This paper presents the case that a potential disaster is looming--the failure to communicate a reliable and authentic cultural record documenting the beginning of the digital era and recommends that as a matter of policy, we enforce those procedures now in place at the point of record creation. In addition, we must promote strong public policies that ensure the preservation and trustworthiness of the electronic record for the long-term while guarding the rights of individuals to privacy now. We must enforce the policies now in place to manage electronic records and also identify criteria that will help us determine, at the point of record creation, those records that will have continuing value in the future as documentation of our cultural record.

The products of the new electronic communication and information technologies are as Grudin and Poltrock (1997) refer to them, artifacts. Others have faced this same dilemma concerning artifacts and the cultural record in the past. French historians Langlois & Seignobos in 1898 (1912) referred to the cultural record of that time as documents and left us with a concise thought to ponder, "No documents, no history"[p. 17].Two specific key issues that merit our attention and collaborative efforts in long-range planning are preservation of the cultural record and the reliability and authenticity of the record. Lyman and Besser (1998) comment on this with reference to the creation of digital documents, but their statement applies to all forms of the digital record.

We face a type of "productivity paradox" (Dunlop & Kling, 1991) because accelerated use of technologies in homes and workplaces fosters an intensely productive society complete with a large documentary heritage in many digital forms. Our use of new technologies is so young and immature that the organizational structures needed to capture and preserve the evidence, the stories, the messages, the documents, the records, and the linkages that give these data context are not yet fully formed. We must take the steps necessary to preserve our digital records so that we preserve not only the socially valuable historical consciousness of our time, but also provide the academic, scholarly, and public communities of the future with data they will need to interpret and critique our society.

The Commission on Preservation and Access (1996) poses this series of provocative questions to illustrate the problem of preserving technologies that face rapid obsolescence:

Because most data created today are encoded in digital form to be used in information processing devices, we focus preservation concern on the longevity of the (a) medium on which information is stored, (b) information technology devices used for storage, and (c) systems that permit us to interpret what is stored. The complex challenges include creating effective organizational strategies to manage new technologies and providing funding for the ongoing expense of refreshing data, migrating it to new systems as they are invented, and implementing emulation solutions that recreate original functionality on new systems.

We must also develop selection criteria so that we select for preservation those cultural and institutional resources or assets that merit the substantial investments required over time. Smith (2000) recommends a series of actions: (a) invest in the selection and creation of digital resources that have a high probability of use and reuse over time; (b) address preservation concerns from the ground up, including adequate quality capture and review, requisite metadata, and the use of standard, well-supported technologies at the point of creation; (c) avoidance of the human tendency to apply short-term solutions to long-term problems; and (d) establishment of a "social security fund" to provide perpetual care for digital institutional resources that are the outcome of our new technologies.

Collaborative work across institutions and professions will be necessary to make progress in these difficult areas where each step is compounded in difficulty by the speed with which the information and communication technologies are changing and the sheer quantity of digital production in this culture. Halem et al. (1999) describe the essence of the crisis as follows: "Since it could take a decade to migrate a peta-byte of data to a new media for preservation, while the life expectancy of the storage media itself is only a decade, it may not be possible to complete the transfer before a non-recoverable data loss occurs" (p. 1).

We truly face a potential disaster if we do not establish the colloborative planning efforts and policies needed to preserve our record. The key economic resource of our era is knowledge, an astounding shift from what has gone before. It is up to us to invent the organizations, structures, and tools that will provide for the preservation of this knowledge. At the same time, we must provide controls so that those who come after us will know that the record we chose to preserve is trustworthy. This leads us to the second specific issue of reliability and auathenticity.

We are now able to produce "stunning fidelity" using digital cloning, but this exciting capability raises a large question for those who value maintaining a reliable representation of their work. How will we distinguish the original from the copy and assure that the original remains unaltered over time? The usefulness and value of our cultural record will be questioned if we do not create organized structures that can authenticate our products by documenting their provenance, providing version control, and validating the integrity and reliability of each transaction over time--creating authenticity.

The complex linkages that illustrate the context of the transactions and give the record meaning must also be maintained to create authenticity. These elements of reliability and authenticity apply to both the physical and intellectual properties of the digital cultural record. As the digital cultural record assumes the role of its print ancestors, it becomes apparent that collaborative action is needed to develop standards and methods to preserve records. Work spanning many disciplines of research and study is needed to develop and routinize practices that will preserve an authentic record that is able to maintain its physical and intellectual reliability and remain safe from the age-old problems of accidental change and intended fraudulent change.

Until recent times, the markers we have used to authenticate have relied on the physical media--the carrier itself, the ink, the paper, and the physical tests that can date this media. These tried, tested, and trusted mechanisms are not applicable to the digital record. Again, our structures and systems have not yet re-organized and matured to detect forgeries in the digital realm or forestall their creation. Our print publication systems provide version control and edition statements that, as Lynch (1996) points out, establish a single canonical version with the act of publication. With electronic artifacts, however, another expectation is at work in our culture. The work, once placed on network-based systems, is open for addition, change, evolution, and alteration with the hope that the combined contributions from many scholars from around the globe will result in new knowledge and value. This is quite different from the view of a fixed permanent record and Lynch earnestly suggests that although print-based systems do provide a good model that should carry forward into the new networked communication environments, we need to shift our thinking to include collaborative exchanges that reflect the intentional combined contributions from diverse places, people, and institutions.

An archival document is reliable when it is valid proof of the fact(s) related in the document. For example, in business, some records are deemed vital and are required to exhibit proof of invention, monies owed, real estate transactions, legal existence, etc. In our private lives, proof of our birth, death, and real property transactions are all records that need to be certified and are normally protected from theft, fraud, or loss both through developing and enforcing laws and using common sense. This principle of providing proof in the print world needs to carry forward into the new networked communication environment.

Ketelaar (1997) suggests that to provide the level of trust necessary to assure reliability and authenticity, we must standardize our systems so that: (a) certain transactions merit a specific format recognizable as a valued transaction; (b) fixed elements are defined: e.g. time, place, signature; and (c) a standardized process is followed as a document proceeds through various stages of existence. The creator bears the responsibility of integrating these standards and conventions into everyday information and communication exchanges.

Anthropologist English-Lueck (1998) reports that in the informated household, rules are created to control family roles: "You must wear your pager," "You must not use the computer during dinner," "You must carry your cell phone." In the same way, workplace controls need to be in place concerning the creation and documentation and authentication of the workplace record. "You must follow the filing structure for saving documents," You must adhere to the version control systems available," and "You must follow security procedures." The user, whether this is someone inquiring tomorrow or one hundred years from tomorrow, must be able to trace the record back to the point of creation and also trace with certainty how the record, object, or artifact that was first created has changed over time. Those records, whether created by the President of the United States using an email system or an ethnographer studying peoples' use of the Internet in year 2001, need to be created using standard and routine procedures for tracking and authenticating the author, place, and time of creation. In addition, those records that are likely to have continuing value need to be preserved in a manner that documents each migration to a new format or platform of use and ensures authenticity over time.

We have not yet developed the organizational structures necessary to preserve and authenticate our creations. Without these structures, our ability to communicate the story of this emergent digital era to those who will come after us is seriously endangered. English-Lueck (1998) tells us that informated households contain a critical mass of at least five information devices including some combination of answering machines, voice mail services, pagers, computers, cellular phones, fax machines, VCRs, and CDs. This mass of new technologies is changing family roles, blurring boundaries between work and home, and generating larger social initiatives in our neighborhoods and communities. We generally view these activities and changes as progress and a sign of our time. But will we be able to document the story of these societal shifts for future interested parties to trace and study?

The letters, diaries, and documents that unveiled the story of the family and our workplaces in years past now are fewer in number as the shift to use of new communications technologies takes place. Handwritten diaries are replaced by Palm Pilots and word processors. Letters illustrating everyday experiences are replaced with ephemeral email messages Documents such as bank statements, tax returns, mortgage documents, school records, medical records, and other data that tell the story of our lives now are increasingly electronic at their point of creation. Loss of the ability to communicate the stories these artifacts convey in an accurate, reliable, and trustworthy manner deserves serious attention. Future generations will not only be concerned with the end-product information created in this era, they will also want to know who created it and how. They will want to know where the artifact originated and its entire chain of custody since that time. They will want the ability to distinguish the copy from the original and be able to trace all versions of the important cultural records.

Developing the complex structures necessary to meet these needs and communicate our cultural record requires collaborative work and long range planning. It is imperative that the complex structures and policy decisions necessary to provide for enforcement of the structures be put into place. Privacy rights will need to be guarded for individuals as well as the rights of those who will come after to this information of continuing value.

It is sometimes said that disasters are the motivator of progress and innovation. It would truly be a disaster to wait so long to respond to the challenges discussed in this paper that we are unable to recover the knowledge that has been collectively created using communication and information technologies invented in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries. Our cultural heritage is at stake if we, in our enthusiastic rush to embrace new technologies, fail to think deeply about the issues and collaborate to craft solutions that will preserve trustworthy artifacts that can be communicated to future generations. We must use all of our diverse and relevant skills and take action to (a) preserve the digital objects created in our highly networked environments, being careful as we do so to (b) assure that the reliability and authenticity of each object is maintained along with the linkages that provide context for it, so that we are able to (c) communicate the cultural record of our time. We must work and plan together. As Chapman (1996) points out, "Solutions to the productivity paradox are more complicated than we thought. A technical fix is not available. Remedies involve turning engineers into amateur sociologists, anthropologists into technical experts, and workers into self-managers. The problems are human and organizational, not primarily technical." Let's get busy, then. We have much work to do.

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