Conference Agenda

Since 2023 the National Library of the Netherlands (KBNL) is proud to curate a digital collection that has become UNESCO world heritage: the Digital City (De Digitale Stad, henceforth: DDS). Material belonging to this collection consists of an original freeze from 1996, as well as two student projects and miscellaneous material that was contributed by users and founders over the course of multiple events. The two student projects were the first attempt to revive the portal of DDS and store it as a disk image. The two groups of students used two methods for this reviving: one based on emulation, the other based on migration. But what choices were made during restoration and which version is more authentic? Furthermore, KBNL has several websites, scientific articles and newspaper clippings in its collections that might serve as context information. Do we consider this context information crucial for understanding DDS or do we rather leave users to find these resources by themselves if they are interested?

Even without considering the plethora of archival material that currently is DDS, the original portal already was a mixed bag of different protocols. Most of them are currently not mainstream anymore like IRC and Usenet newsgroups and were never part of DDS itself but only linked to. The portal also consisted of links to offsite websites not archived, like some of the users homepages or ‘houses’. The original hardware – not part of the collection - was running on proprietary software that is now thoroughly obsolete. There was a multi-user dungeon where users could program their own objects but this depended on real-time user interaction. Some of the functionality depended on live data which isn’t available anymore, like who was logged in. The original software was command-line and based on Freenet-software. Shortly after the initial launch an HTML-interface was introduced. Even then the command-line interface stayed available for less-privileged users. The navigation of the HTML-version relied heavily on image maps that require a binary executable to function correctly. From newspaper evidence we can gather that sometimes functionality wasn’t available or stopped working. There was both a general part of the portal and a personalized part based on login, the latter also containing email. There have also been cases of harmful or polarizing content being published in newsgroups. At the time the norm was self-regulation by the community and laissez-faire but time has moved on and our users may have come to expect a more active approach of regulation, or at least some form of acknowledgement, from us as heritage organizations.

As can be seen from this description, there is a lot of complexity when we consider archiving DDS and making it accessible to our users. We can think of a lot of difficult dilemmas when making decisions on what to archive and how to present it. Do we want users to experience how it is to create a homepage in DDS or do we want to present a historically correct picture of the homepages existing at the time? What should be considered part of the object and what part of the context? Is the migrated or the emulated version more authentic? What is more important, the privacy of the original users or providing full access to researchers? What do we consider belonging to DDS and what not? Only the HTML? Or also any news group material that might still be online but isn’t part of the archival material? Do users want a real authentic experience or rather a convenient way of viewing the content?

Even though DDS was a Dutch portal, it was based on software of the American Free-nets and inspired other cities in Europe and Asia. Therefore, we think this case might have a lot of recognizable features that also apply to the archiving of other legacy portals. Arguably, there are no right or wrong answers. They are typically dilemmas where multiple options have both benefits and drawbacks. In our workshop we want to present a couple of these real-world dilemmas to participants to stimulate discussion based on principles of reflective questioning and open dialogue. The idea is that we present a few cases related to DDS that participants can discuss in groups. Each group has to choose a preferred solution and present their reasoning to the group. People are encouraged to explore the reasons for choosing one or the other, for instance by reflecting on their own organizational context or personal assumptions regarding digital preservation. We try to stay away from providing clear cut answers or guidance but rather provide participants with the opportunity to explore these questions together. Participants will learn how to ask the right questions to delve deeper into their own reasoning process during decision making, based on our method of reflective questioning. Participants should be able to use this method and the cases presented to benefit their own curatorial decision making process regarding legacy webportals in their own collections. For KBNL, the group discussions may provide important community input and food for thought on some of the decisions we are going to be making regarding DDS in the near future.