Last Friday Taylor and I got lucky enough to chat with Corinne Guimont and Alex Kinnaman of Virginia Tech’s Libraries to discuss the multi-headed hydra that is archiving in today’s diverse and uneven ecosystems of media. As was a theme with Dr. Amanda Licastro in an earlier episode, the questions around archiving everything from bespoke applications to physical collections to virtual reality and emulation was on the table for discussion.
It was really awesome to have such generous and knowledgable guests, and they were even tolerant—possibly compelled?—of my steering the discussion towards the fate of university technical infrastructures in the age of AWS. Like Kathleen Fitzpatrick and others, I’ve been trying to imagine potential alternatives to the major tech providers and even the most unlikely idea that some of that infrastructure might somehow move back into the hands of universities in some sort of co-located utopia. Part of this means re-investment, and there’s a big question around the austerity plague ever subsiding; it being more likely the only unicorns that’ll ever appear will be billionaire type.
All that said, the video does nothing if not highlight how committed both Alex and Corinne are to a vision of open scholarship and a web premised on sharing and caring—giving me all sorts of much needed inspiration.
