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T A B L E__T A L K

Does spelling matter in cyberspace? Come to Table Talk's Digital Culture area and add your voice.

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R E C E N T L Y

Survival of the chicest
By Thomas Lewis
A review of Steven Pinker's "How the Mind Works"
(12/15/97)

21st briefing
By Scott Rosenberg
Feds 1, Microsoft 0 -- but the game's only started
(12/12/97)

License to code
By Greg Lindsay
Universities experiment with ways to cash in on software research
(12/12/97)

Let's Get This Straight
By Scott Rosenberg
Drudge falls for Yahoo hackers' nonsense
(12/11/97)

The girl-game jinx
By Elizabeth Weil
Can selling computer games to girls be reduced to a science?
(12/10/97)

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BROWSE THE
21ST ARCHIVES

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BY JACK MINGO | Teddy Roosevelt shakes hands with John Muir in Yosemite National Park. Industrialists dress in drag for a 1906 theatrical production at the Bohemian Club's redwood retreat. Unspoiled nature, 19th century slums, earthquake ruins, a peek into prison life -- thanks to the University of California's Heritage Project, these are just a few of more than 28,000 rare, antique photos you can explore if you have Internet access and a fast modem (or a great deal of patience). Add some Edison cylinder and ragtime player-piano recordings downloaded from other Web sites, and you can have a multimedia turn-of-the-century flashback.

The brave new world of computers was not supposed to be like this, of course. For most of the century, futurists have been predicting that by now we'd be wearing bright polyester Devo uniforms, naming our children "Dweezil" and "Moon Unit," looking at live-cam images from Mars and saddling our public places with inane monikers like "Xanadome" or "3Com Park."

Well, OK, a few of those predictions did come true. But the computer age has also made it possible to look backward in time more vividly than ever. Computer "memory" has come to have a dual connotation, providing a way for Americans to collectively remember some of the history we've been trying so hard to forget. At scores of Web sites, academic and amateur historians are putting up information that, up until a few years ago, would have been circulated to a small circle of scholars, then buried in an academic graveyard and forgotten.

That was also pretty much the fate of archival photos: For decades, millions of photos have been essentially buried in the archives of the University of California at Berkeley, exhumed only occasionally for qualified scholars. With Internet access, the digital images can be "democratized," made available to anybody interested for whatever reason.

"Normally, libraries don't make raw data available to more than a relative handful of people," says archivist Daniel Pitti. "The academics, the authors, the Ken Burnses of the world take the information and sift it, filter it and interpret it for the general public. We're giving people the opportunity to have contact with the raw material, minimally interpreted."

Berkeley's Heritage Project was Pitti's brainchild. He coordinated the project from its start in 1993 until March of this year, when he set out for brave new archiving worlds at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. In working at Cal, Pitti says that his biggest problem was setting up the database's architecture and finding the search engine to make it usable: How would you go about putting 28,000 specimens of anything in one place, reserving the capacity to add a lot more, yet making it possible to find exactly what you're looking for in a reasonable amount of time? Twenty-eight thousand sounds like a lot, but in Pitti's mind, that was a mere demonstration of what could really be done with enough time and funding. "We chose less than 1 percent of a collection that numbers between 3.5 million to 5 million photos," says Pitti. "The fact that we haven't been able to pinpoint a figure more exact than that is testimony to our lack of control over it. Cataloging the images as we go through this is a way to move that process along, too."

The photos were selected by several criteria. First of all, they had to be documentary evidence of historical interest, with a heavy emphasis on California and the West. Within that, the staff selected photos that would support courses and research currently occurring on campus. Finally, they looked at which collections were endangered. Some photos are just not aging well; others are simply being loved to death. "Certain collections are very popular -- the 6,000 photos we have of the relocation of Japanese Americans during World War II, for example," says Pitti. "Even though we've limited access to credentialed academics, the original documents are still beginning to show signs of wear. We've identified that the digital version will serve 95 percent of all research needs, which will significantly reduce wear and tear on the originals."

N E X T_P A G E | Cops, criminals, opium fiends