Page 21 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report

Here are some alternative routes of actionthat could be taken to help preserve our cultural heritage:a) increase public awareness of the imsi- ness of digital content, and the need to continue to improve technology and tools speci cally designed to help us preserve it for the longest time.b) increase public appreciation for the value of preserving our cultural heritage, of its importance, value and of the consequences of when it gets lost forever.c) support and incentivize both government and individual-born activities that strive to collect, organize, and preserve information artefacts of signi cant value for society. Empower many more organizations and individuals into this art of nding, vetting, organizing and adding value to information artefacts.d) create and maintain multiple, redundant indexes for all of the updated collections available out there. A directory of cultural- ly-relevant curated directories, so to speak. Such a curated collection of collections should be completely distributed, and not secured in one single place, easily replica- ble from device to device, continuously updated (but with a full record track of all the changes made to it.Technology solutions that would help in this direction would be those that could enable:a) cloning and replication of vast amounts of data locally,b) online access via our own distributed resources even when there was no Internet (by utilizing our own friends network), andc) a way to physically store and preserve such valuable content for very long periods of time and in harsh or extreme climate conditions. (Crystals and holographicmemory may be some of the solutions we may consider soon.)d) accessibility to this archived information by future generations of computers and intelligent machines.A number of services and tools are already emerging to address some of the basic issues connected to linkrot. Among these are:• Archive – a personal version of the Internet Archive – Wayback Machine, allowing anyone to permanently archive any public web page.• Perma.cc and Permamarks.net are two commercial services speci cally devotedto create a permanent copy of any pageor document, so that it can be referenced without fear that the original will be moved, deleted, censored or taken down.The key issue with these services is that most do not seem to be exempt from the key variable that makes them all as vulnerable as any other publishing or social media service online: busi- ness permanence (their ability to remain alive as a business in the future, and their ability to nd ways to permanently store such data on physical supports that can be accessed and used even without the Internet) .ConclusionCulture is the cumulative expression of what we see, do, believe in and of what we express through our daily activities, whether commercial, creative or spiritual.Content curation collects, organizes and pre- serves the best and most interesting artefacts of our culture, no matter whether these are news stories, paintings, digital videos, 3D panoramas or stories and interviews of people in the street.AC/E DIGITAL CULTURE ANNUAL REPORT 201721Smart culture. Analysis of digital trends