"The Perils of Digital Preservation"

This article focuses on information that is "born digital" and the issues associated with digital preservation today. Many of these topics have been covered extensively before and beg for a solution. This article does provide some strategies to begin a set of standards, again, to decide what to preserve, how to access it, and how to store it.

"Born digital information has no physical original to refer back to."

"Digital preservation is increasingly driven by the need to give wider
access to information, and often by the commercial imperative to turn that access into a revenue stream.
Preservation strategies must include a comprehensive audit trail and will almost certainly bring the IT and archivist's functions closer together.
Strategies should include the establishment of selection criteria, and investment in standards-based technologies compliant, for example, with the Public Records Office standards for records management."

Ford, P. (2003). "The perils of digital preservation." Information World Review.
http://www.vnunet.com/information-world-review/features/2084000/perils-digital-preservation

Digital preservation: a time bomb for Digital Libraries by Margaret Hedstrom

"The purpose of preservation is to ensure protection of information of enduring value for access by present and future generations (Conway, 1990: 206). Libraries and archives have served as the central institutional focus for preservation, and both types of institutions include preservation as one of their core functions. In recent decades, many major libraries and archives have established formal preservation programs for traditional materials which include regular allocation of resources for preservation, preventive measures to arrest deterioration of materials, remedial measures to restore the usability of selected materials, and the incorporation of preservation needs and requirements into overall program planning."

"Digital preservation raises challenges of a fundamentally different nature which are added to the problems of preserving traditional format materials. By digital preservation, I mean the planning, resource allocation, and application of preservation methods and technologies necessary to ensure that digital information of continuing value remains accessible and usable. I intentionally use the term "continuing" rather than "permanent" value to avoid both the absolutism and the idealism that the term "permanent" implies (O'Toole). My concept of digital preservation encompasses material that begins its life in digital form as well as material that is converted from traditional to digital formats.
Recording media for digital materials are vulnerable to deterioration and catastrophic loss, and even under ideal conditions they are short lived relative to traditional format materials. Although archivists have been battling acid-based papers, thermo-fax, nitrate film, and other fragile media for decades, the threat posed by magnetic and optical media is qualitatively different. They are the first reusable media and they can deteriorate rapidly, making the time frame for decisions and actions to prevent loss is a matter of years, not decades.
More insidious and challenging than media deterioration is the problem of obsolescence in retrieval and playback technologies"
The author continues on with a section on reserch and development of digital preservation formats including storage media, migration, conversion and management tools. Read more at
http://www.uky.edu/~kiernan/DL/hedstrom.html

The Digital Library Federation is committed to maintaining long-term access to the digital intellectual and scholarly record. They have a particular interest in practical initiatives and in research into most poorly understood areas.

In fall 2002, a small group of Digital Library Federation (DLF) members—spearheaded by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)—began the work of designing a central, shared registry of digital formats that all participating institutions may one day contribute to and use.

For more information and a list of other programs in the works please visit:

http://www.diglib.org/preserve.htm

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

Preservation efforts

The Preservation of records, cultural artifacts, laws, religious doctrines, historically significant documents, as well as simple notes, letters and diary entries are what we build on as a society to know our past, deal with our present and plan for our future. Today, our lives are flooded with information both new and old. Preservation today is a balance of caring for old documents, organizing new forms of information and keeping information accessible through preservation efforts. Rubin (2004) states that, "in an age in which there is great emphasis on new knowledge in electronic form, Preservation strategies remain critical if both important artifacts and intellectual content of items of the past are to survive." (p368) The Preservation of print materials begins with properly caring for materials while they are still new. Other measures to preserve paper documents includes buying materials on acid-free paper, maintaining proper humidity and temperature and using repair measures like re-binding and mending. Electronic sources of information have caused a series of new preservation issues and questions. One major issue facing preservation today is digitization, which is the main focus of this blog. Lester & Koehler (2007) explain that digital materials, unlike paper documents, require complex hardware and software in order to retrieve and interpret them. In many studies that have been carried out on the use of digital technology as a preservation technique, one question has been raised repeatedly, “Can we be assured that information stored digitally will be accessible in the future?” The answer currently is no. However, organizations including Stanford University, Google and The Library of Congress have projects in the works attempting to preserve digital collections. The LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) is digital preservation software created by Stanford University. “LOCKSS preserves digital content in a library-to-library network, just as multiple libraries keep copies of the same book” (Schneider, 2007) The Google Books Project is digitizing existing print materials in a digital library collection open to the public. The European Digital Library includes more than 40 European national and other libraries in a project to digitize their documents. (Lester & Koehler, 2007, p105)
Kuny, T. (1997). “A digital dark ages? Challenges in the preservation of electronic information.” 63rd IFLA Council and General Conference.
Lester, J. & Koehler, W.C. (2007). Fundamentals of Information Studies. Neal-Schuman Publishers, Inc.: NY.
Rubin, R. (2004). Foundations of Library and Information Science. (2nd ed). Neal-Schuman Publishers, Inc.: NY.
Schneider, K. (2007). “Lots of librarians can keep stuff safe.” Library Journal 132(13) p30-31

Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library Conservation Lab

I have mentioned here and there that I did an internship at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library in the Conservation Lab, but I have not had a chance to summarize some of the hands on preservation experience that I got while working there. According the the Conservation Book Repair: A Training Manual by Bonadea, one of the most important aspects of conservation is deciding what books to repair. Unlike most libraries, the ALPLM has an extensive budget for preservation work. Because of this they have state-of-the-art equipment, a full-time staff dedicated to preservation and a willingness to repair and restore any document that may need it. The workload for this department is never ending. The various other departments of the library and museum send items to the conservation lab for repairs as they are needed. Items for display, for use in the museum or reference materials that get frequent use take top priority.

Some of the most common repairs that I was able to participate in include:

Rips & Tears- Rips and tears are usually mended with Japanese repair tissue or with heat set tissue that is activated by a hot iron. (I got to do this all by myself)

Loose binding- To do this I used a long knitting needle and dipped it in PVA, (Polyvinyl Acetate) an adhesive, and then slid the needle down the loose inner hinge , while pushing the inside flap with a tool called a folder. Then the book sits in a press until the PVA has dried and it is as good as new.

Loose pages- If a page has fallen out of the book, you glue (PVA) a strip of repair tissue to the edge of the page. Once that is attached, you will "tip in" the page by brushing the adhesive to the strip and gluing it in place. Tissue paper is set inside so that glue doesn't stick to the neighboring pages. Then the book sits on a press to dry.

Boxing- Often books have deteriorated to the point that repair is not totally possible and they cannot be shelved. To remedy this situation a box can be made to fit the book perfectly and will house it on the shelf and protect it from further damage. I was able to make a box, but not on my own. This task involves measuring and mathematical equations to produce a box that fits each individual book like a glove.

These are some of the things that I got hands-on experience with, but there are many more preservation procedures that are much more complicated like sewing bindings, fixing covers, etc. Conservation Book Repair: A Training Manual is available online in full at http://www.library.state.ad.us/hist/hist_does/conman/conman.pdf it is a really great resource.

BonaDea, A. (1995). Conservation Book Repair: A Training Manual. Alaska Department of Education: Juneau, Alaska.

This is a really interesting article on the Dance Heritage Coalition that shows the depth of digital preservation and the variety of information that we as a society give importance to and therefore want to preserve. The article states:

"Videotape has become the archival storage medium for dancers and choreographers and popular belief within this community has always been that information stored on magnetic media is permanent. Magnetic tape has provided a medium to record and replay our dance history at will, but magnetic media have a very limited life span and playback machines quickly become obsolete. As a result, irreplaceable tapes are in peril and the probability is real of losing forever many of the moving images that have become the collective memory of all forms of dance. The emergency is especially critical within major institutions and repositories, including all of the Coalition member institutions, where rapidly deteriorating videotapes represent a major part of many archival collections. (For example, the New York Public Library, Dance Division estimates that it holds approximately 40,000 videotapes, representing virtually every type of dance practiced throughout the world.)
With this crisis in mind, the Dance Heritage Coalition has closely monitored the development of digital technology throughout the past few years. In a report to the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1997, the Coalition identified a critical need for the preservation of moving image and audio materials, particularly for dance recorded on videotape. A Technical Advisory Group was created in 1998 to guide and inform the Coalition in these matters. Drawing upon professional expertise in moving image video migration, the group proposed using dance as a model to address the complex issues surrounding the preservation of magnetic media.
Therefore, with funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Coalition called a meeting in July 2002 to design an experiment to determine the most appropriate method of transferring analog videotapes to digital for preservation purposes and using a variety of dance videotapes as the testing focus. In the case of dance videotapes, the digitization process will not only conserve the original object but will reduce the further deterioration of and provide access to rare, fragile, and vulnerable materials. By setting preservation standards, the outcomes expected from this project will have enormous resonance not only for the dance community, but for every major archival institution."

You can read more about the Dance Heritage Coalition at http://www.danceheritage.org/publications/dance_video_risks.html