Posted on January 19, 2011
This is the first blog concerning the emergence of the digital heritage in South Africa, and I will outline what this is, what we can do about it, and how the world is changing in terms of how traditional heritage disciplines are converging onto a single digital heritage.
This year, 2011, will be reflected in history as the year in which the true digital revolution began. The reason is that the first generation of tablet computers have become widely available and have opened the door for access to information in ways that were never possible before. One device I have purchased is the Samsung Galaxy Tab which has a 7in screen, smaller than the iPad, but manageable for carrying around with ease. This is a mobile phone, web browser, email application, camera, audio player, video player and the basis for hundreds of thousands of applications for everything you will need - all rolled into one neat little unit. The world will never be the same.
Let me introduce myself. This year begins my 42nd year in the ICT industry, and I have always been a technogeek, always keeping up with the latest tools, trends and techniques, but also being careful to select those that I believe will have a long-term future, rather than a short term, flavor-of-the-month. When I started we used punched cards and paper tape for storage, and had to wait one day between running our programs. Today I can write a software application, publish it to the entire world, and start to get income from this within a few hours. My focus is on improving utilization of modern technologies for the benefit of user communities, rather than simply chasing technology for technology's sake.
We are moving faster than we can cope with into a new digital world, in which information is accessible everywhere. We have recently peaked in the mobile revolution, with around 90% of the world's population having access to a mobile phone, up from less than 10% only 10 years ago, and now the real information revolution begins with these new tablet computers. It is my prediction that these tablets will replace mobile phones and laptops for the general population and will be the technology that enables the Information Society. These tablets are larger and hence more usable than mobile phones and yet they have power of the larger laptops sufficient for most user requirements. Laptops and desktop computers will fade into history and will become specialist tools for specified applications, for superusers and for software developers, but for the majority of the population of this planet, who simply want access to information in all of its forms, and who want to communicate with each other, the tablet is perfect.
At one level the tablet computers are just another technology, but the difference that they make is in redefining our modes of access to information. This is important, since when we need to asses information capability of the nation we need to explore this along four key dimensions of access, content, capacity and disposition.
Of these four dimension, our primary concern in the digital heritage is primarily on 'content', in which our existing content is largely stuck within traditional paper archives, libraries, within museums, and in the minds and memories of potential oral history sources. We talk about processes of 'digitisation' which will supposedly unlock the potential of our heritage in all of its forms, and many institutions have already commenced small and large-scale projects to digitise their holdings, based upon some justification. Some custodians want to provide access to their collections, and others wish to use digital technologies for protection against loss, as an alternative approach to preservation, under the assumption that digital technologies will outlive their physical origins.
However, history is not on our side in this debate. The world is full of examples of digital media which can no longer be retrieved, and formats which are no longer in usage. And even when old data can be obtained, the meaning of the digital items may not be evident from what has been retrieved. We may be leading to the 'digital dark ages' as was identified by the EU in the Lund Principles in the early 2000s.
As you read this, you may be reading this as a Web Page, written in in the language HTML or XML, or you may be reading this as a PDF document. (You may even have printed this out - I still do this for some pages!) But what guarantee do we have that this blog will be readable in 10 years or 50 years time? To make this possible requires a concerted effort by all concerned, and for this and related purposes the Department of Arts and Culture commissioned the development of a National Digitisation Policy for Heritage during 2009. In early February 2011 this is being debated in a public review and is expected to be finalized soon. My next blog will provide some background to this policy and will also provide some substance on the discourses arising during the public debate and how they will impact on your efforts in digitisation.
We need such a national policy, since the decisions on what is a reliable and trustworthy future for digital heritage is not a decision that can be made by individual institutions if we are to preserve heritage and to create a digital heritage that will be accessible by all as far as we are able to plan into the future. However, a question has been raised as to what degree will our world of the digital heritage be controlled by external institutions rather than allowing us as individual institutions to control what we digitise and how. A balance is needed and the policy is required to strike this fine balance for the long-term common good.
With the digital revolution having arrived, more and more information is being generated, by everyone on the planet. Emails, SMSes, blogs, digital photos and videos, are all able to be produced by anyone with a modest mobile phone, and our future digital heritage is being created today in such volumes that a central future issue will be mining exabytes of information to find trustworthy sources.
It is this concern with trust and authenticity of information which is for me the core issue of the digital heritage. With the ability to copy, modify and distribute digital information, we need to have some way to define the concept of the 'digital original' as the authentic source from which other copies are derived and adapted. The future of information is no longer determined by what we can produce and create using digital technologies but how we create and develop authentic sources and how the existing institutions are required to adapt to meet this need.
These new technologies provide both opportunities and threats, and there is an urgent need to introduce an accelerated capacity development programme among heritage practitioners so that we are not swept away by this digital tsunami but rather position ourselves as leading the way through this new world of information.
{encode="roger@rl.co.za" title="Roger Layton "}is CEO of Roger Layton Associates (RLA), a company which provides specialist services in the field of digital heritage
