How do we save the digital pieces of our history that we are creating in ever increasing size and scope?

Before I discuss the nuts and bolts of my paper, I want to share the following with you...

As an archivist I am not terribly interested in the tech geek-y things that one can do with .xml, dtds, or any of the other TLA* (three letter acronym)-type things that coders and tech people can geek out about for hours. My interest lies primarily how these tools can help us to ensure that, generations from now, interested parties can look at really cool websites, videos and archived episodes of This American Life.

Personally I would also like to be able to save my own old websites and digital creations. Although my initial attempts at web design from the mid 1990s could stay out of the public view, if that's ok.

But I managed a team of 20 people over the course of a year to create this project: Passport to the World.

I know that Prentice Hall, the company that I was working for at the time does not care about this project, it is old, kludg-y and it doesn't generate any revenue. But I would miss it if it was gone. So, how does something like this get saved?

For example, take a listen to this:

How cool is it to hear stories like that, be able to see a picture of the person telling the story, and know when this happened?

Obviously I believe in paper originals like Da Vinci's notebook.(see page 22/23) or the papers of Benjamin Franklin. But in reviewing the landscape of archival best practices, I see that paper preservation is pretty well in-hand.

On the other hand, digital artifacts are in real trouble...

A big question of mine is: with the amount of content that we create today, is everything worth the effort of preservation? I don't know how to make that call.

But even with all the crap, are so many important collections out there, born digital collections, like the ones I've been showing here, that give a real picture of what our lives were like in the 20th, and early 21st centuries.

This one that I recently found is an archive of videos documenting the stories of holocaust survivors, this is a digital archive called: Survivors of the Shoah.
These things tell the stories of us. Stories that won't be around in in 20 years, much less the 500 plus years that Da Vinci's work has been around, if we don't work for standards in digital preservation.

When I think of all of the difficulties of preserving digital artifacts: hardware obsolescence, proprietary software, metadata standards I think about Yiddish Literature:

More then half of the worlds Yiddish speakers perished in the holocaust.
The survivors were flung to the four corners of the earth, some preserving their treasured books, but most not.
Eventually the only people who spoke Yiddish in the United States and Israel were some Professors and the Chasidim.

Yiddish was almost dead except for the occasional ‘Oy Vey’ or ‘Mazl Tov’ uttered for a laugh at Hollywood parties.
So, what happened? Well like ‘kabbalism’ (a fancy Hollywood way of saying: Judaism), Yiddish started becoming hip. THEN, Steven Spielberg donated a whole lot of money and...
Yiddish went from almost dead to the first fully digitized literature in the world!

So, I guess it’s all a matter of perspective. Are there problems and difficulties with digital preservation? Yes.

Can it also be our salvation? Yes.