Digital Curation
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Teleconference with Dragan Espenschied

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Challenges of an open archive

00:00Introduction by Jon Ippolito.

00:24Dragan Espenschied on Rhizome mission.

01:50Crowdsourcing archival acquisitions.

03:37Obsolescence and the archive.

Archiving social media

04:00Problems of archiving social media.

07:18Example: Facebook redesign.

08:02Example: MySpace redesign.

08:52Preserving records versus preserving user experience.

10:31Jon summarizes challenges faced by Rhizome.

11:55Scale for the Internet Archive and Rhizome.

15:22Limits of metadata.

Emulation as a service

16:13How do you know what software you need to run an artifact?

18:02Preservation through access.

18:50demo of bwFLA CD-ROM emulation.

22:08Viewing a Mac OS9 "Read Me" document in browser-based emulation.

22:08Viewing the Mac OS9 CD-ROM "Vexations" in browser-based emulation.

25:41Advantage of saving only the differences between system configurations.

27:29Viewing Theresa Duncan CD-ROMs in emulation.

28:01Spawning an emulator in the cloud.

31:05Why should collecting institutions help develop emulators?

Preserving networked assets

32:55How do you emulate network-based resources, like outdated URLs?

34:06Resurrecting Geocities with a proxy server.

39:21Researching history of software via DROID over Geocities.

40:40Leveraging the Internet Archive for obsolete software.

42:14Web archiving: public documents versus personal media.

Webrecorder

44:05Webrecorder archives Web content that a robot cannot.

46:16JavaScript, not HTML, is now the language of the Web.

48:07The challenge of archiving Facebook.

49:47Webrecorder contrasted with traditional Web archiving.

51:15Archiving Instagram with Webrecorder.

52:45Why we need to archive emojis.

54:38Archiving Yelp with Webrecorder.

57:30Where is the border of an online artifact?

57:58The challenge of archiving results from search boxes.

63:10What is a WARC file?

67:20Why you need to save collections for each user.

68:19Demo of Webrecorder applied to the New York Times.

72:11Demo of Webrecorder applied to Vine.

Conclusion

72:27Why archivists need futuristic approaches, and how art can help.

74:38How browser-based emulation can focus on the work preserved.

This teleconference is a project of the University of Maine's Digital Curation program. For more information, contact ude.eniam@otiloppij.

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As digital conservator for the prominent new media platform Rhizome, Dragan Espenschied has contributed to dynamic new tools that help preserve social media and helped develop emulation as a service, which allows any user to access outdated software using nothing more than a Web browser.

His conversation with the University of Maine's online Digital Preservation class was recorded on 7 May 2015.

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