Emerging themes: digitisation as collections preservation

If you cornered someone in the street and got them to give you their view as to why libraries are producing digital collections online, they would probably say something about 'access'. The data coming through from my survey is really no different. Access can mean a lot of things and deserves a post (or two) of its own, so instead I'm going to write about something I find to be more compelling that has come a close second in this survey: digital collections as preservation devices for physical holdings.

It's been interesting to see that the data coming from digital library professionals shows that there is an emphasis on access via digital to the physical originals, and preservation of physical holdings by creating digital 'surrogates'. It's interesting because, while there's been general support for the idea of integrating digital and physical collections, it would seem that the current reality in libraries is that digital collections are very much in a supporting role, always leading back to the physical original.

This can be explained in several ways, not least by the resource pressures that most libraries are under. Digital collections are an addition to a library's existing holdings, and demand different models for their construction and upkeep, so using them in such a supportive and economical manner is understandable. The idea of digitisation as preservation is certainly the most overt example of this.

Let's be clear: we are not talking about the mistaken notion that digital versions of physical originals will allow them to be kept in perpetuity within that medium - anyone who knows about the digital medium knows that to be naive. Rather, it's essentially the idea that once you've digitised your originals, they don't need to be consulted to the same extent, if at all, thus 'preserving' them from the most likely cause of damage, which will always be transport and handling. This makes sense when original material is at death's door (photographic and moving image collections come to mind), but unless this is the case across the board, the idea seems worth further consideration.

As an example, say you've got a few thousand ancient manuscripts kicking around - they're frequently accessed and you decide to digitise them. You want more people to be allowed to see them and maybe increase your library's profile a bit, but you also intend to minimise access to the originals once they've been digitised. If you follow the logic of preservation to its conclusion, you might try to restrict access to the originals altogether. That logic is: protect an item for the future by preventing causes of deterioration now, which is inherently at odds with an open access policy.

A couple things can happen here. First of all, much of the anecdotal evidence I've come across suggests that requests for access to originals increases once they have been put online in digital form. You then have more people seeking to view material to which they can't have access, which might upset the punters. Even with more tightly controlled access, if requests do in fact go up due to the library's online content, even requests that fit these new parameters should also be expected to rise, leaving no drop in physical handling in overall terms.

Next, having re-written your access policy to achieve this, you have to wonder whether someone higher up might not query why a library is continuing to use expensive storage (think real estate, climate control, and so on) for material that no one is actually looking at. Of course, it depends on the collection, and perhaps a collection of nineteenth century books might be removed to a salt mine, if you have one, without much ado, but it sits awkwardly alongside the library's mission.

In my experience there seems to be a disjoin between preservation ethics and the major factors influencing library development today, and I'm worried about a self-imposed obsolescence for physical holdings, paradoxically driven forward by those who treasure them the most. Add to that the fact that physical original and digital version have their own distinct attributes and seem unable to replace each other, combined with the fragile digital medium as realistically only a temporary solution, and this leaves the notion of digitisation as preservation perhaps not everything it appears to be.

Ontology in digital media

Frankly, a blog on digital issues doesn't lend itself particularly well to imagery, though I look forward to being corrected on this. Since I'm dipping into the philosophical here, I've taken the opportunity to preface this piece with a view from outside our seminar room, which I snapped last week.


Ploughing through readings on DAM, one word seems to come up rather frequently, clearly packing some weight: ontology. It's come up so often that, rather than dismissing these philosophical trappings as superfluous to practical implementation, it seems worth taking the bull by the horns and exploring the potential of an ontological enquiry in this context. I did, after all, begin this blog as a means of self-education.

The term 'digital' is probably taken for granted by most people, and registers largely at the conceptual level. It's a fluid medium that is hard to pin down: is it merely our conceptual perception of information presented on a screen, for example, or the process by which hardware and software interact to interpret digital data - or even the physical medium to which any of these can ultimately be traced?

These notions were put forward by Kenneth Thibodeau at the US National Archives and Records Administration some years ago and I find them very useful, not least because they highlight some of the major differences between digital and traditional preservation concerns. Essentially it seems that in most cases, the conceptual delivery of digital materials are of prime importance (that is, the point at which digital data takes on meaning for humans), to the point that the physical source and even the logical processes that deliver digital data in conceptual form can be altered to suit that end. Compare that with the object-orientated world of traditional preservation which seeks to alter physical objects as little as possible - when applied to digital media, a traditional approach would probably favour the preservation of obsolete hardware instead.

I might also add that, by nature, DAM is a more active process, because leaving a digital object in a box (whatever form that object may take) for 50 years is going to ensure its loss and destruction, rather than its preservation, as would be the case with paper or other physical objects. But I don't believe that DAM can be truly effective without ontology, since its effective delivery hinges on a proper understanding of the differerent facets of a digital object and how they relate to one another to achieve preservation, function, accessibility and so on. Whether or not you even aware that you are applying an ontological investigation to DAM processes, it's always there. As such, it does seem like a practical tool, even if the etymology of the word is Greek.

Preservation and (business) management

I recently had the opportunity to meet and talk with Barclay Ogden, Head of the Preservation Department at the University of California Berkeley Library. His activities in the field of preservation have included the development of the CALIPR collection needs assessment tool, a free piece of web-based preservation survey software hosted on UC Berkeley's servers (it's availability and ease of use would make it suitable for implementation in almost any collection around the world). Barclay has been in the preservation business for forty years and, following the birth of random sampling in the 1970s to quantify preservation problems and needs assessment in the 1990s based on collection use and value principles, he has turned his attention to risk management.

His approach to risk management is a novel one in the field, as he has managed to collaborate with the second largest risk management consultancy in the US after approaching the University of California Office of Risk Management with his preservation concerns. This has resulted in positive attention from the UC administration, and that translates to funding for the UC Berkeley Library. In this economic climate, it's a great working model, but for anyone who's worked in a library or cultural institution, they will probably have encountered some cultural resistance to business models (and for anyone who's studied business, they will know that culture eats strategy, for lunch). Barclay has circumvented cultural opposition and the problems of emotive, experiential modes of risk management that can often be encountered in the cultural heritage community, going straight to the experts in rational, analytical risk management - arguably the group that can really influence outcomes at the UC Berkeley Library.

I can understand the resistance to business models. One of the problems with accreditation/certification in conservation, for example, and standards in general, is that cultural heritage professionals could potentially lose their individual operational flexibility in a sector where outcomes are often subjective and difficult to quantify. Under the current circumstances, though, business management models represent an area that requires serious and considered engagement in order to achieve a mutual understanding; I don't believe that learning this language has to result in losing one's culture. Business models, language and communication, and the adoption of standards, have the potential to give the cultural heritage sector a real leg to stand on.