Reflections of a Digital Archivist

Preserving online information has never been more complicated, but it's my job to sort through it for the public good.

I’m a digital archivist.

That has many meanings: 1) I preserve information in a digital format, 2) I work with collections that are or are currently being digitally uploaded for public accessibility, 3) I archive digital information that is significant to public interest.

Lately, so much digital information has been coming at me that it feels insurmountable. Just as I get to work digging up information on the Epstein files from the DOJ website at the end of February, the U.S. and Israel decide to bomb Iran.

I work with my team, The Accessible Archivist Coalition, a group of independent volunteers who are working to keep an accurate record of current events as they happen. We’ve been doing this for the past year. There’s more than anyone can make sense of being thrown at us, the administration purposefully “flooding the zone” as ghoulish jackass Steve Bannon calls it, but we are fast and accurate. We keep everything in order as it happens, organize and catalog it accordingly, and are in the process of building a digital database that acts as a repository for all this information that will be freely accessible to the public. But for now, we have to take it one day at a time.

We’re currently in the phase of “triaging” information before we publish it in a database, which includes weeding through inaccurate reports and irrelevant sources in an effort to preserve what’s most at risk first. It’s time consuming, and it’s not easy, but it’s work that needs to be done. It’s incredibly difficult to sort through information on your own, particularly unverified information on the Internet. We try to be an intermediary, a liaison to accurate records of events, but at the end of the day, there is only so much that can be done by a small volunteer group to sift through a literal mountain of misinformation.

I try to present a level of optimism, and I still do feel it (I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t). I do feel that things will get better even if they get worse first, but my God, how much worse does it have to get? In the midst of this confusion over the last twelve months, I have put my head down and focused on my work, focused on taking in the information around me, sifting through it as well as I can, but it’s gotten harder.

There is a great sadness that hangs over every document I preserve, every webpage I archive. Archives are inherently political and though my archives are not without bias, as hard as I may try, I will always be human. In my spirit I am inclined to preserve the story of those who are suffering as well as the evils of the “victors”. My greatest hope in doing this work is that the genuine truth survives.