After some practice, I’ve come to consensus on the process of scanning a collection of artificial, human-originated information into the computer that principally is accessible by humans in a normal indoor “room-sized” environment. It is only a few simple steps.
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Document the information environment as-is. Your goal is to create some sort of coarse-grained image indicating generally how the unaltered environment appeared when you first found it.
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Reorganize the environment around optimal archival preservation storage and digital library scanning principles, and document the new environment organization. For example, like-sized papers should be stored together, all digital media storage disks/drives should be stored together, items should be sorted in chronological order, items should be easy and efficient to remove for scanning, etc.
- Footnote: Again, I reiterate, because this is important! Papers should be stored horizontally, not vertically.
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Perform restoration treatment. For example, often times in the case of paper, there are sub-optimally archived items such as curled or crinkled papers that need to be flattened. The best way to treat this is to store it in optimal orientation for at least a week.
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Create high-quality scans from the newly optimized and restored collection. Review the scanned material to check for poor scans or material that is missing a scan.
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When feasible, maintain and preserve the original information objects so that they can be re-scanned at a later date. The digital data you have on hand today is limited by the capacity of today’s imaging and digital data storage technology. Tomorrow’s technology will always be much more promising than what you have today, and you could just as well want to rescan the original objects with the newer technology, provided that they are sufficiently preserved.
Does this process extend to information about natural environments? In general, no. Due to the fact that the reorganization step is invasive, this process may not be applicable on natural environments. On the other hand, you could argue that sometimes artificial intervention in natural environments can be helpful for conservation or preservation.
In the discussion above, the steps described are limited to “room-sized” environments, the kind that are easily habitable by humans. Can these concepts also be extended to the microscale? Absolutely. In that case, it is merely a difference of technology. How about the mega-macroscale? That is far less certain, as we have very few technologies that are capable of operating in the mega-macroscale. In theory, if we had technology that could operate in that scale too, it could also make sense.
Why doesn’t everyone obey these rules? When some people go dropping objects, and other people go picking them up. Well, we know the answer to that… the moment you mention “shared culture,” that’s where things trail off. Nope, in general it can’t be guaranteed. But sure, if everyone acted upon these rules, the world would have less problems with loosing things that results in instigating increased production of artificial human waste volume.
- Footnote: For example, for a container with food in it, the food might need to be thrown out but the container should be saved and documented.
So, this is why we have “object trackers,” computer devices that “report to” the owner. Who owns this device? In the ideal case, it is only one person. However, sometimes we can make an exception to this assumption and assume that there exists a community of people with a reasonably consistent shared culture so as to effectively act as one “person,” i.e. a company acting as a “legal person.”
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Footnote: Of course, this doesn’t work, for example, if the object in question gets thrown out and doesn’t get retrieved before it gets destroyed in an incinerator. Unskilled archivists, i.e. the vast majority of people, are particularly prone to doing this.
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This issue is similar to the reason why news reporters all have their own microphones up in front of the President of the United States. Nobody trusts anyone else that their microphone will be the “true words” of the president. Essentially, there is no “shared culture” that can enable a modus operandi of only one microphone.
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Ownership is a very interesting question in relation to software code components. A distro developer copies someone else’s code, but they don’t have the humanpower to maintain it, so although the original code keeps getting updated, the copy of the code gets stale. The bottom line is that this phenomenon creates more opportunities for attackers to exercise exploits, regardless of who “owns” what.