As I sit here watching my EAD files get indexed by Solr, I ask myself, “To what degree are we — the Code4Lib community — curating our content?”

Seriously, our “community” generates content, and the bulk of it takes three or four forms: the mailing list, the journal, the wiki, and conference agendas/schedules. How “important” is this content? While it my very well be backed up, and while it may very well be restorable, I wonder about its intrinsic values. What does the content say about our loose organization, librarianship, and the state of computers in libraries? If TCP (the “Internet”) was invented in 1983, and if Code4Lib has been in existence since 2004, then Code4Lib has been around for just more than 33% of the time of the Internet. Our content represents a slice of history. Is this significant? To what degree ought we apply some of our other library skills against our own content?

EAD indexing is done. Time to index some MARC data…

—
Eric Morgan