From Allison Kilkenny:

It’s curious to witness the archival process of a movement that may be merely the opening salvo of a great cultural shift in America. The process of collecting the scraps of Liberty Park has a sense of finality to it.Once there was something called Occupy…

The desire to dissect OWS may reflect the modern era in which everything and all things are consumed at a frantic pace. Sure, Occupy just got off the ground, and is constantly evolving, but the want for information about the movement is overwhelming. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but the archiving Occupy might also be a byproduct of Americans’ limited ability to imagine the possibilities of a serious protest movement.

I wonder if this isn’t just a sign of the way colleges are trying to keep their curriculum relevant and engaging. Furthermore, perhaps archivists, librarians, and ethnographers, etc. are trying to learn from past mistakes - trying to document something thoroughly from the get-go rather than gathering bits and pieces as a late after-thought. 

One thing I’ve heard a lot in library school is the concern with keeping and preserving information that today is very fleeting and transient. Some think that the time we live in will one day be considered a dark age, that we’re going to lose so much information. So I think I can get the motivation behind this “archival rush” and I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing. And OWS is a pretty good target. 

I also think we live in a very nostalgic time, where there’s a lot of desire to hang on the past things even if they didn’t happen all that long ago. Again, I think that’s because stuff changes so quickly these days.

Still, the rush feels odd because it can be dangerous if priorities aren’t right. Why are these people archiving OWS? Is it to help the people of the movement or is it motivated out of a desire to personally or professionally benefit (profit) from the last big thing?

Another question: has anything like this happened for the Tea Party movement? If not, why not? I’m not a fan by any measure but I think the comparison might be an interesting way to look at it. I almost wonder if all this rush to archive OWS isn’t a way to keep the protest movement alive beyond the fleeting attentions of the media? Or to give it more legitimacy than other movements? 

“We are going to rescue your shit”. 

Advances in digital preservation over the past decade now mean that storing a traditional atomic unit of information, such as an image or PDF file, can be relatively straightforward. However, doing the same with web content or a blog is a different matter. As Surface highlighted, no common practice exists for capturing web blogs and blogging, let alone a common practice for how you archive and preserve this content in the long term.

‘The technology on websites changes so rapidly. There are different tools to create websites and different technologies used to present information and these are changing year after year,’ explained Surface. ‘If you are trying to capture this information coherently you really have to focus on who you are preserving it for, and why.’