It is time to turn our attention to a new discussion topic: "Digital Preservation." This topic was mentioned in passing by Peter Graham in Topic 7 on the "Library of the Future." Peter mentioned the importance of the commitment that libraries make in keeping and guaranteeing the availability of information in electronic form. This preservation commitment, he suggested, has wide implications for libraries, archives, and information centers. Paul Conway has agreed to moderate a discussion on these implications and on their meaning for the education of a new generation of information specialists.
Paul heads the Preservation Department at Yale University Library. He has an undergraduate degree in history from Indiana University and a master's degree in history from the University of Michigan. He completed a doctorate in 1991 at the University of Michigan's School of Information and Library Studies. At Yale, Paul manages "Project Open Book," which is a multi-year, multi-faceted study on the feasibility of converting preservation microfilm to digital image. He is widely published on the topic of digital preservation and even served as "cover guy" for Library Journal's February 1994 issue.
Thank you, Paul, for assuming the guest editorship of the CRISTAL-ED Mail List discussion group for this two-week discussion of preservation in the electronic library.
My Spin on the Matter To start this discussion on preservation in the digital world, I'll tip my hand a bit. I had the good fortune to work at the National Archives when the digital imaging revolution was sweeping through corporations and government agencies and was just beginning to penetrate the academic research community. It was clear to me in the late 1980s (and remains so today) that librarians and archivists do not necessarily share a common language or a common set of assumptions when we approach systems developers, vendors, or each other about our long-term needs and requirements. We need to form that language.
I now manage an imaging research and development project at Yale that is exploring the concept of feasibility in the broadest sense of the term. It is now even more apparent to me that we are at a crossroads. If the electronic text and digital imaging systems we are building in libraries and archives contain information with continuing value beyond the life expectancy of the initial system, then we have a special set of responsibilities for preserving this information. Some of our traditional preservation concepts map nicely on this new world and others do not.
Some Questions for Discussion
We welcome your suggestions for discussion topics at any time. Please message me with your suggestions. Our fall schedule is as follows:
Sept. 10 to 23 (currently under way):
Preservation in the ILS curriculum, guest editor: Paul Conway.
Sept. 24 to Oct. 7:
Management in the ILS curriculum, guest editor: Richard M. Dougherty.
Oct. 8 to 21:
Less-than-graduate education, guest editor: Jim Curtis.
Oct. 22 to Nov. 4:
Life-long learning, guest editor: Ray Metz.
Nov. 5 to 18:
Culture clashes, guest editor: Judith Segal.
Nov. 19 to Dec. 2:
To be announced soon.
Dec. 3 to 18:
Producing leaders, guest editor: Peter Underwood.
Dec. 19 to Jan. 3:
New topics discussion.
We appreciate the efforts of the many CRISTAL-ED members who are taking an active role in discussions as respondents and/or discussion leaders. As you teach your classes this semester, encounter sticky situations at work, ponder the future of the profession, consider bringing your thoughts to CRISTAL-ED as a discussion leader and/or respondent. We are always open to suggestions for new topics and hope that you will consider CRISTAL-ED as a forum for open discussion of issues that interest, intrigue, confuse, or overwhelm you.
Somebody needs to take on the role of preserving digital information. The libraries more or less took on the role for paper, but apparently did not see they had a role for turn of the century technology. I think the figure is that over 50 percent of all movies ever made no longer exist; I would guess the figure is at least that high for records of radio and TV broadcasts. In essence, no one worried about preserving the newer media until they noticed much of it was already gone. (You could make the same case for early photographs and their predecessors).
It seems preservation is still a legitimate role for "libraries" or "archives," or possibly a combination of the two.
As Paul Conway indicated, there is a dual problem of preserving the information and also making sure that the preservation medium remains accessible. This is very complicated -- e.g., should we set up a system for copying material into new formats/media every X years, try to ensure that older equipment and software remain available (at least in the preservation facilities), or what?
But -- why "digital"? At the moment, that appears to be the format of choice, but that could change. Outside the collector, do we really care about the format/medium as long as the information is preserved? (I know where this can lead -- we already wrestle with the questions "is a microfilm of a book really the same as the book, is a videotape of a film really the same?" -- but we still need to consider it).
I would agree that this is bigger than the LIS fields, but I suggest we ought to take the responsibility for organizing, proselytizing, etc. I don't think it's overstating the case to suggest a re-reading of 1984: I don't think trusting to either government or the marketplace is a viable approach to really preserving information, although both can have a role.
A question implied in Paul Conway's original posting, but not stated, is the issue of selection: given the increase in data, it seems unlikely that we should try to preserve everything. But who does the selecting, and under what criteria?
(Hope this gets some discussion going)
There are many facets to this issue, including the use of digital technology to preserve printed materials and/or archives and also the problems related to preserving the digital media itself. (I think we have all run into this second issue/problem at least once; for example, when we need to use a word processing file that may now be a few years old and our new software will no longer read the information.)
In this space I am most interested in discussing issues of preservation of digital information with regards to the authenticity of the information presented. In a digital world that gives multitudes the ability to publish and archive their own work, a need for standards exists to ensure the authenticity of the material. A fellow student posed the following situation:
An individual has published something on the WWW that I have used, and I would like to return to that source and re-use the information. First, I have no guarantee that the information will still be there for me to access. More importantly, I am not sure that it will still exist in its same form. Perhaps the author has changed his/her mind and altered the material since its initial posting? Should that person leave the old material there as well so that others may follow the thought patterns that have led to new conclusions? (I suppose this is referred to an "edition" in the print world.) Or is the old information lost?
I do not believe this situation would happen in a non-digital universe because what has been written is much more of a matter of public record. A scholar may change his/her viewpoint on something, but it would be extraordinarily difficult (if not impossible) to remove from the record an earlier position statement.
One very important function of libraries has been to preserve knowledge and the cultural contexts that produce that knowledge, a function that should not be neglected in a digital setting. It is understood that libraries probably will not bear this responsibility alone in a digital world. I do not claim to have the answers to such questions, but perhaps they will be a good place from which to begin to discuss issues of preservation in ILS curriculum.
Just a few comments...
Some of their leavings were accidental (fragments in burial mounds, lava-enshrined Pompeii) while others were intentional -- Stonehenge, cathedrals, and pyramids, for example. Examining these in more detail, Stonehenge was probably more a "place" than a "preservation," cathedrals were built to the glory of God and were constructed to be long-lasting without any concept of "preservation," and the pyramids are the only example I can think of where "preservation" was in the mind of the builders.
The fact is that "preservation" is something that has only recently become reasonably practicable and affordable -- I hate to think how many "annual Egyptian salaries" they cost, (but it answering the question may provide an answer to the old question "What's an Egyptian urn?").
Now that preservation is practicable, we are faced with the question of what to preserve, and what to let go. It seems that there may be many parallels with medicine and health care, where the technology to extend life exists and it is frequently applied even though the quality of post-surgery lifestyle is inferior, and the resources could have been better applied for society as a whole. We seem to lack a "moral" view of life (and death) which says that there comes a time to let people go, and not apply heroic efforts to keep them going for another month, or year. Finally, we do not attempt to "preserve" people for some future, undefined need, although if their work has been found important during their lifetime, copies of it will likely be preserved in printed form for some time.
Back to document preservation, if we were to ask the question, "What documents would we like to have been left by our forefathers that were not?" we could come up with a list as long as your arm. Grant these wishes, and I am guessing that all of the information could be contained in 100 optical CDs (or maybe one million) -- relatively small anyway for the eons of history and culture which they capture.
I don't see that we can keep everything -- we can't keep a perpetual tape running on all traffic in the Internet (which would of course only be a very small part of all of the documents being generated), and I think that there is a great danger that we will try to preserve everything that we cannot justify discarding. Our policy therefore has to be written around what can be kept not what can be discarded; and absent a constituency willing to move to retain it, the "delete" button becomes cyberspace's "grim reaper."
Perhaps we could establish a yardstick of how much information could be preserved per person as a function of prior trends of "valuable information retained per unit of population." Let's make "preservation" competitive, unless you want to privatize it and allow free-enterprise to preserve things for you.
I am arguing, therefore, that:
A) What technology will be used for preservation? I've seen microfilm, microfiche, magnetic, and optical CDs used progressively as storage media. Each technology obsoletes the equipment for making and reading (and it's the reading which is critical) of the stored documents. Are we going to perpetuate this trend, and if so, will we transfer microfilmed work to the new media? Books and written material have one predominant thing going for them: you don't need special equipment to read them (you may need language skills, but you don't need equipment).
B) As a matter of practice, if I see material which I find interesting or valuable, and which I think is unlikely to be re-accessible (= preserved), I am going to get or make a copy of it and preserve it myself. This applies particularly to material found on the Internet which is -- and should remain -- ephemeral. It is, after all, a highway, and is no place to park vehicles.
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