Past-Forward

Challenges of the Digital Archive

New media affords HDMB great opportunities, but there are some challenges to going digital. Cohen and Rosenzweig point to quality, durability, readability, passivity, and inaccessibility as dangers of using new media. Additionally, we grapple with the question of how can we collect a large, diverse archive when participation is voluntary? I will explain what we did to help HDMB grow and thrive in light of these concerns.

• Finding the stories and images to collect: From the beginning, we have refined and updated various strategies for collecting and publicizing HDMB. Relying heavily on personal and professional contacts in the early stages, we spread the word and developed partnerships in a very traditional way. We also turned to listservs, blogs, online forums and other electronic means for creating direct links to HDMB. Other efforts, such as distributing Mardi Gras cups with the HDMB logo and URL and public presentations, encourage the general participate to logon and add their story to the digital memory bank. Unfortunately, the site’s mere presence on the web does not guarantee participation or visitation.
  
• Passivity, Quality, and readability: HDMB is different from oral history project where you carefully choose subjects, tailor questions for your interview, and spend hours talking with your subject. Here individuals visit the site voluntarily and decide what they want to contribute and the duration of their stay–an active process. We do not edit postings for grammar or check for “accuracy.” As Cohen and Rosenzweig suggest, historians must rely on their critical analysis skills to determine if a submissions seems authentic. Since the project went live in November 2005, we have received no spam or mock contributions.
• Incorporating an understanding of memory becomes important when analyzing the quality and even readability of these contributions as well. Oral historians have tackled these issues, such as David Thelen and Alessandro Portelli who incorporate the study of memory into their interpretation. They emphasize that accuracy of memory is not always important when taking oral histories. What is important is that those people find those memories to be real. During the early days following Hurricane Katrina, news reports detailed horrific crimes–”from eyewitnesses”–that turned out to be false, but were very real for those waiting for help at the Superdome. When documenting the history of these storms the personal interpretation of those events, as memory, will be as important as the events themselves.
• Inaccessibility: Roy Rosenzweig reminds us that economic, social, and cultural issues remain one of the biggest challenges when confronting new techology. Dealing with the displaced and disenfranchised is a big concern for us, because our target population is dealing with loss on many levels and perhaps online activity did not play a huge role in their lives prior to the hurricanes. The Pew Internet and American Life Project‘s most recent surveys find that 72% of all adults go online, but the numbers dip for those with less than a high school education to 38%, and to 54% for those with an income less than $30,000. In New Orleans, for example, the median household income in 2004 was $31,369. While we do not have hard figures on how connected New Orleanians were prior to the hurricane we know that there were many without computer access. Since the hurricanes there are even more challanges for those without the necessary hardware, so we created an internet phone account through Skype with a New Orleans exchange where anyone may call to record a digital story. Those digital files will be uploaded to the archive. Those with computers but no internet access will not need to wait long in New Orleans, because they will become the first major wireless city in the nation. Free wi-fi is becoming easier to find at cafes and computer usage is available at all public libraries. Awareness of inaccessibility issues does not solve them, but we are trying to accommodate the needs of our target population as best as we can.
• Durability: To ensure the longevity of HDBM, it will be saved in two main locations on stand-alone computers. The University of New Orleans has established a DSpace repository in collaboration with Louisiana State University (LSU) and we will deposit a second copy in the GMU’s digital repository, MARS.