In Roy Rosenzweig’s essay Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era brings up a variety of dilemmas modern day historians and archivists are facing. At first the lack of history and information posed a problem to historians. Now, the problem faced by archivists and historians lies in the abundance of information, rather than the lack of it.
Still, the astonishingly rapid accumulation of digital data–obvious to anyone who uses the Google search engine and gets 300,000 hits–should make us consider that future historians may face information overload…Thus historians need to be thinking simultaneously about how to research, write, and teach in a world of unheard-of historical abundance and how to avoid a future of record scarcity.
If information is not chronicled adequately, then finding the information itself becomes difficult. What historians, archivists, and ordinary people are facing is information being lost in the abundance of it. Access to information is enormous. An ordinary American high school student, as Rosenzweig expresses, can access endless amounts of both primary and secondary research through a quick online search.
While this is an advantage, it’s difficult to tell what is factually correct. Information can be categorized based on personal preferences and ideologies. Individuals can pick and choose their own version of “truth.” Rosenzweig also address this issue, particularly with historical artifacts.
How, for example, do we ensure the “authenticity” of preserved digital information and “trust” in the repository? Paper documents and records also face questions about authenticity, and forgeries are hardly unknown in traditional archives. The science of “diplomatics,” in fact, emerged in the seventeenth century as a way to authenticate documents when scholars confronted rampant forgeries in medieval documents. But digital information–because it is so easily altered and copied, lacks physical marks of its origins, and, indeed, even the clear notion of an “original”–cannot be authenticated as physical documents and objects can.
Information can easily be altered online, in a digital age. How can you then prove if something is authentic if you are unable to compare it to something else? With primary, physical sources one is easily able to distinguish which artifact is true or not. You can look at the ink that was used, you can look at the paint that was used, or you can look at the parchment that was used. In a digital age, you cannot see that. Are we becoming to reliant on the benefits of a digital past recorded, without realizing what we are loosing?