Repository Rant -- Digital Scavenging

Presentation at Open Repositories 2014, Helsinki, Finland, June 9-13, 2014

General Track, "Repository Rants" 24x7 Presentations

The session was recorded and is <a href="https://connectpro.helsinki.fi/p9gn9h0dn49/">available for watching</a> (this presentation starts at 0:22:48).

We’ve accomplished both a lot and a little. We’re building new platforms using agile software development, separating out the CRUD successfully with an eye to persistence and long term preservation, supporting sophisticated computing environments with multiple VMs and load balancing, and moving from simple formats with a 1:1 ratio of file to intellectual object, to complex multi-part formats. We are exploring digital forensics. But our users may still not know or care who we are. We still have a ‘build it and they will come’ cultural attitude. We need to do more than build the platforms and acquire content piece by piece. I suggest that we need to become anthropologists and archaeologists of the future – ravenously, even stealthily, scavenging our digital environments for what we can squirrel away, perhaps hidden, for our future colleagues to find. I will talk/brainstorm/rant (briefly) about ways we might consider capturing entire systems as objects in our repositories, hoping that our future colleagues will be able to unfold them like origami, able to explore whole past worlds.