Maintenance

<blockquote class = “epigraph”>”Two basic systems: Development and Maintenance. The sourball of every revolution: after the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?” <footer>Mierle Laderman Ukeles</footer></blockquote> ![[IMG_0700.jpeg]]

Mierle Laderman Ukeles
Hartford Wash: Washing, Tracks, Maintenance: Outside, 1973
Part of Maintenance art Performance Series, 1973-4.
Performance at Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT.

Gerry McGovern, who ought to know, once said that “[[digital is more maintenance than creation]].” He’s right, but I’m not sure it’s just digital.

I once heard the Library of Alexandria’s collection development policy described as the most effective in history: When ships docked at their busy port or caravans came in, they would confiscate all books, make copies, and return the copies while keeping the originals. I haven’t verified this, but it has a certain ruthlessness that I think appeals to librarians, and the library certainly did grow rapidly. The problem is, the books they were working with at this point in history were papyrus scrolls.

Papyrus as a medium is fragile; it’s susceptible to damp and needs to be recopied every generation or two. The Library of Alexandria was so large and grew so fast that copying so much so quickly was never going to be possible. The real trick is maintenance, not acquisition, and it’s all too easy for a collection to crumble under its own weight.

I have some sympathy for this, since I spent years doing IA for a site that had a similarly swashbuckling acquisition policy (“We’ll make wild promises and convince your boss to shut your site down, give us all your pages!”) and quickly found itself buckling under the weight of tens of millions of documents. The lifespan of markdown is apparently even shorter than that of papyrus, but it sure is faster.

A failure of maintenance is a failure to account for the taskscape at work in whatever you’re building. You don’t just have stuff, you have a set of processes that result in stuff. You’d better hope it’s the stuff you want. This is how organizations earn their architecture, by the quality of their everyday communication.

Development is often aimed at more efficient maintenance, but you have to think and work differently to get there versus to stay there. It’s hard to do both.

References

Pettegree, A., & der Weduwen, A. (2021). The library: A fragile history . Basic Books.

Mierle Laderman Ukeles. Manifesto! Maintenance Art – Proposal for an Exhibition . 1969.