Among the archival material from Salman Rushdie currently on display at Emory University in Atlanta are inked book covers, handwritten journals and four Apple computers (one ruined by a spilled Coke). The 18 gigabytes of data they contain seemed to promise future biographers and literary scholars a digital wonderland: comprehensive, organised and searchable files, quickly accessible with a few clicks.
But like most Rushdian paradises, this digital idyll has its own set of problems. As research libraries and archives are discovering, ?born-digital? materials?those initially created in electronic form?are much more complicated and costly to preserve than anticipated. Electronically produced drafts, correspondence and editorial comments, sweated over by contemporary poets, novelists and non-fiction authors, are ultimately just a series of digits ? 0?s and 1?s – written on floppy disks, CDs and hard drives, all of which degrade much faster than old-fashioned acid-free paper. Even if those storage media do survive, the relentless march of technology can mean that the older equipment and software that can make sense of all those 0?s and 1?s simply don?t exist anymore.
All of which means that archivists are finding themselves trying to fend off digital extinction at the same time that they are puzzling through questions about what to save, how to save it and how to make that material accessible. ?It?s certainly one of those issues that keeps a lot of people awake at night,? said Anne Van Camp, the director of the Smithsonian Institution Archives and a member of a task force on the economics of digital preservation formed by the National Science Foundation, among others.
Though computers have been commonly used for more than two decades, archives from writers who used them are just beginning to make their way into collections. Last week, for instance, the Harry Ransom Centre at the University of Texas, Austin, announced that it had bought the archive of David Foster Wallace, who committed suicide in 2008. Emory opened an exhibition of its Rushdie collection in February, and last year, not long before his death, John Updike sent 50, 5?-inch floppy disks to the Houghton Library at Harvard.
Leslie Morris, a curator at the Houghton Library, said, ?We don?t really have any methodology as of yet to process born-digital material. We just store the disks in climate-controlled stacks, and hope for some kind of universal Harvard guidelines.?
Among the challenges facing libraries: hiring computer-savvy archivists to catalog material; acquiring the equipment and expertise to decipher, transfer and gain access to data stored on obsolete technologies like floppy disks; guarding against accidental alterations or deletions of digital files; and figuring out how to organise access in a way that?s useful.
At Emory, Rushdie?s outdated computers presented archivists with a choice: simply save the contents of files or try to also salvage the look and organisation of those early files. Because of Emory?s particular interest in the impact of technology on the creative process, Naomi Nelson, the university?s interim director of Manuscript Archives and Rare Book Collection, said that the archivists decided to try to recreate Rushdie?s writing experience and the original computer environment.
Rushdie started using a computer only when the Ayatollah Khomeini?s 1989 fatwa drove him underground. ?My writing has got tighter and more concise because I no longer have to perform the mechanical act of re-typing endlessly,? he explained during an interview while in hiding. ?And all the time that was taken up by that mechanical act is freed to think.?
He added, ?I had this kind of fetish about presenting clean copy. I don?t like presenting my publisher with pages with lots of crossings-out and scribbling. So I would be manic at the end of typing a page where actually I didn?t want to change anything, not at all.? At the Emory exhibition, visitors can log onto a computer and see the screen that Rushdie saw, search his file folders as he did, and find out what applications he used. (Mac Stickies were a favorite.) They can call up an early draft of Rushdie?s 1999 novel, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, and edit a sentence or post an editorial comment.
?I know of no other place in the world that is providing access through emulation to a born-digital archive,? said Erika Farr, the director of born-digital initiatives at the Robert W Woodruff Library at Emory. To the Emory team, simulating the author?s electronic universe is equivalent to making a reproduction of the desk, chair, fountain pen and paper that, say, Charles Dickens used, and then allowing visitors to sit and scribble notes on a copy of an early version of Bleak House.
?If you?re interested in primary materials, you?re interested in both context and content,? Farr said. ?Fifty years from now, people may be researching how the impact of word processing affected literary output,? she added, which would require seeing the original computer images. ?Our focus is preservation and storage now,? she said. ?Over the last couple of years, we?ve been learning about computer forensics.? The centre is trying to raise endowment money to hire a digital collections coordinator while Redwine works on preservation and processing.