitter is now being archived. I feel that in the future we will likely have so many things archived that it will in a way make historians jobs more difficult because they will have to cipher through that many more records many of which will likely be less relevant and reliable then records of the past. We may also be archiving the wrong things. As the article mentions many government records since the 1980’s have not been being saved and government workers are often confused about whether they should archive things. Although technology is a wonderful tool that has made research easier, more efficient and more accessible to the masses, we as a society have to be careful of over dependence and understand that sometimes it is important to have physical versions of items.

Who hasn’t had music or pictures disappear forever after a computer crashed? The importance of backing up data continues to grow as we continue to depend on digital sources to store these personal items. After doing the assigned reading, I like that the library of congress has an online guide about personal archiving. Although it doesn’t address specific problems that people can run into.

For example I have lost probably around 500 dollars worth of iTunes music. The reason being is that Itunes only allows users to copy songs on up to five computers and from the time that I first made an account (roughly 10 years ago) until now I have had more than 5 computers and so much of the music has been lost. I could have copied the entire library onto CDs but that is a very long and tedious process. Apples strict licensing has caused me to move away from there service and begin to use Spotify a monthly subscription service that for 10 dollars a month gives me access to unlimited music on my phone, computer and tablet both online and offline. Although now I do not “own” the music I do not mind because I have access to such a larger collection and if I were to ever terminate could very quickly and easily gain back whatever I wanted to listen to as soon as the song popped into my head.

~ by kroll on November 17, 2012 .