This book is titled The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation, but it seems to me that this text is really preoccupied with advocacy. Half of the sixteen axioms are about shaping the conversation around digital preservation—there’s an assumption built-in that the reader or the reader’s audience must be disabused of notions that preservation has “already happened” or that digital preservation is as simple as backing up files before any real work can commence. The talking points are useful to public historians as-in (who in many cases are making the preservationist decisions) and should serve as a starting place to make their own talking points to frame their specific fields of study to the un-initiated—since public historians are likely to be working at cultural or educational sites and therefore need to justify their work and their expenses to directors (whose interests and knowledge of the subject can vary wildly), legislators, funders and ideally volunteers who can assist with some low-level preservation work. (The caution against one-and-done software purchases or any other new and fancy tool is going to be very useful for any digital preservationist looking to defend their job when the next bout of funding cuts inevitably rolls through.)
The way that Owens describes his approach
to digital preservation seems to approach a proto-memex as described by
Vennevar Bush—digital content where original order is not necessary, as all
information is linked together vertically and horizontally. Of course, all my
original complaints about the memex still stand, and this is still digital
preservation that’s clustered around any given cultural institution, serving
that institution’s priorities, and which only a sliver is being cultivated and
maintained rather than the bulk.
