Free Information

I'm headed to my first ever Oscars-watching party later today, and I've a good bit of study to do before then, but I saw something online and felt I should share it. I've become interested in data security recently, and I've been reading everything I can get my hands on about the subject. Cory Doctorow is a copyright activist and journalist who writes a lot about digital rights and has an impressive amount of fiction under his belt, too. Here, he talks about a keynote address he gave at the 2014 Museums and the Web Conference. 

Via Craphound:

The information age is, in many ways, the beginning of history
It’s a moment at which every person is swiftly becoming an archivist of her own life, a curator of billions of blips of ephemeral communications and ruminations and interactions
As any archaeologist who’s ever rejoiced at finding a midden that reveals how normal people lived their lives in antiquity can tell you, this ephemera, so rare and badly preserved through most of our history, is of incalculable value
Which would you rather see: an oil painting of a Victorian monarch, a ramrod stiff photo of your great-grandmother in her confirmation smock, or a hundred transcripts of the conversations she shared with her peers and her family?
The tools by which we accomplish this archival business are, of course, computers
Carried in our bags and pockets, worn in and on our bodies
There is one group of people in the world who understand how archiving works, who understand the importance of the ephemeral en masse, who can steer us to personal and cultural practices of preservation, archiving, dissemination, and access — it’s you, the museum sector
Just as librarians — who have toiled for centuries at the coalface of information and authority, systematizing the process of figuring out which sources to trust and why — are more needed than ever now, when we are all of us required to sort the credible from the non-credible every time we type a keyword into a search box
So too are curators and archivists more needed than ever, now that we are all archiving and curating all the live-long day