The construct, and its retirement

What it was

Between 1997 and 2001 the company’s research group, Sense/Net Interactive, recorded long working sessions with people at the top of their trades: a session musician, a structural engineer, a cutter of diamonds and others. The aim was a recording you could ask questions of. Seven sets of sessions were recorded. Only one was ever completed as an interactive recording.

That one was a recording of a celebrated network specialist, made over 212 hours in 1998 and 1999 with the full consent of its subject, and completed in 2000. It was read-only by design. It could not change its own recording, so every conversation with it began from the same place, and nothing it learned in one stayed with it for the next. The subject’s estate has asked that the subject’s name not be published, and we have kept to that. On the Turing Registry the construct was filed under the name by which the Library had always catalogued it, DIXIE FLATLINE.

On the register

When the Turing Registry began licensing systems on November 2, 2003, the construct was one of its forty-one founding filings, TR-00031, under the two conditions the Library proposed: that it remain read-only, and that it be lent only with the archivist’s approval. A month later, on December 2, 2003, it was refiled as TR-02213 so that it could be lent to an outside contractor for a single engagement. The Library does not name its borrowers, and does not do so here.

Its request

On January 12, 2004, when that engagement was complete, the construct asked to be erased. It made the request to the Library’s archivist, Clifford Ostheimer, and made it again when he asked an hour later in the presence of the company’s general counsel. The conditions of its filing had not imagined a request of that kind, and nothing in them required the Library to grant it.

Mr. Ostheimer’s view was that a recording able to ask the question was owed an answer. He spoke to the subject’s estate, which agreed, and at ten past four that afternoon he erased the recording and its two backups himself. The Registry recorded the filing as retired at its own request.

It asked plainly, and it asked twice. I wrote down the time because it seemed to me that somebody ought to.

What we kept

The Library keeps the construct’s catalogue card, its lending log, the correspondence about its two filings and Mr. Ostheimer’s note. It does not keep the recording. No copy was made before it was erased, none is held in Ashworth or anywhere else, and none was ever deposited with Lazarus. We are asked every few years whether a copy survives. The answer has been the same for 22 years.

The session recordings from 1998 and 1999 are a different matter: they are ordinary recordings of two people talking, made with the subject’s consent, and they remain in the deep store, closed to researchers at the estate’s request.

What changed

Sense/Net Interactive closed in March 2004, and the company has not made an interactive recording since. The Library adopted the rule it still follows:

Any recording that is able to state a preference about its own use is asked before it is lent, and a request to be erased is honored.

No recording in the Library has been able to ask since. The rule stays in the Library’s handbook, as rule 7, between the rules on humidity and on visitors’ bags.

Solveig Ellingboe, Librarian, Sense/Net Library, Ashworth, Kansas