Unleash the Metadata!

I thought this Wired article, which describes how people in what was formerly East Germany are working to piece together surveillance documents produced (and then shredded) by the secret police was fascinating in a lot of ways that relate to our discussions.

We have huge amounts of information collected, which is of course interesting to librarians. This information was about private citizens, which is a whole spooky issue of its own. In a more blunt and obviously line-crossing way, it recalls questions of privacy today: who is collecting and keeping information on our credit card transactions, online activities, etc?

We have the attempt by the collecters to destroy the information, proving that preservation is not always a good thing for everyone: if it’s evidence of wrong-doing (or a sort of right-doing that one believes will later be seen as wrong-doing), it can cause problems. Sometimes the drive to preserve information has to battle with the drive to protect secrets—and sometimes this seems justified. (Should it be a person’s right to have personal records destroyed?) Where to draw these lines is always an interesting question.

We have attempts by historians and the subjects of the information to gain access to it. People saved hundreds of bags of torn paper and are now attempting to put pages back together in order to recreate those documents and look at that history. What will it tell about the individuals who were the subjects of the surveillance, and about the people and the system that collected the information?

We also have cool new technology, with the design of a system that, it is hoped, can scan and digitally reconstruct the pages; a hugely complex task “taking into account the varying textures and durability of paper, the different sizes and shapes of the fragments, the assortment of printing (from handwriting to dot matrix) and the range of edges (from razor sharp to ragged and handmade.)”

Preservation sure isn’t simple.