Moulaison Sandy Heather - Digital Preservation for Libraries, Archives, and Museums

Digital Preservation for Libraries, Archives, and Museums

Digital Preservation for Libraries, Archives, and Museums

Edward M. Corrado and Heather Lea Moulaison

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

Lanham Boulder New York Toronto Plymouth, UK

Published by Rowman & Littlefield

4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706

www.rowman.com

10 Thornbury Road, Plymouth PL6 7PP, United Kingdom

Copyright 2014 by Edward Corrado and Heather Moulaison

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Corrado, Edward M., 1971

Digital preservation for libraries, archives, and museums / Edward M. Corrado and Heather Lea Moulaison.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8108-8712-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8108-8713-8 (ebook) 1. Digital preservation. 2. Preservation metadata. 3. Electronic information resourcesManagement. I. Moulaison, Heather Lea. II. Title.

Z701.3.C65C67 2014

025.8'4dc23

2013034021

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Foreword

Michael Lesk

Digital preservation is not a problem; it is an opportunity. Until recently we accepted that many creative activities, from poetry reading to broadcast interviews, would be transitory. Even the average written piece of paper would be lost, not because the paper would necessarily turn yellow (we have learned how to make acid-free paper) but because nobody could afford the costs of retaining the paper, describing what was on it, and remembering where it was. Today digital technology is cheap and accessible to everyone. Architects today neither have to worry about the space required to store models of buildings nor about the permanence of cardboard, balsa wood, and foamboard; instead, computer-aided design (CAD) models are universally used and stored. Digital cameras today are so small and cheap that the BBC put cameras on the collars of fifty cats in a rural town and recorded what the cats did all day, producing a program called The Secret Life of the Cat (BBC Horizon).

The explosion in quantity produces an explosion in our need to preserve and organize. The cats may be able to take pictures but not yet to tag these pictures with descriptions (and, my wife observed, these cats need to learn about composition). Im not worried about the BBC, which has an admirable record of retaining its history. We can still hear what William Butler Yeats sounds like because he read his poems on BBC radio in the 1930s. But how does one make this kind of preservation happen?

Unfortunately a large fraction of what has been said about digital preservation has focused on technology: tapes wear out, disks have head crashes, and so on. I am one of the authors who wrote too much about this twenty years ago, not realizing that the media problems would become insignificant compared to the organizational issues. Digital copies are perfect: they are exactly the same as the original, and so multiple copies are nearly always the best answer to the fear of information loss. And so long as the price of disk drives declines by half every eighteen months we can afford to keep the copies of anything we could afford to copy in the first place. But, to repeat, the problem is not about the weaknesses of media; it is about the weaknesses of organizations and knowledge.

The late Jim Gray used to say, May all your problems be technical, expressing his frustration with the complexities of economic, legal, social, and organizational issues. Digital preservation is a fine example: it is not about knowing the mean time to failure of a flash drive but about creating an organizational system that will make our information available in the future. Carving hieroglyphic inscriptions into stone blocks on pyramids did not guarantee intelligibility centuries later; only the accidental survival of the Rosetta Stone, with the same text in both hieroglyphs and Greek, enabled that. Worse yet, we still have difficulty with ancient Mayan texts as a result of deliberate destruction of most of the codices after the conquest of Mexico. Preservation today similarly requires organizational survival, knowledge of formats, understanding of content, and competence in technology.

As a contrast, there are two versions of the U.S. census that have posed preservation issues. The 1890 census records were destroyed by a fire in 1921. More frequently we read about the loss of some digital information from the 1960 census, the first to use digital magnetic tape. The tapes were from an early Univac system, and the drives to read them became obsolete quickly. However, we lost less than 1 percent of the census data, and that mostly because two of the tapes were physically lost. The response to the 1921 fire was in part a new organization, the National Archives. And the response to the tape problems was a managed program of backup copies, now that it was recognized that the very detailed data was in fact worth keeping. Until this episode, the census had routinely discarded the microdata as not worthy of preservation. So, in both cases, the answer is organizations and procedures, not a discussion of sprinklers as opposed to night watchmen or tape durability compared to disk.

The greatest danger to digital materials is that we forget the meaning of them. Preservation depends on our knowledge: we may have bits but be unable to interpret them. Keeping knowledge, rather than objects, is an organizational problem. This book is an excellent description of the issues involved in developing a digital preservation program. It will be useful to people who work in cultural heritage institutionslibraries, archives, and museumsor in institutions that perhaps have not been focused on preservation, such as theater companies or orchestras, but wish to exploit their legacy.

Both the knowledge and organizational issues described in this book are complex and well-explained. A variety of kinds of knowledge must come together in a digital preservation program: knowledge of the content, knowledge of the technology, and knowledge of the procedures used. This poses issues for human resources and educators, and one of the most valuable aspects of this book is its ample references to courses, conferences, and other resources for learning about digital preservation. Even if an organization follows a teamwork model in which different people are handling each aspect of the digital preservation process, it is still important to understand what the other team members are doing.

The importance of copies and of searching in digital preservation makes the organizational problems more serious. To enable other organizations to share copies of material, and to have search engines operate across all of our stored resources, we need interoperable representations and common protocols. This book describes the interworking of the various standards bodies, professional associations, and government or university groups that have created procedures and policies to encourage and facilitate sharing. These policies also reduce the workload of individual organizations and increase the chance of long-term survival.

The book also touches on many of the most delicate organizational issues: legal permissions, sustainable funding, and institutional survival. The habit of doing digitization as soft money has led to fears for long-term survival. Examples are the end of funding for the Arts and Humanities Data Service in the United Kingdom (taken over by Kings College London) and the Arabadopsis Information Resource (becoming a consortium). Various strategies are mentioned, but we dont have a general answer yet.