Preservation in a box

Personal (Digital) Archiving. A concept often talked about, but one that is often difficult to realise in practice, especially for individuals, minority and indigenous peoples, and communities without access to significant resources.

Many individuals/groups have specialised knowledge relating to subjects of great personal interest. However, more often than not, these people/groups don't have the resources/know-how to record this information in sufficient detail, with sufficient surrounding meta data to make it of use to scholars worldwide. To an extent, projects such as Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org/), Europeana (http://www.europeana1914-1918.eu/en) have allowed basic recording and cataloguing to take place. Indeed the written word, sound, and two dimensional imagery have been transformed by modern recording tools. However, the current widely available tools still leave a lot to desired, particularly when it comes to preparing the data for “proper” preservation.

Anything beyond the basic scan/photograph/record/video also tends to require specialised (for specialised read big, bulky and expensive) equipment and operators.

But what if such individuals/groups could have access to a cheap portable workstation for preservation? Preservation in a box?

The cost of recording devices and techniques is falling all the time. It should now be possible to create a "standards compliant" low-cost digital preservation workstation using standard, widely available, cheap technology and open source software and hardware (see http://www.diybookscanner.org/). These workstations could record (and OCR) books, paintings, objects), spatial info, non-invasive material/composition sampling, related ephemera (like instruction books), etc.

Couple such a device to a 3d printer, large format printer, digital book printer and you can reproduce copies for people to handle (imagine the impact of handling a replica bone harpoon head, or reproduction of an actual d-day map)

In this poster I intend to explore how such a device could be built using standard, cheap components and present a design concept for a prototype.