Trevor Owens (Library of Congress) has written an intriguing post on The Signal that considers the future direction of interfaces to digital collections by examining the rescue of Geocities data by a group of digital preservationists known as the Archive Team. Owens explains:
Through data dumps of full sets of raw data, cultural heritage organizations can consider embracing the fact that they don’t need to provide the best interface, or for that matter much of any interface at all, for digital content they agree to steward. Instead, a cultural heritage organization can agree to acquire materials or collections which are considered interesting and important, but which they don’t necessarily have the resources or inclination to build sophisticated interfaces to if they are willing to simply provide canonical homes for the data, offer information about the provenance of the data, and invest in dedicated ongoing bit-level preservation. This approach would resonate quite strongly with a more product less process approach to born digital archival materials.
