Digital Dark Ages

I found a really interesting, pessimistic, but true, article on digital preservation efforts. Kuny outlines why he believes we are in the digital dark ages and ways to possibly remedy the issues facing digital preservation. It is agreed that the Internet has changed everything as far as information production, retrieval, storage, archiving and preserving, to name a few. Information professionals are not only concerned with these physical issues, but also on the impacts of the new technologies on society. Kuny (1997) says that "one important impact that these new technologies have on society is how we are to preserve the historic record in an electronic era where change and speed is valued more highly than conservation and longevity."(p. 1)

Kuny provides observations on the present environment of digital preservation to explain why we are living in what he calls the "digital dark age." Some of these are as follows:

• Enormous amounts of digital information are already lost forever.
• Many large data-sets in governments and universities world-wide have been made obsolete by changing technologies and will either be lost or subject to expensive "rescue" operations to save the information
• Unstable and unpredictable environment for the continuance of hardware and software over a long period of time represents a greater challenge than the deterioration of the physical medium
• Financial resources available for libraries and archives continue to decrease and will likely do so for the near future
• Increasingly restrictive intellectual property and licensing regimes will ensure that many materials never make it into library collections for preservation
• The challenge in preserving electronic information is not primarily a technological one, it is a sociological one.
• Corporate survival in the competitive capitalist democracy ensures the fundamental instability of hardware and software primarily because product obsolescence is key to corporate survival.

Kuny (1997) puts it quite bluntly by saying, "No one understands how to archive digital documents...Sustainable solutions to digital preservation problems are not available."(p. 4) We cannot archive the entire Internet. The key is selecting which digital resources to preserve and which ones not to preserve. To do this librarians and archivists must develop digital collection development and evaluation guidelines to assist in this process. Some other options discussed in this report are putting digital information on microfilm or printing out as documents on acid-free paper and then carrying out traditional preservation techniques. This, of course, is not an option for all digital materials.

The last issue that I will discuss from this article is the management of rights and access controls for digital objects. Kuny (1994) states that, "a library may have the rights to access and use electronic materials, but the right to preserve the materials may not be the same thing." (p. 8) Licensing and related issues are just another aspect of the complications concerned with digital preservation.

Kuny, T. (1997). "A digital dark ages? challenges in the preservation of electronic information" 63rd IFLA Council and General Conference.

http://www.ifla.org.sg/IV/ifla63/63kuny1.pdf