On 29/01/2016 08:59, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
I am sure the future historians would be much happier if we simply had
someone do interviews with current collaborators and find out what
they are up to.
Looking at the digital detritus is another dimension to the record of
course. But that only captures what people did, not why they did it.
Oral history interviews are indeed a valuable resource, but they complement
(or contradict) the written record rather than replace it.
The problem future historians will have with the IETF (and the W3C, and ITU-T,
and ETSI, you name it) is probably not too little information, but the opposite.
When you work on the early history of electronic computing, or even the early
history of networking, there isn't actually a shortage of material and a lot
of it is on the web. But it's finite, because it depends on what was considered
worth keeping on paper in the 1940s-1960s. You can find pretty much everything
technical that Alan Turing wrote, but you can't find his shopping lists. For
more recent events (just take the IPng selection process as an example) you can
find more than any historian of IPng could ever want.
What I want to say is this: Archiving too much is just as bad as archiving
too little, from the future historian's point of view.
That's not to say that we shouldn't consider long-term archiving, but an
important aspect is deciding what not to archive.
Brian