Short View at the Long Now

The Long Now Foundation was established in June 01996 to foster long-term responsibility. It will support conferences, such as the recent "Time & Bits" conference, and other projects such as the 10,000 year clock and library. In an initial concept the "long now" planning period of multiple millennia is contrasted with "nowadays" extending from the last, to the present, to the next decade and "now" extending from yesterday, to today, to tomorrow.

An early issue that emerged from a long now perspective is the transience of digital information. Many features of this new data gathering medium impose a transience on the recorded information. Since this reading and communication mode appears destine to project itself into the future and impact the continuity of intellectual and cultural property, founding members of the Foundation have focused on the domain of digital patrimony. This initiative is admirable and certainly converges with objectives of library and archives preservation.

This Long Now initiative into digital archiving further benefits the preservation field by introducing a different constituency of interest and expertise into the discussion. The founding members of the Foundation, influential scientific and creative personalities, are providing the preservation field with an outside perspective on the preservation mission.

Beginning this exchange, starting only with early discussion and background materials, Peter Graham (posting to timeandbits@www.ahip.pub.getty.edu) has responded with his comments on the (1.) risk of the holistic approach, (2.) the risk of overdependence on market rhetoric and (3.) the need for attention to integrity, or authenticity. This posting is an excellent contribution from the library field to this forum.

Following from this posting a few other early considerations of the Long Now stance also come to mind. Surprisingly, from a preservation perspective, the Long Now Foundation has features of short-term planning. The features of short term planning are apparent in the Foundation's confine of the library and archival functions, a narrow focus on a mono-medium future and a possible confusion of cultural patrimony with intellectual property, or patrimony established by an evaluation of its creators. Here are some counterpoint comments that may indicate short-term perspectives of the Long Now Foundation.

(1.) The 10,000 year planning period of the Foundation is too short!

The reason that we have been dependent on physical media to convey conceptual works is embedded in the fossil record. Throughout the hominid series the hands prompted the mind...not visa/versa...as primate dexterity imposed this avenue of investigation, control and inquiry of the world. If we are now ready to abandon this paradigm of reading hand held objects...we should at least, recognize our heritage and wonder if it will remerge as an ingredient in the future.

(2.) The projections are too linear and could discount cycles and feed-back effects.

The library of late Antiquity at Alexandria could have been imaged and distributed digitally except for the lack of a technology that we now know can be created quickly. The Mediterranean basin of the period already had an installed base for networked communication.

The relevant point here is that the library media of late Antiquity, and much of recent history, are BOTH machine and eye readable. This paradigm of true mediation, via a single object, between human and automated reading and knowledge assembly and reassembly should not be lost to the discussion. In fact the future may consist in part of the influence of digital media on its parent media...and a new status for source original collections in the context of digital delivery systems.

Cultural bias to distinguish or confuse originals and copies can also play a role in projections of the digital future. A simultaneous enthusiasm for "image integrity" and "image enhancement" may suggest a confusion between the role of the original and copy. Deeper confusion is suggested by linear projection of institutions "recording and preserving artifacts in digital form" (Culture and Technological Obsolescence, Anne Pierce, Wired magazine). The analog to digital transformation is not a one-way transaction. We could also be building a bridge backward from delivery copy to source original.

(3.) The perceived role of libraries and archives is too narrow.

Conference and Foundation participant Brewster Kahle commented that "you can do tremendous things when you can take what tens of millions of people are thinking about--aggregated human thought--and put it in a computable form." This precept was invented by librarians and archivists. While the traditional library exemplifies this dynamic data base, accomplishments in on-line bibliographic control demonstrate the very early participation of the field in digital delivery.

But there is a further dimension to the role of libraries and archives, which Peter Graham identifies. These are the institutions that are the only ones that assume the uneconomical preservation of the collections. Preservation is a curatorial series of "yes" decisions uninterrupted by a single "no". This factor greatly inhibits scenarios for digital migration strategies because (1.) there are more curiatorial decision points than with more passively preserved media, and (2.) preservation must occur exactly at the point of disinterest and neglect.

Librarians and archivist are expert at this counter-intuitive, counter cultural and non-economic/revenue-negative activity of preservation exactly at the point of disinterest and neglect. The Long Now foundation may be posing its concerns for long term planning under an aura of enthusiasm that creators attribute to their times and their works. Later dark zones where source collections disappear and where the wilderness of cyberspace really begins to "howl" is in a no-mans' territory populated only by subsistence librarians and archivists.