As the semester draws to a close, Roy Rosenzweig’s extensive article, “Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era“, brings us almost full circle to the first few weeks of class, when we discussed the positives, perils, and new frontiers created by the digital world in which we live.

One of Rosenzweig’s main points involves constructively criticizing historians’ lack of involvement in debates and proposals for new methods of preserving digital material. He then provides reasons as to why their involvement has been limited and why the need for their input to increase is so gravely important.

Rosenzweig notes that historians are prone to relegating questions about digital preservation to archivists and computer scientists, but that

While these technical difficulties are immense, the social, economic, legal, and organizational problems are worse. Digital documents–precisely because they are in a new medium–have disrupted long-evolved systems of trust and authenticity, ownership, and preservation. Reestablishing those systems or inventing new ones is more difficult than coming up with a long-lived storage mechanism.

While I am not sure that I agree that these concepts are more difficult than discovering a solution to digital preservation problems, I think they are also of pressing importance–the blurred lines of copyright provide a pertinent example, as well as questions about determining the legitimacy of digital documents.  Not only are these issues relevant; the prevalence of digitized historical media is causing historians to re-evaluate their practice of the discipline. Who is the new, expanded audience? Should the nature of historical journals–and the types of articles included in them–change? Perhaps most importantly: “Will abundance bring better or more thoughtful history?” Rosenzweig continues:

Surely, the injunction of traditional historians to look at “everything” cannot survive in a digital era in which “everything” has survived. The historical narratives that future historians write may not actually look much different from those that are crafted today, but the methodologies they use may need to change radically. Historians have time to think about changing their methods to meet the challenge of a cornucopia of historical sources. But they need to act more immediately on preserving the digital present or that reconsideration will be moot; they will be struggling with a scarcity, not an overabundance, of sources.

This scarcity might stem from a variety of issues, as Rosenzweig posits: corruption of digital material, the inability to recover obsolete digital material, confusion over what should be preserved (i.e.–which e-mails should be saved?), and the quest to find the perfect, all-encompassing preservation system instead of focusing efforts in the present. He notes, “We have never preserved everything; we need to start preserving something.”

While historians may not be particularly involved in the technical aspects of the creation of preservation systems, Rosenzweig believes that they have the responsibility to make sure those projects continue. Though seeking the intervention of the national government is not always enough, as many of these questions transcend national boundaries,”advocates of digital preservation” should still try

…To mobilize state funding and state power (such as the assertion of eminent domain over copyright materials) but infuse it with the experimental and ad hoc spirit of the Internet Archive. They should also argue forcefully for the democratized access to the historical record that digital media make possible. And they must add their voices to those calling for expanding copyright deposit–and opposing copyright extension, for that matter–of digital materials so as to remove some of the legal clouds hanging over efforts like the Internet Archive and to halt the ongoing privatization of historical resources. Even in the absence of state action, historians should take steps individually and within their professional organizations to embrace the culture of abundance made possible by digital media and expand the public space of scholarship–for example, making their own work available for free on the web, cross-referencing other digital scholarship, and perhaps depositing their sources online for other scholars to use. A vigorous public domain today is a prerequisite for a healthy historical record.

Rosenzweig noted in this 2003 article that not enough had been written by historians about this topic; nine years later, the need for history students such as ourselves to address these issues is more pressing than ever. Today’s digital landscape has certainly influenced the way we practice and study history–it will be up to our generation to protect the past and preserve the present for the future.