Because of stuff I’ve been doing at work lately, and some recent conversations at code4lib in Seattle I’ve been getting more and more interested in archival description and the Web. When I first ran across Storify it seemed like it might provide some useful user interface ideas that could be used in archival description. I’ve been thinking how web content such as Wikipedia, authority records, etc could be easily referenced while composing descriptive text about a collection. And once this content has been referenced how can it be baked in so that the content is usable in the future?

The tweet led me over to his blog post on Gizmodo, which rankled my anti-authoritarian sensibilities a bit. This statement in particular got the blood pumping:

So it was time to actually look at the Curator’s Code itself. The instructions are pretty short and brief: use “via” and “HT” or their unicode equivalents ᔥ and ↬ respectively. I’ve already been sub-consciously using “via” for some time now, so a little bit of discussion about seems like a good idea.

Maria Popova has a more detailed description of the rationale behind the use of unicode characters. Strangely the discussion didn’t mention what I thought was going to be the primary reason for them: brevity. There have been similar efforts to use special unicode characters on Twitter (where real estate is scarce) before. There are already bookmarklets for easily creating links that use the correct unicode glyphs. But this led me to another post:

Ingram’s essential point is that if the past is any guide the Web will route around efforts to control the way citations are made, and more importantly that:

Groth mentions some serious work that has been going on at the W3C for expressing provenance on the Web. The challenge here I think is to have something with the simplicity of a microformat for expressing these semantics. Perhaps some additions to the Link Relations Registry that would let HTML authors use rel=“via” or whatever…This seems a bit more sensible to me than expecting people to all use the same obscure unicode characters at any rate.

I guess the back story here is that a lot of this discussion is the result of discussions going on at SXSW.

And has been amplified by venerable institutions like the the New York Times:

and The Atlantic:

And of course there is the requisite (and much welcomed) humorous take on the whole thing:

I for one hope the topic of curation and the Web continues. And in other news, Storify is kind of fun. I’m going to test out the export feature after I hit publish.