Entertainment For Lively Minds
"Can you hear that? they're playing Day Tripper right now!"
I came across these highly evocative photos taken by a chap in the crowd at The Beatles 1966 Shea stadium concert:
http://www.pbase.com/tg6string/beatles
and my initial thought was "these look just like the kind of concert snaps everybody takes with their phone nowadays" but then a second thought struck me. If these were to be taken today on a cellphone would we be able to stumble across them sometime in 2050? We can see these because this chap had his slides developed, kept them in a box somewhere for decades and then scanned them in & uploaded them to a website.
Who's going to bother to preserve the photos clogging up their phone when the "memory almost full" message tells them they need to free up some space? I know there are lots of online storage options but do you think that this chap's 1966 Facebook or MySpace would still be available today?
When The Word does the "Were you there for Led Zep at The O2?" article in 2050 will anybody have any pictures left to send in?
Are we recording more and more but keeping less?
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Keep on storing
there is a school of thought that suggests that because memory is getting more compact and cheaper by the day and with the proliforation CCTV and GPS devices, you will be able to blog your entire life for every waking minute. Speaking solely for myself...my life AINT that interesting.
Digital Preservation
I work for the British Library, attached to the development of our digital library. There's a web archiving department that collects stuff, including lots of blogs, from the UK domain - it may well collect a copy of this very post.
We also have a team engaged in the thorny job of digital preservation - making sure all the images etc are accessible to future generations.
Should we ever meet I'd be happy to bore you for some hours on the intricases of all this.
Incidentally, we have a copy of everything ever published in the UK. Sometime I'll do a database search of monthly music publications past and present...