Lischer-Katz, Z. (2020). Archiving experience: An exploration of the challenges of preserving virtual reality. Records Management Journal, 30(2), 253–274. https://doi.org/10.1108/RMJ-09-2019-0054
Virtual reality (VR) technologies are complex configurations of computer hardware, software and file formats
In the context of digital materials, and all materials, given a long-enough time scale, preservation is an ongoing process, rather than a singular event that ensures eternal access to information.
alternative perspectives, e.g. phenomenology and media materiality, are necessary for
addressing the archival challenges of VR.
the institution announced it will no longer archive every one of our status updates, opinion threads, and “big if true“s. As of Jan. 1, the library will only acquire tweets “on a very selective basis.”
The library doesn’t say how many tweets it has in its collection now, but in 2013, it said it had already amassed 170 billion tweets, at a rate of half a billion tweets a day.
Tweets can now be longer, too: This fall, Twitter rolled out 280-character tweets to most users across the platform.
Another issue: Twitter only gives the library the text of tweets – not images, videos, or linked content. “Tweets now are often more visual than textual, limiting the value of text-only collecting,” the library says.
The library also has to figure out how to effectively manage deleted tweets, whicharen’t part of the archive.
Videotapes Are Becoming Unwatchable As Archivists Work To Save Them
Scott Greenstone
Kidd and the others are archivists and preservationists, and they’re part of a group called XFR Collective (pronounced Transfer Collective). Most work professionally, but they volunteer their free time to do this.
That’s because research suggests that tapes like this aren’t going to live beyond 15 to 20 years. Some call this the “magnetic media crisis,” and archivists, preservationists, and librarians like the ones in the XFR Collective are trying to reverse it.
Some are old videos of police brutality; others are just weddings or old public access TV that isn’t saved anywhere else. All tapes are from people who want their content to be publicly available, and after the tapes are transferred, they’re stored on the nonprofit Internet Archive. To date, they’ve transferred 155 tapes—67 hours in total.
Of course, this doesn’t guarantee that they will be saved forever. Digital has its own problems, and Lukk says that some film preservationists argue we should be looking back to before magnetic media for stable preservation — many Hollywood films, for instance, are often stored on film in salt mines, where they can last 100 years.