Principles of Information SystemsSession 05Recording and Remembering

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Recording and Remembering

Chapter 4

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“Life without memory is life with no connections to your past, present and future and no ties to the events

and people around you”

Susumu Tonegawa

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OverviewLearning objectives

1. Introduction

2. The act of recording

3. Remembering

4. Other aspects of memory

5. Summary

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Learning objectives• Explain why it is essential for ideas or knowledge to

persist through time for individuals and groups• Compare the issues involved in written versus non-

written records for a culture• Choose an appropriate form and medium to record

something in• Outline the principles of electronic records

management• List and describe several types of digital and non-

digital storage media

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Learning objectives• Describe some strategies to ensure digital data is not

lost over time• Describe several ways in which stored information can

become inaccurate over time• List and describe the problems and some strategies

for long term digital preservation• Explain how memory and ideas can persist through

time in a society or an organisation• Explain the role of translators, librarians and archivists

in ensuring that stored memory can be understood in the future

What did you do today?

How will you remember this tomorrow?

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• I tell my friends • I keep a diary…• I have a blog …• I write to do lists in my PDA…• I wrote an essay…• I got a receipt from the ATM …• I take photos with my mobile phone…• I wrote a letter…• I backed up my computer …• …

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Introduction

• We have seen how observations, ideas and discovered data may be communicated and represented between humans

• To ensure this information can be used in the future, or outside its immediate context, it must be recorded in some way

• So what do you record, and how do you store it?

• And how do you make sure it will still be there when you come back for it?

1. Introduction2. The act of recording3. Remembering4. Other aspects of memory5. Summary

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Introduction

• Making a record also reduces the burden on human memory – you don’t have to know everything, just where to find it

-What you store and how you store it determines how readily you can find it again

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Digital information• The vast majority of information now produced is in

digital format, either:-Born digital (such as emails, text messages, digital photos)

-Digitised (such as scanned paper documents, digitised versions of old movies)

• Lots of this is ephemeral – needed only for an immediate purpose

• But what should be kept, what has ongoing value:-To an individual?

-To society as a whole?

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The act of recording

• One of the most basic technologies for recording is writing

-Any visible form of language, including pictograms and hieroglyphics

• Writing makes information potentially available to all members of a culture and across time

1. Introduction2. The act of recording3. Remembering4. Other aspects of memory5. Summary

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When information is communicated verbally, there must be a continuous, living link – often across generations

view

Recording information enables it to be removed from its original context and retrieved later, in a different one

view

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Written and non-written languages

• Written language “can be collected, stored, examined, manipulated and analysed in ways (traditionally) impossible for spoken language”

• In earlier societies trained scribes preserved social remembering and culture using languages available to them

Chafe & Tannen, 1987

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Written and non-written languages• Knowledge that is explicitly not intended for collection

and manipulation may not be written down

-Sacred or secret material or practices may be held only by elders or privileged members of the society

• Some languages may not even have a written form

-A purely spoken language, however, is only one generation away from extinction, and depends on a living link

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Should everything be recorded?• Researchers may try to preserve a spoken language

and the ideas and cultural heritage embedded in its stories it from extinction

• There are risks of writing down stories that are traditionally oral:

-No control over who may read them-Misinterpretation of meaning-Exploitation of the original culture by outsiders

• What do you think – is it worth it

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Recording information

• A recording is never as good as the original-A film of a concert compared with being there-A translation of a poem-The record of your day in your diary compared with living it

• This means that choosing what to record, and how to record it, is an important decision

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Recording information • Choosing a representation for the record to be stored

-Who will use the record, does it have enough information for their purpose, is it in a form they can understand?

• What storage medium?-Paper or digital document; film or digital image; analogue music or digital audio…

• Which digital format?

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Which digital format to choose?• Whether it has the features you need for the particular

purpose-Quality - ‘true colour’ image, or CD-quality audio-Amount of storage required by the format

• Portability-How widely supported the format is by application software

• Whether it is likely to remain available in the future- ‘Official’ standards are guaranteed to persist, though may not be the best quality for the immediate purpose

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Formats and standards• Some formats are developed by official standards

bodies, such as ISO or W3C -JPEG images, PNG images, MPEG video and audio

• Other formats are proprietary, or owned by a software company

-GIF images, TIFF images in scanners

• Some proprietary formats are so widely used and supported that they are known as‘de facto’ standards

-PDF documents, MOV, WMA

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Formats• Sometimes the simplest format is the most likely to

persist

• Project Gutenberg, which aims to record all the world’s great books, is storing them as plain ASCII text

-This is almost guaranteed to be readable in the future, though does not have many features of more sophisticated formats (such as fancy fonts or page layout)

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Recorded information is never as good quality as the original

experience, so it is important to choose the right medium and

format for a digital record

Recap

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Managing electronic documents and records

• Records management (and information management generally) is likely to be a key skill for informatics professionals

-Huge amounts of digital information is being produced as a by-product of normal commercial transactions

-Many government, business or medical organisations require information to be kept for legal purposes

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Managing electronic documents and records involves…• Storing information • Tracking and locate information, finding gaps in a

collection, or missing items• Answering queries about information• Keeping valuable assets secure, accessible only to the

authorised• Deciding what is worth keeping

- trade off between information collection and storage costs, and its value in a future context

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Managing electronic documents and records• Storage• Indexing• Access• Preservation• Security• Governance• Social continuation of knowledge

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Remembering

• Things are recorded so that they can be remembered- By an individual

- By an organisation

- By a government

- By a society

• The record substitutes for an individual’s memory or personal experience

1. Introduction2. The act of recording3. Remembering4. Other aspects of memory5. Summary

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Storage

• Storage is a way of ensuring something persists-Any record will last as long as the medium it is stored on (digital or non-digital) lasts

• A storage strategy involves:-Choice of storage medium-Storage strategy – what to back up, and how frequently

-Replication – multiple copies are usually made

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Backing up a movie collection over several disks

3 movies, 4 disks

Backing up a movie collection over several disks

If this disk is lost we can still

recover Movie 1 from the other

disks

Backing up a movie collection over several disks

If this disk is lost we can still

recover Movie 2 from the other

disk

Backing up a movie collection over several disks

If this disk is lost we can still

recover Movie 2 from the other

disk

Backing up a movie collection over several disks

If this disk is lost we can still

recover Movie 3 from the other

disks

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“Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe”

• LOCKSS is a strategy for making sure a library can continue to maintain its digital collection of article through time

• Individual libraries in the LOCKSS collective don’t have to keep backups of all their collections, because the entire collection is constantly circulating among all members

• Peer-to-peer checking between documents makes sure there is always a correct copy in circulation

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Storage media• Magnetic media

-Hard disks, floppy disks, external drives

• Optical media-CD-ROM (CD-RW, CD-R)

• Flash memory-USB sticks, memory sticks

• Storage Area Networks-Link different types of storage together over a high speed network

• Online storage-Photos, videos etc stored on remote website

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“Archives are the documents accumulated by a natural process in the course of the conduct of affairs of any kind, public or private, at any date, and preserved thereafter for reference, in their own custody, by the persons responsible of the affairs in question of their successors” Sir Hilary Jenkinson

written documents

mapsnewspapers

photos

sound recordings

personal collections

filmsdances

buildings

carvingsoral records

artistic works

cave paintings

CDs

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Archiving

• Archives provide a record of all types of documents relevant to cultural memory

-The counterpart to this is memoricide, where museums and cultural archives are deliberately destroyed under ‘ethnic cleansing’ regimes

• Archives are physically housed in dedicated institutions-This involves expertise in security, climate control, space usage, etc

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Digital asset management

• Increasingly, the documents that are stored as records or archives are digital (either born digital, or digitised)

• Similar issues apply to categorising, labelling, searching, etc

• But long term preservation of digital artefacts brings its own issues and challenges

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Records management is a key skill for informatics professionals.

It involves issues of storage, indexing, access, preservation, security,

governance, and the social continuation of knowledge.

Recap

What software do you currently have on your computer?

What are your backups stored on?

What would your answer have been this time last year?

What would it have been 5 years ago?

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“Digital documents last forever or five years, whichever is sooner”

Jeff Rothenberg

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Preservation and digital preservation

• Preservation is an aspect of archiving that ensures what is stored survives in good condition

• Digital preservation is doing this for digital or digitised artefacts

Digital preservation: A process by which digital data is preserved in digital form in order to ensure the usability, durability and intellectual

integrity of the information contained therein

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Digital preservation• The definition emphasises the preservation of the

information contained in the digital artefact, rather than the artefact itself

• This means that the strategies for preserving digital objects are different from those traditionally used to preserve physical objects

• A book may decay, but the words in it are preserved in digital form

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Digital longevity

Howard Besser identified 5 classic problems:

• The viewing problem- We cannot see what is on a disk or file without the relevant software

• The scrambling problem- Many files are encrypted or compressed, and the schemes for de-crypting may become lost

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Digital longevity

• The translation problem- Changing the form of a digital artefact may change its meaning

• The inter-relation problem- Many digital artefacts such as websites have many component parts – where is the ‘boundary’ of the object?

• The custodial problem- Who is responsible for preserving digital information?

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Digital longevity• The problem of authenticity is also significant –

especially for ‘born digital’ artefacts

- How do we know that a digital artefact has not been modified (intentionally or otherwise) since it was created?

- This is a growing problem in legal informatics, where digital documents may be required as evidence

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Strategies for digital preservation

?• Replication

- Simply copying the artefact on to different media, or more up to date media

- Avoids the problem of media rot but not format obsolescence

• Migration- Moving to a different format and/or updating the media on which the artefact is stored

- Standard archival formats are used to counter obsolescence

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Strategies for digital preservation

• Emulation- Preserving the original ‘look and feel’ of the artefact through emulating the hardware and software platform of the original in software

-Old arcade games

• Encapsulation- Storing the artefact together with metadata and other information required to run it

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Version control

• As soon as a digital document is revised and saved elsewhere you have two versions – so need some form of version control

• This involves - A consistent naming convention to identify different copies- Controlling who has access to the various copies, and how they can modify them

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Preserving the Internet• There is a huge amount of digital content on the Internet

which is added to constantly and which disappears again almost as fast

• But nobody owns the Internet, so nobody is directly responsible for preserving its resources

• Some efforts exist though:- Internet Archive

-International Internet Preservation Consortium

-National libraries, such as PANDORA archive at National Library of Australia

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Internet Archive www.archive.org

• Captures and stores old web pages-Wayback Machine allows viewing of old pages

• Collaborates with institutions such as Library of Congress and Smithsonian to preserve cultural material

• Also houses many digital collections of audio, text and moving images, such as Live Music Archive

• The Archive’s aims are to make its collections available to everyone

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Preserving your own stuff

• How do you keep your own digital stuff?- CD, Disk drives …

• Many websites retain copies of your photos, videos or writings indefinitely

- Flickr

- Youtube

- Internet Archive

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Data archiving standards and metadata• To be able to access stored data, it must be stored in a

way that enables it to be retrieved

• Metadata is information describing a resource (such as photo or text) which helps indicate the categories it can fit into

• Using a standard scheme can help ensure resources can be catalogued and searched as part of a wider resource

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Some cataloguing schemes

• Dublin Core Element Set-A core set of metadata elements used mostly for describing web pages

• LCSH – Library of Congress Subject Headings-A set of keywords used to describe subject

• AACR, AACR2 – Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules-Cataloguing rules and keywords for libraries

• RDA – Resource Description and Access-Revised AACR2 for digital content

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Finding stuff on the Web

• Web resources are identified by address or URL - But problem is that URLs can disappear or their contents change

• Addressing schemes for persistent identifiers:- PURL (Persistent URL)

- DOI (Digital Object Identifier)

- ARK (Archival Resources Key)

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Semantic Web

• The idea of the Semantic Web is that instead of humans needing to process the ‘meaning’ of web pages, the computer will be able to

• All documents on the web would be marked up according to standards for data description and association

- Resource Description Framework- Dublin Core Metadata Element Set- URL- XML

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Long term preservation of digital records is a significant issue.

There are various strategies for digital preservation, and international collaboration

and standards will be important.

Recap

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Persistence

• The preservation of records and digital artefacts is at one remove from our experience

- If the context of author and reader are aligned, the record may be understood as intended

• But nothing can be exactly the same

• What changes, and what persists?

1. Introduction2. The act of recording3. Remembering4. Other aspects of memory5. Summary

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Persistence

• Ensuring that something persists is a common concern for everyday life

- Objects or entities

- Ability to do things

- Social concepts

• What allows us to do this is memory• Matching memory against the present is what is

interpreted in your mind as continuity and familiarity

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Types of human memory - declarative

• Semantic memory – for facts- ‘Paris is the capital of France’

• Episodic memory – for events you have personally experienced

- ‘Last year I went on holiday to Paris’

• Semantic and episodic memory together contribute to declarative knowledge– Enables you to make statements about things

that you know and which have happened

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Types of human memory – procedural • Procedural memory – for how to do things

- How to pack a suitcase

- How to brush your teeth

- How to ride a bicycle

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• Describe how you fold your arms

• Is your left arm over your right, or your right arm over your left?

• You remember the procedural knowledge (you know how to do it) but can’t necessarily describe how to do it (declarative knowledge)

step

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Types of memory in informatics

• Informatics uses concepts of both declarative and procedural knowledge in designing artificial memories

- Reasoning with facts and rules

Jim bought nappies and beer

Jack bought nappies and beer

all men who buy nappies also buy beer

- Stored procedures for calculation

=SUM (A5:A10)

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Social memory

• Social memories transcend individuals and are built into way a society identifies and conducts itself

- National holidays

- Traditional stories, songs and art

- Telling jokes about the neighbouring region

• These traditions can persist even if individuals die or written records are lost

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Organisational memory

• Records of data and general procedures are maintained for an organisation

• There is also often a legal requirement to store records for some period of time

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Decay and obsolescence

• Physical media may degrade-Data stored on them may be lost

• Later versions of applications supersede earlier

• Information may become obsolete-Although the information itself is still there, meaning can be lost-A living system of meaning is required if knowledge is to last

• Remembering and doing may be essential to preserve meaning – not just the written record

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Social memory and culture• Entropy is the tendency of everything towards a state of

disorder, negative entropy or order acts against this• Human knowledge generally consists in stabilising some

order of things that are agreed as meaningful over some length of time

• An order that outlasts the lifetime of an individual, that enters social memory and tradition, is the stuff of cultural heritage and the social identity of a people

-Preserving such order is the function of institutions such as libraries, museums and galleries

-Theatre, colleges, art, religions explore and reinterpret themes of social value

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Which ideas will endure?

• At any time in a culture, there are themes that are ephemeral and others that turn out to be enduring

• Words that change their meaning over time are especially treacherous in preserving understanding

-Gay, wicked, bad …

• As language changes, information expressed in language is unreliable if you don’t take into account the times in which it was written

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Which ideas will endure?

• The work of translators, editors, librarians and archivists is crucial in ensuring ideas and concepts persist over time

- Must be able to distinguish concepts from the words that convey them

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Persistence of memory is what gives us our concept of reality.

The persistence of ideas and knowledge through time is essential for the

continuity of social and cultural identity.

Recap

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Summary• Written records allow data to be removed from its

original context and used in others• Records management is a significant issue for

informatics• Recorded information is never as good quality as the

original experience, so the choice of medium and format is important

• Formats and applications can become obsolete, and storage media can decay

• Active strategies are needed to preserve digital information in the long term

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Summary

• Information can become inaccurate through going out of date

• The persistence of ideas and knowledge through groups and society is essential for the continuity of social and cultural identity

• Language changes through time, so being able to distinguish concepts from the words that convey them is essential

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