e-Postards Archives

In addition to this blog on digital media, I also write a blog on my postcard collection @ The Deltiology Deity. Although both blogs are about media, it's rare that topics are applicable to both blogs (but it has happened). This post was lead to my thoughts lately of the need to archive various digital media content and that lead to this post below, which I ran first on Deltiology Deity...

A few weeks ago, I was thinking about the efforts to archive various Internet communication. With this and postcards in mind, I remembered a trend in the late 1990s of e-Postcards. They are like print postcards but in digital format - instead of people visiting a physical destination and mailing back a print card with a visual and textual message, visitors to websites would be given online forms to fill out to send an email to someone with a digital image and brief message.

e-Postcards are rare today, but many websites (from retailers, multinational corporations, tourist sites, cultural centres, etc.) used to offer the ability to send them.

A similar form, e-Cards, has persisted longer through such websites such as Blue Mountain and card companies such as Hallmark; although they are also dying out. e-Postcards differ from e-Cards in that they are thematically focused on a destination (in this case websites) rather than focused on special occasions, they tend to arrive straight in one's email box rather than being emailed a link to click through to see the card, and are not interactive, animated, or multimedia.

I used to get and send e-Postcards occasionally up until the past decade. As with most people, I never thought to save these e-Postcards (unlike my constant dedicated preservation of print postcards). Much of our digital heritage will just pass us by and never be saved. Admirable organizations such as the Internet Archive can only do so much. If we want our digital records to survive for future generations, as the print postcards I display here have, then it's up to us.

So I sought out websites still offering e-Postcards. Despite extensive searching, I couldn't find many websites offering them. I did, however, find a few - and a surprising variety. Here are my favourites, now preserved for posterity:

from The Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Loki, from a poster e-tailer

from New York's Museum of Modern Art

Self-made e-Postcard from Toronto Public Library

from Mount Washington Resort, New Hampshire

from the World Wildlife Fund

If you know of websites still offering cool e-Postcards, then send one here for history's sake.

Blogging is History

Earlier this week, I was at a public lecture given by Carolyn Hank, an information professor at McGill University, on archiving considerations for blogs. Archiving isn't a topic that stirs many people's interest (no offense to my archivist friends), let alone those in the notoriously now-oriented world of digital media.

But upon hearing Hank speak, I realized there are preservation and copyright issues that apply to all bloggers (not those, however, who blog about what they just ate or the club they're at).

Here are useful considerations for all bloggers:

1) Does your blog have historical value?
Probably. But many bloggers prune or delete without thinking that there could be historic value to their posts. I admit, I delete as I please without any thought to any greater implications. As blogs are one of the main discursive forms of our era, they are definitely worth preserving.

Also studies, and certainly my blog's stats, show that there is tremendous value in the long tail of blogs, so it is worthwhile to keep old posts around.

2) Who owns the copyright for your blog?
This may seem a rather basic issue. But there are factors that can make things more complicated. This can particularly become an issue if you decide to publish your blog in some other format (e.g. as a book) or port to another provider.

If you use a hosted solution, you probably won't own the technology of the blog. As for the content, it's not a bad idea to check the terms of use with your service provider or any blog network or syndicators you may belong to.

Comments are a thorny issue as it doesn't seem there are clear laws or norms on who owns them. I tend to see blog comments as similar to callers of a radio show, audience members on a tv talk show, or someone interviewed by the media.  Once you say it to them, you don't own it anymore.  So I am not clear why bloggers wouldn't own their audience's comments?

I believe that commenters do not have the right to edit or retract without the blogger's permission. Of course, this wouldn't apply to comments that are libellous, against a terms of use, or otherwise morally problematic. Either way (and I'd love to hear other people's thoughts on this), a blog should have a policy on this and should be clearly articulate to users.

3) Do you clearly state your ownership of your blog and its components?
Hank found that many blogs don't have any statement as to copyright of the blog or the rights of commenters. Considering how easy and free Creative Commons makes it to declare copyright and usage permissions, I was surprised that some bloggers don't have any sort of statement about this. I recently updated my Creative Commons licence after Hank's presentation. Clearly, I also need to state something about my commenting policy.

4) Is your blog already archived?
Hank pointed out that there are organizations already archiving blogs such as Internet Archive and others. I never thought of this, but I assumed this blog would not be archived. I checked with Internet Archive and a portion of it is. I never directed it to crawl my site, so this was a surprise.

This is important for bloggers to think about. I have posted items that I later regretted and wanted to edit or delete (and I did).  But if your blog is archived without your awareness, one can loose control of what lingers around.  It is, however, great to have my blog preserved with no effort on my part, but as a result I have lost a bit of control.  Internet Archives does offer instructions on how to add or remove your blog.

5) How does one archive a blog?
It's not as easy it seems. It's not simply a case of just backing-up past posts. First, if one is using a hosted solution, there could be technical or commercial limits to what can be saved - so one may be able to archive the text of the blog posts but not the wrapper or other elements.

6) What are the elements of a blog that should be archived?
Considering the dyanmic, contextual, and hyperlinked nature of blogs, it's impossible to perserve all the dimensions of a blog. So what are the essential elements that should be archived?

Certainly the main post is essential, but what about comments (and back to the issue of who owns these), the profile links, embedded content, hyperlinked context, and sidebar elements? Once one has determined the essential elements the next issue is how to technically preserve all this.

7) Whose responsibility is it to archive blogs?
It seems rather safe to me to say that some blogs should definitely be archived. It also seems safe to say that most bloggers and blog owners operate in the moment and often haven't considered this issue.

Should blog archiving fall to individual bloggers or is this something that should be handled by a government,  academic, or non-profit organization?

Although the concerns addressed above are applicable to most bloggers, the latter issue concerns everyone.  Blogs are history.  And we should protect our history.