Preserving Culture? Use paper! (Or poets)
The Setu people gained main stream interest in Estonia from their folktales. Jakob Hurt, the man on the 10 kroon note, earned his place there by collecting Estonian folk lore. At least over 5,000 pages if not 10,000. He said the Setu people were a pathway for Estonians to discover their own history, and that the Setu civilization was 200 years behind the Estonians! (Quoted from an unpublished research paper emailed to me) The setu people didn't record much of their folklore. Instead, a performer interpreted common tales to meet the current situations. The response of the audience would influence the performer, and the tales would change over time. There was no "master record" of the fable.
This week in Tallinn was a conference on digital libraries and digital preservation. The attendees were organizers of archives and libraries across Europe. I attended the last session. It ended in a debate about whether their is a difference between an archive and a library. A library needs to store materials that can be looked at. An archive needs to maintain records. Its like the silly Mac vs. PC game for geeks... Anyways, the conference came to the conclusion that no good digital solution is available yet. They are all still waiting for an off the shelf software solution. People have developed XML+database solutions, but then explained the issues with them. They also express the problems of older digital solutions now being out of date. "I can't run my emulator *in* DOS 3.1 anymore." Should the data be migrated to a new version? Should the software be emulated? What about the interface?
My proposal... If your goal is preservation only. Stick with paper. Paper is just as outdated 5-10 years ago as it is now. Technology ages rapidly. Old technology gets more outdated with each year. But paper remains outdated by the same amount each year. I would argue that the cost of building a paper database and maintaining it(rent for storage, clerks to access it) is much cheaper than programming an electronic database and maintaing that.
But thats a bit boring... my hope is that when they migrate the records to the digital age-which will inevitably happen... someday... they should develop a digital poet that will scan the headlines of all the current news items, turn the text into prose with music, and then perform that to the audience.
This page can already "speak" estonian. Its a start.
