So here we are. Millions of creative people creating millions of amazing things. So what happens next? As time passes, what will happen to these millions of illustrations, stories, photos? Will someone read your book in 218 years? Will an historian stumble on your illustration in 2156? Now, more than ever, we have the tools we need to preserve the work we do “forever”. Not that all of our work should survive the ages, but shouldn’t some of it? The fact that most of us do most of our work in the digital domain is a problem. How do you preserve an ebook? How do you keep a portfolio stored on a hard drive safe? How do you make sure kids in 4127 enjoy your best song? Most people answer that question with, “save it to the cloud!” which is ludicrous. We can’t depend on a company’s longevity to keep our work alive. The premise of archiving is based on having at least one point of preservation. One copy owned or managed by one entity for ever and ever. That entity may be a law firm, an estate or a dry basement. But archiving assumes there’s a hard copy. There are less and less hard copies of our works as time goes on. This is not a new thought, but it is an ignored one. People don’t like to think about it. First, it requires us to think about that eternal state of not enjoying chocolate that we call death. Second, it tends to trigger the voice in our head that wants to leave it to the fates to make sure our genius is discovered later. Read the rest of the post on the other side of the link. Can we create a universal archival standard for all creative people everywhere?
Posted on: Wed, 04 Dec 2013 17:25:50 +0000