How will we preserve our digital world?

A Dallas-area library adjusts

An endless sea of beige shelves glows an artificial orange beneath a windowless basement’s overhead lights. These rows of documents tower over librarian Joan Gosnell as she thumbs through a box of archives.

“You can see Jane McCollum’s papers – I don’t really know who she was,” Gosnell says. “Here’s Sally Childs, she was a teacher who worked with people in reading and language, teaching, I think. And then if you look here – Horton Foote was a writer and a couple of his books were made into movies.”

A quick google search will show that Gosnell is right – Sally Childs worked in language and reading, with dyslexic children, in the mid 20th century. Horton Foote was a playwright, and he adapted the novel “To Kill a Mockingbird” for its 1962 film. Jane McCollum and her papers, though, don’t seem to pop up online. Whoever she was, whatever she did, that information isn’t available through modern, conventional means. The same can be said for the private papers of Foote and Childs, which Gosnell now thumbs through gently.

            This is the real value of Southern Methodist University’s DeGolyer Library: little bits of history that can’t be found anywhere else. The library’s collections are eclectic, including everything from an original copy of an order to print the Texas

declaration of independence to a letter written by Christopher Columbus.  These artifacts are regularly featured in newspaper stories from around the world – like in this Times of Israel piece on the Sassoon dynasty.

But the nature of information is changing; things are going digital, and the campus’s students don’t seem to care much for old pieces of paper. Just outside DeGolyer, on a sea of green known as Dallas Hall Lawn, a pair of students are basking in the warm February sun. Sophomore Dennis Murphy says he’s never heard of the DeGolyer Library.

“Yeah, you have. You study there all the time. It’s the third floor of [Fondren],” his friend, sophomore Colin Wartenberg says.

“Oh, yeah. I didn’t know the name,” Murphy says. “I just go up there to study.”

As diaries give way to online calendars, letters to e-mail, and contracts to DocuSign, DeGolyer’s service becomes simultaneously obsolete and infinitely more important. There are no more physical documents of history to be preserved and found in the attic, but somebody needs to keep archiving these slices of life. 

“We’re always interested in preserving the material of enduring permanent value,” Gosnell says. “But that material has changed. A lot more is digital now.”

That verbiage – “material of enduring permanent value” – is what it means to be “archivable.” Deciding whether something fits this description is a big part of Gosnell’s job.

“Some people's diaries are just the temperature each day,” she says. “That may not be real interesting to people. But then again, it might be interesting to a climatologist.”

It’s difficult to know what documents from our current world might be valuable to researchers of the next generation. DeGolyer’s specialties include Western Americana and business and transportation history, but the library’s collection proves too eclectic to be so cleanly categorized.

“To stay alive, a special collection has to continue to grow and change and evolve,” Gosnell says. “Western Americana can be described very broadly. The SMU archives, for example, can be considered Western Americana because we're a Western School.”

The SMU archives are one collection within DeGolyer, which document the history of the school itself. Dorothy Amann, who became SMU’s first librarian in 1915, started the collection just a few years after the school opened. Like most of DeGolyer’s collections, it includes a wide variety of artifacts – coffee mugs, letters, recordings, photographs – and once-physical press releases.

“And now they’re all electronic,” Gosnell says.

So, in 2018, DeGolyer began collecting and preserving those electronic releases. And they quickly found that the task of preserving digital information is not so similar to that of archiving physical artifacts.

“And that [project] is not me. That is another part of the libraries,” Gosnell says.  

On the other side of the Fondren Library complex, James Williamson is sitting behind a curved computer monitor as wide as some people are tall. He’s holding a medium-large cardboard box with a piece of hardware and the letters “jaz” printed across the front of it.

“I bought this off e-bay, it’s a Jaz drive reader,” Williamson says. “You probably have never heard of it.”

Williamson’s department specializes in this sort of thing. “Unique formats,” as he calls them, are those rare artifacts of our technological history, once state-of-the-art storage devices. This one, the Jaz drive, can hold up to two gigabytes of information. It was sold from 1995 to 2002.

“Anytime someone like Joan gets a collection or wants to go out and collect something that they know has digital material in it, we coordinate with them to deal with the various aspects of how to handle that digital material,” Williamson says.  

Often, one of those aspects is simply reading the content. SD cards, flash-drives, DVDs, hard drives, floppy disks, jaz drives, and so many more have conquered the world’s storage needs only to vanish as quickly as they came, taking with them petabytes of potentially valuable information. Simply tracking down the equipment necessary to access that information is the first step to preserving it.

Once Williamson and his department, the Norwick Center for Digital Solutions, can access the information, the real meat of their work begins: organizing and preserving it, including the original file in which it is stored. Every computer file has metadata, which contains information like when it was created, how it was created, and how it has since been changed.

“[Metadata] is the understanding of the file itself,” Williamson says. “Because when it was created might have some context for what the researcher is looking for.”

So, keeping information in their original files is an important piece of digital preservation. Another important step is organizing that information – because the files that come into Williamson’s office are often named like all digital files, arbitrarily and unhelpfully, Williamson and his department must figure out what each file contains and how it should be cataloged.

“Not a lot of people organize their digital material fairly well,” Williamson says. “Even me, and it’s my job.”

            Williamson’s daily duties look a lot different from Gosnell’s – whole basements of artifacts replaced by a computer and server connection. The smell, touch, and discolor of old pages replaced by a monitor display. But they’re both archiving; our systems of preservation are catching up to our systems of information.