I had the pleasure of serving as the opening speaker for the 2015 NEDCC Digital Directions conference. This post contains the text of my remarks and the slides from my presentation. Each is intended to be able to stand on its own, so if you want a quick overview, download the slides. If you want to dig in, read on below.
Slides: Self Playing PowerPoint Slideshow (ppsx, 1.7MB)
SETTING THE STAGE: CREATION, CURATION, AND USE
In this essay, I want to do a few things to prepare you for a productive foray into learning about digital preservation. First, we need to cross the divide from analog to digital. From there, we need to think about what it really means to create digital resources, to curate them, and to put them to use. And finally, we need to get ourselves back home, and ready to do good work.
To ensure you are ready for this journey, please look at your shoes…
Or your phone or computer, or your new tote bag or your watch, or your headphones, glasses, health tracker, usb drive, tablet, other phone, e-reader, or actual magazine, or any of the myriad of things you touch and see each day.
You have all these things with you, here and now, because the world took a digital direction decades ago. These things are here thanks to computer mediated supply chains and inventory management systems. They were developed using computer aided design and manufacturing. They were sold in online marketplaces that exchanged money across the network, and later, they were delivered by a parcel system that tracked the item by a unique ID, all the way to your door.
Look at the printed materials in your hand. They were all born digital. Most print is born digital and has been for a good many years. It’s only at the very end of the production process that those digital documents were rendered out as ink on paper and even so, that printed object reached you through a digitally mediated supply chain.
THE SPOOKY DIVIDE
We crossed over a spooky divide a good while back, so that now digital media and digital mediation are normal. The reason this shift is spooky isn’t that we are haunted by the ghost of the analog library, but precisely because within our ongoing work, another presence has made itself felt.
As important as this digital turn may be, analog media are also normal, and obviously necessary. It is hard to go a day tuned into library and archives talk without hearing someone attest to the intrinsic value, beauty, and utility of the printed page, the actual photograph, or any of the many material artifacts we hold in our collections.
As we turn our attention to digitization and digital preservation, we would be wise to remember that all digital stuff has some tangible form. Bits have to be recorded on some thing, somewhere, and our job is to make sure that our repositories turn these seemingly evanescent electrons and polarized molecules into long-lived and coherent digital collections. We do that by making sure that a single copy, on a single piece of media, is never the sole representation a digital resource. At its simplest, more than once copy, more than one place; something that is simple with digital collections but early impossible with our analog collections.
We will say over and over this week, and correctly, that digitization is not digital preservation. And yet…
Remember that digitization plays a role in general preservation. In our day jobs, we are still responsible for physical things, stored in buildings, prone to accident. And the digital surrogates we create for these things play a crucial role in preserving the human record and making it accessible for everyone, because now, digital is how we connect the past to the present.
In my day job, I am responsible for 12.7 million physical items. But I only know this because they’re logged in a digital inventory management system and the only way to get to them is through a request made over the web. ReCAP, and other facilities like it, is laid out much like the blocks and sectors of a hard disk or RAM chip. It is a systematic, logical, organization, and it operates by algorithm. There is a procedure, a fixed process, for putting things into ReCAP and for getting them in and out.
We hosted a researcher at ReCAP recently who exemplifies this moment. He was aware of some research that had used colonial financial records to examine how much money was expended on education in a variety of French colonies in Africa. He thought the results were interesting, but being a good researcher, also wondered if this was merely interesting, or if these French colonies represented a pattern, and if similar results would appear in other colonies.
So, he started to search Princeton’s catalog, which is a discovery system that brings together all of their library holdings, licensed databases, books, journals, etc. Well, he found an example of similar records from British colonies in Ghana. Except they were digital copies, a database Princeton subscribes to, so he could only see the page images on his computer. One page at a time. He needed to compare and collate data from across dozens of volumes, so he started looking for a print copy. Well, one of the ReCAP partner, New York Public Library, owns a set and stores them at ReCAP. So we set him up in our reading room for a week, with his research assistant and their laptops and dozens of Colonial Blue Books. As they work, the note tables and datasets they need, compare one set to another to determine how to normalize data, in short, they dig in, in a way they can only dig into print, which they found through searching digital resources.
And my favorite part, and the reason last week’s story from ReCAP is this week’s story for Digital Directions, is that the ReCAP visit isn’t the conclusion of this story. It’s the middle. The end of this story is that they are compiling the relevant sections of the Blue Books into a database so that they can do computer modeling using these data and cross compare them with other data in digital form.
The digital direction is not a replacement for what we have done before. It is another layer that interacts with the library we have had and presages what that library will become.
More practically, and of course, the reason you’ve come here today, is to because crossing fully over into the digital age means finding a digital counterpart to every analog item in our collections. That’s what we’re here to do, today and the rest of this week.
CURATION, CREATION, USE
To start us into this, I was to read you a passage from Craig Mod’s incredible essay “Post Artifact Books and Publishing.” Mod is an author and book designer, and in this essay he reflects on how the work of writing and bringing ideas into the world has changed:
The future book — the digital book — is no longer an immutable brick. It’s ethereal and networked, emerging publicly in fits and starts. An artifact ‘complete’ for only the briefest of moments. Shifting deliberately. Layered with our shared marginalia. And demanding engagement with the promise of community implicit in its form.
The book of the past reveals its individual experience uniquely. The book of the future reveals our collective experience uniquely.
For those of us looking to shape the future of books and publishing, where do we begin? Simply, these are our truths:
The way books are written has changed.
The canvas for books has changed.
The post-published life of a book has changed.
Let me paraphrase Mod, and say that not only for those looking to shape the future of books and publishing, but for all of us, who are here to shape the future of libraries: where do we begin? Simply, these are our truths:
The way research is done has changed.
The canvas for research has changed.
The post-published life of research and creative work has changed.
We have incredible resources in our libraries. I do not mean the collections, only, but also the librarians and archivists who work with them. We are becoming responsible not just for collection but also for ensuring that our collections are optimally arranged, so that both those materials and our expertise can move from us to everyone.
To accomplish this, the library needs to deliver both utility (finding aids and resources) and usability (places, formats, and interpretation). We have a great, mature body of work in the first area, the providing of useful things, but I suspect we are just now coming to understand what a really usable and interactive library looks like.
The stacks and the reading room are more meaningful places now that they are complimented by digital libraries, because now we can ask what can only be done in each environment and what can best be done in each environment. Physical formats are more meaningful now that they exist in both complement and contrast to digital formats, letting us ask in turn what can only be done, and what can best be done with each.
If you recall my story about our intrepid researcher, he was working with our resources in a way that used their various affordances* at the best way, at the best time, for the purposes of that stage of his research process.
The possibility of asking these questions pushes us towards an interpretive role, something that I think is legitimately deserving of the name “curation.” Curation is nothing new. Rather, it is a way of working that is adjacent to both our received and emergent practices. To my ear, curation speaks to arrangement and rearrangement. A well-curated library enables the user to experience interesting juxtapositions between materials and also provides access to all of the affordances of all possible formats.
I hope this indicates a way for us to find a progressively better fit to the developing practices of our readers, without changing the library so radically that we alienate or exclude the readers we have. The digital direction ought to be circular, or reciprocal: analog and digital expand on each other; librarians and users work together; curation and creation play together.
For the next few days, I want you to put yourself in the mindset that creation can mean “to make anew”, to make things digitally tangible, so that they can get from us to everyone. That means digitization that puts new things on the network, and it means creating new formats that suit a particular use.
We should remember that we are a creative profession: we make new things. I like to call our creative work curation, and I think of this as the making of new context. We do this through organization, and, through the craft of cataloging, we embody that new information in metadata.
Curation is a way of adding to context. It starts with remembering the object’s original purpose, but it grows through investigating its potential purposes. Curation “makes anew” within the archive, by adding density and intricacy to the connections between things. This process borders on interpretation, it is a creative act.
Scholars and artists are creative as well, and indeed, our craft is interdependent with theirs. As they make new information, through interpretation, we ensure that work can live on, through preservation and through citation.
This interdependency is important. It should be a signal to us about what our profession adds, a reminder that just getting what the user asks for is not enough. We also ought to show the user things they had never imagined, help them focus their attention, and improve their questions. We are called to co-discovery and to navigation.
All of this, though, is about the use we know: this researcher uses that resource.
There is also the use we never notice: Digital content can be reused and repurposed, too, because digital objects are malleable. The fact that digital systems are eminently countable makes it possible to quantify activity, and from there, to compare and predict varieties of activity.
All of this use creates context and emerges from context, so librarians need to be readers and watchers of this activity. Sensitive to emerging trends, developing practice, and disruptive invention. That’s a lot! And that’s very heady stuff! And I like to go home and have hobbies and things! The good news is that we are the profession that is best at converting philosophical imponderables into practical work.
I have a joke, that the philosopher says to the librarian, “How shall we ever understand the extent of all knowledge, and how every idea relates to every other idea?”
And the librarians says, “well, we’ll need some 3×5 cards.”
LEARNING HOW TO LEARN
There is a great deal of information and advice that supports digital preservation. It can be overwhelming to encounter all of this, so I find it useful to remember that all the frameworks, acronyms, standards, and clever ideas in digital preservation come together around the Open Archival Information System reference model, which manages the neat trick of being a detailed yet generic description of how preservation happens.
The best question to ask as you encounter new ideas in digital preservation, and as you prepare to work on digital projects yourself, is how a particular approach is trying to get to OAIS compliance. Some guidance is ground-up. It pertains to how to make good digital objects, how to select and set up software for a repository, how to create useful metadata, or how to make sure the archive works as you expected. Some guidance is given from the sky on down, helping to determine what you need to do next, how you’ll finance the operation, what to do as changes come along, who’s in charge, and when will the stuff that works today stop working quite as well.
Decide which way you’re going, and remember that one person can only successfully go in one direction at any one time.
Trying to set up a digitization lab based on the Report of the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access will be frustrating. Trying to develop a viable financial model for your digital library based on the format guidelines from Library of Congress won’t work. Your library needs to work on digital preservation from both directions, but you need to work on it from one direction. Or, for those of you who run the whole operation solo, at least from one direction at a time.
I think the heart of preservation is sustainable activities, optimized over time. Preservation works when an institution can understand what it is doing well and poorly, and gradually shift that balance to the good. That means there are lots of things that can wait until next week, next year, even until the next person takes the job. You know the phrase “the perfect is the enemy of the good,” I’m sure, but in preservation, I would remind you that while the “bad is also the enemy of the good,” the real ally of the good is the somewhat better today than yesterday, because…
With nothing done, countless problems
With one thing done, only thousands
With a few things done, merely hundreds
With a couple projects under your belt,
there will only be a few dozen problems left
…this year.
I have been working on preservation for about15 years now, and it’s easy to list the things I still need to get done. So if I may give one piece of outright personal advice, it is this: preservation librarians do not succeed by calling a halt to all of the bad stuff. We succeed by finding safer, easier ways for the library to do its work.
There are lots of problems to solve in preservation, but with the training you get this week, those problems will move out of the realm of insurmountable challenges, blatant goofs, and mysterious malfunctions, and show themselves to be knowable and manageable risks. And most importantly, as mistakes get made and surprises come along, you’ll have friends who you can call for help
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* Affordances are, briefly, the activities that are enabled by a tool. I opine that the key question for libraries right now is how to align the affordances of various media with the key activities of each movement of a research or creative process.