I recently had the pleasure of attending an event at UC Berkeley devoted to a pressing issue for many digital archivists: what to do with raw war footage, particularly the videos produced by sundry terrorist groups in Iraq? This is a very real issue confronting Brewster Kahle, who runs the Internet Archive, a nonprofit in San Francisco devoted to preserving history in digital form.

Kahle wants to preserve important digital art, book, and movie collections, but he also wants to give regular people a way to preserve their digital history, too. That’s why he has a section of the Archive called open source movies, where anybody can upload their footage. And now he’s getting 30-50 Arab-language videos every day, all of which deal with the war. Some of them are graphically violent. Others appear to offer directions on how to put together an IED. The question is, what should he do about it? Archivists have historically never been in this position because they usually receive curated collections, not raw information from the anonymous public.

If you want to know more about how Kahle resolved some of the problems of being a non-censorious archivist in real time, read my column. And if you want to help the Archive by translating some of the videos they’ve received, check out their Iraq War footage collection.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 1st, 2007 at 2:34 pm.
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