[Esip-preserve] Four Interesting Articles from New Publications

[Bruce Barkstrom]

There is an interesting juxtaposition of a brand new New Yorker article and
three articles in the new issue of Comm. ACM.  All four of these articles
raise some questions about the philosophy of preserving information.

The New Yorker article reference is

Lerner, B., 2016: The Custodians: How the Whitney is transforming the art
   of museum conservation, TNY, Jan. 11, 2016, pp. 50-59.

While the article is one of the New Yorker's series "Onward and Upward with
the arts", the questions that face art custodians are also ones we face in
trying
to preserve digital information.  The article has a nice quotable comment
on
the issues involved:

"... I find myself thinking of the ship of Theseus, king of Athens.
According
to Plutarch, the ship
  `was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius
   Phalerus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting
   in new and stronger timber in their place, insomuch that this ship
   became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical
   question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained
   the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.'

If it isn't the same ship -- if restoration has crossed into replication --
which
piece of timber was decisive?  And where does the identify of an art work
reside
if it will be fully realized only the future, plank by printed plank?"

Of course what we do with digital objects is to create backups and then
perform
transformational migration to preserve content.  In the advent of
mechanical
breakdown or system obsolescence, we replace the unreadable current copy
with
a new one that should be the same, or at least have the same content.  This
seems
to me to replace wood rot with bit rot, but the philosophical issue remains
the
same.

As an observation, I'm not sure that our assumption of "persistent objects"
on the Web holds up under detailed observation.  To build a completely
persistent
object, it is necessary to assume a continual flow of future funding (and
trained
personnel).  Given the finite lifetime of organizations and of their
organizational
focus on certain goals, it seems unlikely that objects will persist unless
there's
some way of emphasizing the need for preservation.  Even if we succeed in
this task,
we'll still be faced with the issue raised concisely in the quotation from
the New
Yorker.

To add to the pleasantries, there are three articles in the January, 2016
issue
of Comm. ACM:

Greengard, S., 2016: Better Memory: Advances in non-volatile memory are
changing
   the face of computing and ushering in a new era of efficiencies, CACM,
59, No. 1,
   pp. 20-22.

Nanavati, M., Schwarzkopf, M., Wires, J., and Warfield, A., 2016:
Non-Volatile
   Storage: Implications of the datacenter's shifting center, CACM, 59, No.
1,
   pp. 56-63.

Helland, P., 2016: Immutability Changes Everything: We need it, we can
afford it,
   and the time is now, CACM, 59, No. 1, pp. 64-70.

All three suggest that in the near future, computing may not work the way
we're
used to it working.  An e-mail site that I look at fairly frequently opened
a
thread entitled "Everything You Know is Wrong".  The gist of the changes
that
the first two CACM articles mention is that it may be cheaper to just keep
old
digital objects in their original format and pull them out as needed
rather
than trying to keep updating them.  (I suppose that's equivalent to
treating
the old timbers in the ship with a dose of formaldehyde and then pouring a
coating
of acrylic plastic or glass over what remains.)  The third article has some
interesting
comments on how these approaches might change database software.

I'll also note that while we're used to using cryptographic digests that
rely on
using the individual bits to produce a digest, I don't know that we've had
much
discussion of the use of block cyphers to retain digital content.  That
would
fit with the use of block ciphers (and their relatives).

Hope these articles provide some interesting thoughts for the new year.

Bruce B.
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