Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
which provides historic and social information on many places, large
and small, in Britain, temporarily crashed after its creator appeared on
breakfast TV to promote the site.
6
And the same fate befell The
National Archives' 1901 Census site, a fact that really awoke the
organization to the huge international interest in the rich seams of
genealogical information it holds and proved a springboard for some
spectacular digital successes.
7
The blip was only a temporary one for the
Vision of Britain site too - it now regularly achieves 80,000 unique
users a month.
8
The issue of sustainability
A casual observer, therefore, might think that this digital world is a well
constructed and ordered world. Certainly, the successes mentioned
indicate so and deserve praise. Yet the early optimism about digitization
has taken something of a battering and revealed a slightly more
anarchic digital sphere. The birth of the internet spawned a tiresome
flood of clichés and suppositions about presenting digital information
online - the belief that knowledge could be instantly democratized via
global internet access, that digitization projects were reasonably simple
DIY jobs requiring only basic training, that publishing would be cost
free via digital means, and that audiences, safely ensconced in their own
homes, would flock to see these glittering jewels online. This chapter
largely focuses on the UK but the experience has been much the same
elsewhere. The report
Shifting Gears
sums up the US experience: 'A lot
of money went toward creating barely visited web sites. And a lot of
institutions created preservation-quality images that they, in fact, had
no way to sustain in the long run' (Erway and Schaffner, 2007, 8).
In the context of publicly funded digitization projects, bitter realities
soon disproved many of these uninformed assumptions. In particular,
the issue of sustainability - the fact that complex websites require
ongoing funding in order to ensure their technical reliability and their
intellectual freshness - was the unpleasant jack-in-the-box that kept
popping up. Numerous projects received fixed-term funding to digitize,
say, their collection of historic architectural photographs and construct
a relevant web-enabled database, only to find that they had no funds to
tweak and maintain the database, thus threatening its continued online
existence. The result was an unhealthy glut of 'error 404' pages.
9
