Two Work-Safe Tidbits about Archives and Erotica

First, via my associates at booktruck.org, I came across a review of the comic book Demonslayer v. 2.2, by a certain Marat Mychaels, et al. at Comics Should Be Good. While the fact that the reviewers pan the comic book seems only marginally of interest to those of us wading in archivy, I should draw your attention to a specific part of this issue. Apparently one of the characters goes to visit the Director of Archives at the New York Museum of Natural History, who has chosen to decorate his office in the style of some seemingly life-sized works by (fellow Peruvian) Boris Vallejo.

Secondly, everyone knows how much of a pain digital preservation is, particularly in terms of born-digital cultural materials. So, who should archivists and curators look to for guidance? Kurt Bollacker, digital research manager at the Long Now Foundation (and formerly of the Internet Archive), holds up the pornography industry as a potential leader of the pack. He states that he guarantees "that a wealth of pornography from the late 20th century will survive in digital distributed form (because) it's a social model that's working extremely well." If you read the rest of the article it's not clear if he's talking about just the producers trailblazing these distribution paths or the "consumers" as well (e.g. using peer-to-peer file sharing). Either way, though, I think this idea is a lot like the LOCKSS model for distributed preservation and Dan Chudnov's idea for preserving blogs using METS (or Atom) and BitTorrent. I've intended for a few weeks now to dedicate an entire post to Dan's idea, but after mentioning it in this one I feel like I've covered that sufficiently.