Book Breaking and Digitisation

An article in the New Yorker, Scattered Leaves describes how a medieval scholar discovered how a book of hours, a type of personal prayer book, dating from the 1460s with gold illuminations, came to be broken up.  It survived intact until 2010 when it was catalogued as "APPARENTLY COMPLETE" at a Christie's auction.  By late 2013, the book had been dismantled and leaves sold separately, particularly on EBay, to make a bigger profit. The scholar acquired the cover and 7 remaining leaves out of the original 234.  The original number of leaves is known because the book had previously been catalogued and described.

Digitisation, the process of creating digital copies by scanning or photographing original documents, typically results in a collection of digital images.  In a sense, the copying process resembles book breaking, but without destroying the original.  The resulting collection then needs to be organised and presented in a way that faithfully represents the original as far as possible.

Even without deliberate dispersal, as in the case of the book of hours, the original may not be complete at the time of digitisation.  Unless it has been described in sufficient detail to note the missing parts, users may make erroneous conclusions.

Have you tried to scan or photograph your own genealogy artifacts or records in an archive?  It is easy to skip a page, or make duplicates, isn't it?  My luck dictates that the missing page contains the record of my ancestor!

Institutions like archives and libraries do take great care to ensure the quality of digitised copies of documents.  The standards published by the State Library of Queensland are an example. Notable in these standards is the requirement for structural metadata in addition to  descriptive, administrative and technical metadata  (p.4 item 7).  The structural metadata describes the relationships between digital files such as the sequence of pages.

Commercial genealogy vendors do not always take the same care as public institutions.  Although the following examples refer to a particular company, I regularly hear reports of poor curation of digital records by other companies.  In a recently reported scandal, an Ancestry.com employee, contracted to digitise records at St Louis repository of  the USA National Archives and Records Administration, disposed of military draft-cards when under pressure to perform efficiently.  In Ancestry's 1871 census collection for Enumeration District 9,  Hitcham, Suffolk, England, pages 3, 6, 9, 13, 16, and 19 are missing.  The entry for my great grandmother, Susannah Stiff, on page 3, reveals her real relationship to Abraham Stiff (grand-daughter, not daughter).  What did I say about my luck?

So, next time you use digital resources ask yourself: Is the collection complete?
 

Digital copies enable access that would not otherwise be possible, help researchers find resources and use the materials in new ways.  They are not a complete substitute for originals, and only assist with the preservation of the originals by reducing direct use.  Original materials that are worth photographing or scanning are worth keeping carefully. Once digital copies have been made, their preservation presents its own set of challenges.  Digital files require constant care with regular copying to new media and new formats. The JISC digital media Guide to Digital Preservation notes:

"due to technological obsolescence and media fragility, many consider it possible that future generations will have less information about Gulf War conflicts (recorded on digital media) than the First World War (recorded on analogue media)"

An excellent example of how digitisation enabled scholarly research is The Great Parchment Book project.  This manuscript containing surveys and estate records from Derry, part of the Ulster plantation, was compiled in the 1630s.  It was so badly damaged by fire in 1786 that is has been unreadable until the restoration and digitisation project.  The website presents digital images before and after manipulation, transcriptions and background information.

High quality digitisation combined with careful and accurate presentation is what I want to see from all providers of research materials relevant to genealogy.   That will best support my personal scholarship, and yours.

Preservation

Why we should all be concerned about preservation?

Yesterday (Tuesday 10th March) there was a fatal road traffic collision on the road that I use everyday to get to and from my place of work. Although, I was not an eyewitness, I saw the immediate aftermath from the other carriageway, whilst on my way to work and was shaken and saddened to think that someone was going to be hearing bad news later that day. 

Experiences such as these can bring home the uncertainties of life.

We all like to believe we will live in to old age but even the youngest of us should be aware that we only have a limited time in which to do things.

Geoff Rasmussen who hosts the Legacy Family Tree Webinars usually finishes with the saying "Life is short, do genealogy first". Would that we could all do this. 

If there is one resolution we should all have made this year it is this, I will endeavour to get my genealogy organized so that anyone can pick up where I left off.

Those who have taken up the challenge of Thomas MacEntee and embarked on the Genealogy Do Over are to be commended as are those who have not been in a position to need to take up the challenge. Many (including me) will have started with good intentions and other commitments have somehow got in the way.

Have we set ourselves unrealistic goals? Maybe

We all need to work at our own pace and the most important thing we can do is to leave something that our families will value rather than a jumbled mass of documents and unlabeled old photographs.

How do I know that what I have will be of use to others?

We have records and photographs that we have inherited (unless we are very unlucky) and those that we have found or created in our lifetime. 

We need to make it clear how these are important to our family and each of us will have our own way of doing this.

Computers and the associated technology can help us in storing and collecting our sources of information but we need to consider how easy it will be for others to access these in the future. 

So keeping up to date or finding ways to future-proof our sources is important however we store the information.

Family history programs can help us pull together the information we have found and display it in a format which shows our connections to our ancestors but they may not be supported indefinitely.

Whilst we may want to become paperless we must all consider how we back up what we have. 

Disasters can occur and we may lose what we have collected if we only have one copy or everything is in one place.

• Label things clearly
• Back things up
• Think about who will need access to your information

What legacy do you want to leave?
How are you going to pass your work on to the future generations?
Who gets your records? 

Can't I just leave my records to the relevant archive?

When Did You Last Visit an Archive ?

Much is made of the reduction of hours or closure of an archive and with a worldwide recession there has been great pressure on public services to reduce the cost of their services. On the back of this the paymasters will be looking at the footfall for these places.

National Archives will usually be safe as they have such large collections of interest to various researchers. However smaller regional or city/town repositories may not appeal to such a wide audience and the staffing costs will be an area where they will see reducing costs as a possibility.

So if you thought you could leave your work to the local archive you may have to think again.
Unless you have something unique which can stand the test of time such as a printed book you may find that much of the results of your hard work will become unusable or inaccessible.

Move with the technology and present your findings to the younger generations in your family. 
Consider how you store those unique items.
Make sure that somebody knows what you want to happen to your research.

Digital preservation, or why I worry about Evernote

Digital preservation ensures that the digital information we have today can still be accessed in the future. Before becoming a professional genealogist, I worked in the IT department of the National Archives in the Netherlands where I picked up some knowledge about digital preservation that I hope will be useful to you. Most people think that all you need to do is make back-ups, but there is a lot more to it than that.

Four issues with digital preservation

There are four main issues with digital preservation:

1. Files get corrupted when hardware fails. Think crashed hard drives or demagnetized floppy disks. Or your house burning with your backups inside. 
2. Files stored on obsolete media. Who still has a 5 1/4" floppy drive? Many new computers don't even come with a CD/DVD player anymore. 
3. Files are in obsolete file formats. For example, a WordStar 1.0 or WordPerfect 4.2 document. 
4. Files get lost because of human behavior. For example, files on hard drives that nobody bothered to copy before recycling the computer or emails and document that get deleted when you loose access to your account because you change jobs or providers. People also use files because they don't understand how their cloud storage solution (Dropbox, Google Drive) works and don't realize that deleting a file from their hard drive may also delete it from the cloud. 

With paper information, you have to actively do something to make it go away (throw it out). If you don't do anything, it will get preserved in your attic or wherever you saw it last. 

With digital information, you have to actively make sure that it gets preserved, otherwise it will be lost. 

Back-ups only help so much...

Back-ups can help combat issues number 1, 2 and 4 (corrupt files, obsolete media and human error). A good backup strategy is the 3-2-1 rule: have 3 copies of each file, on 2 different types of media, 1 of which is stored in a different geographical location. By actively making backups of things you want to preserve, you ensure that this information is not lost accidentally. 

A good backup strategy will give you access to your files. But whether they are in a format that you can use is another matter.

Different types of file formats

The way a file is stored on the computer is called a file format. A file format tells the software how to open the file. Examples of file formats are .jpg (JPEG image file), .docx (Microsoft Word) and .pdf (Portable Document File). 

Digital preservation problems start when you have a file that is stored in a file format that you cannot open anymore. You may have a WordPerfect 4.2 file, but you may not have WordPerfect anymore. Perhaps you can convert the file, but information may be lost along the way. Or you may use an old computer (or emulate one) and run your old software. 

The type of file format determines how hard it will be to open in the future. Some file formats are proprietary and require that vendor's software to open them. .FTM files are a good example, the file format that Family Tree Maker uses. You can't open an FTM file in another program.

Other file formats use open standards. An open standard means that the specification of the standard is published and everybody is allowed to use it to create their own programs. Gedcom is an example of an open standard: dozens of tools can read a Gedcom file, which is why it is still being used to exchange information between different genealogy programs.

Most software offer a way to save files in a different file format, which often includes open standards, like the Gedcom export function in genealogical software. You have that option as long as you can use the software. But you may not be able to run that software after your next operating systems upgrade, if your license expires or if the vendor goes out of business.

The problem with programs like Evernote

Cloud-based solutions (like Evernote) give people a false sense of security because they think everything is "backed up" in the cloud. That is not really true though: Evernote synchronizes, which is different than a backup. If you delete a note in Evernote, it will be gone from all your devices, because Evernote synchronizes your information. That is different from information that is backed up, because then you will be able to restore the backup. 

Another problem with programs like Evernote is that you are totally dependent on the vendor. I have no idea if I will be able to access my Evernote files if Evernote goes out of business ten years from now and the software stops working. I use the web version as well as the Windows version. If Evernote goes out of business, I won't be able to use the web version but will probably still have access to the Windows version, at least for a while. But the information are all stored in Evernote-specific .EXB files on my hard drive. As far as I know, there are no other programs than Evernote to get my stuff out except copy-paste it.

[BTW, I'm using Evernote as an example because it's very popular among genealogists but most software, especially cloud-based software has the same issues]

My advice: combine solid backups with migration to open file formats

For information that is important to you, that you want generations from now to be able to open, my advice is to make sure to save them in a file format that has an open standard. For example, I save scans of my family photos as TIFF, not PSD (the Photoshop file format). A hundred years from now, any programmer can take the TIFF scans and create a viewer for the amazing devices that they will have then. But Photoshop might not be around anymore. 

This does not mean I don't use other files as well. I use Family Tree Maker and RootsMagic for my research. That is no problem since I am aware of the issues and will periodically create a GEDCOM and put that in my backup locations using the 3-2-1 rule. I also keep the FTM files, because conversion often loses some of the information. But if for some reason I don't have FTM anymore, or the old program doesn't work on my shiny new operating system, I will still be able to access at least a large part of the information.

More information

If you want to learn more about how archives professionals deal with digital preservation, check out the website of the Open Preservation Foundation. For a more lighthearted introduction, view the rest of the videos by Team Digital Preservation on Youtube.