Archipel June 25th: an impression

Information doesn’t belong on an Island

Our memory is based on history, or at least the bits that we register. It is therefore important that we can be given a helping hand  in archiving historical facts. IBBT’s Archipel project  does just that.

We want to hold on to and archive everything that’s ever been written, filmed, built … as well as we can. However, the speed at which information is thrown at us is ever increasing, especially since the arrival of the Internet, which only makes the archiving problem more acute. In this digital age, when considering a solution,  digitization cannot be ignored. Traditional storage centers like museums and libraries are therefore in need of a thorough revision.

Digitizing in trial and error

Digitizing however is not without problems. IBBT studied this in the project BOM-Flanders: the storage and retrieval of multimedia data in Flanders. The idea was further concretized in the follow-up project Archipel.

An archipelago is a cluster or chain of isolated islands. The same can be said about multimedia data in Flanders; data is very isolated and fragmentized. Archipel aims to solve this by creating a dynamic network that allows easy access to information and where information can be added, explained IBBT-researcher Gert Nulens during the international convention “Memories of the Future”.

The impact of images on the social memory

Digitizing offers tons of advantages for archiving. Not only durability is guaranteed, it also allows connection between organizations such libraries, universities and heritage institutions. Negative aspects include the cost, the huge amount of inevitable copyright issues associated with digitizing and the ethical questions that arise due to the ubiquity of digital images.

The amount of information on the Internet, according to Geoffrey Bowker, Professor at the University of Pittsburgh ‘iSchool’, leeds to an inability to create own memories. Memories are created for us. The Internet doesn’t allow us to forget. Viktor Mayer-Scönberger, Professor at the national University of Singapore, adds that the Internet has changed the notion of privacy. Everybody knows everything about everyone. This has an inevitable impact on the shaping of our personal and social memory.

De Waalse Krook

In Ghent the idea of a centralized multimedia site where online and offline information is offered in an accessible way, is being concretized in the project “De Waalse Krook”.

This will be the new intersection between innovation, participation and knowledge economy. The realization is planned for 2015 and will be a collaboration between the Ghent City library, the center for new media (which includes IBBT) and the Flemish Government.