Thank you.
This has been a fascinating discussion. When I'm not wearing my political hat, one of my other hats I wear is oral historian. I have 20-some years of doing oral interviews.
I find that technology giveth and it taketh away. I'm excited in terms of the role of the citizen archivist today, but changing technology does continually provide issues.
For example, I'd like to think that I know pretty much every historic photo taken in the early boom town of Cobalt. I've been in the archives for hours and hours. I know there's a computer project in there. They were setting up this historic...and they had a photo on the front. I asked where the photo had come from; I'd never seen it. They showed me a whole bunch of these photos, and they were fascinating.
I asked them, “What archives did you go to?”, and they said, “We didn't go to any archives. We just went to Flickr.” Then I tried to track down this guy on Flickr who's got these extremely rare photos. I tracked down this guy from British Columbia, who has photos that nobody's ever seen before. I still can't even figure out where they came from.
So the citizen's library is out there, and more and more citizens are engaging. But the downside is that over the last 20-some years, lots of research has been put on the “latest technology”. There were hundreds of interviews of mining widows done on these big floppy discs. It's all junk now. Nobody kept hard copies. The only thing I've ever found reliable is hard copies. I've done interviews on minidiscs. Now I can't find a minidisc to play them on. And that was cutting-edge technology five years ago.
Are there recommendations that should be given to the amateur community historians out there who are creating culture today and recording it so that it's not redundant or unusable in two or three years time? Are there standards that we should be starting to show people about how to gather interviews, to gather digital photos, how to keep them? Because it seems to me there's a phenomenal opportunity, but a lot of stuff might just end up being unusable if we continue to change formats.