During the 19th and 20th centuries, preservation in research libraries evolved around two functions: preservation and conservation. Roughly, preservation is concerned with collection-wide actions to prevent damage and decay, while conservation is focused on corrective repair of past damage and decay. By analogy, I often say that in libraries, preservation is a mix of hospital administration and public health, while conservation represents surgical and medical specialties.

Conservators know their medium, know their limits, have some sound general principles for their work, and they know their colleagues. If we have a textile conservation question at UCLA, for instance, between our conservator, Kristen St. John, and myself, we know enough to avoid screw-ups, but we also know who to call to get intelligent, experienced guidance.

I find myself on the lookout for the digital equivalent quite often - the programmers, systems administrators, computer scientists, and electrical engineers who live in their medium and know the right calls to make (or emails to send) to get information from across the field. Just as conservators grew out of the craft traditions of their media, I'm hoping that the digital craft traditions will start to yield some people who are primed and engaged to think about how to stabilize, repair, and rehabilitate digital objects.

As a fun little example, here's the world's easiest and least expensive web archiving system. It's part of the uprgrade options for the pinboard system, which I use for my personal bookmarking. A few months back, the developer decided to offer an archiving service. I signed up (and yes, I do intend to write off the twenty-five bucks I paid as a research expense). Here's the development team, Maciej Ceglowski and Peter Gadjokov, on the behind-the-scenes of their archive system:

The bookmark archive makes heavy use of wget, with some postprocessing to handle the common case where stylesheets and other inline content are versioned by appending a random string to the filename ("main.css?90xs8"). This versioning messes up Apache's ability to guess the content type of the file from its extension when it comes time to serve the archived file, so we do some renaming and symlinking behind the scenes to make sure archived files get served back properly.

Our technical goals are to never lose data, be very fast, and favor boring and faded technologies where possible. A rule of thumb that has worked well for me is that if I'm excited to play around with something, it probably doesn't belong in production.

Now, is this tool as robust as the UC3 Web Archiving System? I don't know. It's fast, though, and cheap, and most importantly, it's the kind of thinking that gets me excited. This is web-archiving by guys who build web-sites, and those guys are starting to talk about preservation.