Am I My Electronic Resources' Keeper? Who's Responsible for Preserving Digital Information?
9/27/1999
NELA Annual Conferece
Manchester, NH
Dr. Barbra Buckner Higginbotham
Chief Librarian and Executive Director, Academic Information Technologies
Brooklyn College (City University of New York)
Presented by the New England Technical Services Librarians (NETSL) at the New England Library Association's Annual Conference, Manchester, New Hampshire
Co-sponsored by the North American Serials Interest Group (NASIG).
Dr. Barbra Buckner Higginbotham provided attendees of the NELA conference with an informative and sobering look at the current state of digital information preservation, and possible paths toward at least a partial remedy. Digital materials include those which have been converted from traditional formats, and those which were created directly in that form. Some of the characteristics of digital information which make these materials so attractive include its ease of use, storage, transmission, and its high reproduction quality. However, the widespread adoption of digital media for the creation and storage of resources is far from being matched by a correspondingly activist approach to preservation.
The purpose of preservation is the protection of information of enduring value for access by present and future generations. With paper-based materials, traditional approaches to preservation include stabilizing the original artifact and controlling its environment, or transferring its content to a more stable medium. These are responsive approaches, invoked only when an item begins to decay. But with digital materials, the responsive approach is inappropriate, involving great comparative expense and almost certain loss. Digital information must be preserved proactively. This proactive approach has been developed neither by publishers, who are primarily concerned with developing markets, nor by librarians, who are concerned with providing access to users and redefining their own roles in the digital environment.
Dr. Higginbotham outlined several central issues pertinent to digital preservation. First, with new media, the intellectual content is of much greater value than its carrier, and yet is inaccessible without access to specialized technology. Costs for digital technologies are declining rapidly compared with those for paper and microfilm, while their effectiveness for many purposes is improving. The creation and maintenance of digital archives require engineering skills which are unlike any in the world of traditional media. New media are fragile: "there is an inverse relationship between the longevity of information media and their accessibility." Much more information can be captured digitally than on paper, and lost much more rapidly. Hardware and software needed to read digital data become obsolete, and even disappear, even more rapidly than the media which store the data. All of these issues culminate in the central question: how can we ensure that future users of digital information have access to it, in its authentic and integral form? Without practical and affordable solutions to digital archiving, our current period will undoubtedly represent, as Stewart Brand expressed it, "a maddening blank to future historians -- a Dark Age." These solutions do not exist at present, while there are numerous examples of important cultural data which have already been permanently lost.
There are a number of current approaches to preserving digital materials, each with its strengths and weaknesses. Some resources may be duplicated at "mirror sites," or copied onto other storage media such as magnetic tape, although there are multimedia resources which cannot be duplicated in any other medium. Data may be refreshed (copied onto another carrier of the same type, such as tape or disk), but this does not address the problem of hardware and software obsolescence. Migration, or conversion of data from one format to another, may be workable where content is more important than the resource's original display and/or index features. However, migration and conversion do not preserve the resource in its original integrity, and some data will be lost or altered. Emulation is an approach which involves the use of metadata describing characteristics of the original systems used to create or run an electronic resource. In the future, the metadata would be used by emulating systems to reproduce or simulate earlier systems. Metadata may also include information on a document's provenance, and digital time stamping, or some similar technique, which will assure future users of the resource's authenticity.
These techniques are in different stages of experimentation and testing. Whose responsibility will it be, then, to implement a comprehensive approach to preserving digital information? Dr. Higginbotham concluded that neither publishers, nor individual libraries, will be willing or able to assume the responsibility. Instead, a number of large-scale repositories will be needed to archive digital materials. An archival approach is preferable for this purpose to handling preservation through digital libraries, as the former is explicitly concerned with long-term storage and access, where the latter may not be. Given our cultural dislike of centralization, creating a series of independent, but linked, archives is a more probable scenario than a single, central facility.
Institutions which seek to qualify as a digital archive will need to meet an array of technical and other standards, as determined by an independent certifying agency. Digital archives should have the right, established by the federal government, to invoke a fail-safe mechanism allowing for the aggressive rescue of endangered digital information, regardless of who holds the original rights to it. Besides physical organization and storage (on- and offline) of their materials, digital archives will create organized means of access, either through cataloging records or other means. They must also be able to guarantee the integrity and authenticity of the materials under their care.
Dr. Higginbotham concluded by discussing examples of trailblazing digital archives efforts: the Digital Library Federation, OCLC, the National Library of Canada, Bell and Howell (formerly UMI), the Center for Research Libraries and J-STOR. Their efforts include work on maintaining persistent links, migration techniques, and the conversion of microfilm materials to digital form. There are roles for individual librarians in this effort. We can emphasize to publishers the importance of perpetual access to licensed material and the need to include metadata as a routine part of creating electronic resources. Individual libraries may also be involved in archiving efforts, potentially those who are now practicing traditional historic preservation on a large scale.
Web Sites for the Preservation of Digital Information
(cited by Dr. Higginbotham):
David Miller
NETSL Writer/Editor
Levin Library, Curry College
Milton, Mass. 02186
(URLS updated August 29, 2001)
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