Category: Preservation

Getting involved in PARS

As ALA Annual Vegas recedes into a hazy memory, and with a fresh round of Committee assignments starting and new guidance from PARS-Exec about expectations for Interest Group and Conference participation, I’ve had a few questions from people about how to get involved in PARS.

First off, let me say thank you, bravo, and encore. We need new people to take up the work of the Association, because some of us are more than ready for a little break, plus you seem to have energy, ambition, and good ideas. If you’re wavering, wondering what you might be signing on for, and what you’ll get out of it, let me give it to you plainly:

  • PARS is a friendly group of people.
  • PARS is a small Section of ALA, so we often have room for people who want to get involved.
  • PARS gets a pretty high amount of stuff done, pretty quickly.
  • PARS develops and promotes standards and practices that see actual use.
  • PARS does not get everything done, nor does it do everything quickly.
  • PARS pulls off some big things, Preservation Week, for example.
  • PARS knows more about inherent vice than any other Section of ALA.

Now let me make that all a little murky.

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FRBR Group 1 as a Preservation Administration Framework

I gave a talk on using FRBR group 1 entities as a framework for preservation administration at the FRBR Interest Group during the ALA Annual 2014 conference [Las Vegas, NV; Friday, June 2; 10:30 am PT]. This talk proposed a way of using FRBR to coordinate preservation effort across library networks and to clarify the goals and expected outcomes of preservation and conservation efforts. Special attention was paid to two areas where frameworks for this kind of coordination are urgently needed: managing regional print archives and understanding the role of digitization in preservation management. The slides (download ppsx) and transcript (below) should give a good sense of how this works, and an article that expands on this talk is on its way to Library Resources and Technical Services for review.

The majority of this talk focuses on aligning FRBR group 1 entities with areas of preservation administration, but there are brief remarks on two other frameworks that I’m working on: evaluating scarcity in print collections and describing the focal points for preservation interventions on information carriers. (There’s some clunky language in that last clause, I know. I find these frameworks useful, but I’m still a long way from being able to convey them with any elegance.) These models support the particular use-cases I discussed  in the talk, print archives and reformatting, but they are concepts I have found useful in many other areas, and I use them both in teaching preservation and evaluating preservation strategies.

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Regional Print Management: Discovery to Delivery

On March 27, 2014, I spoke at an OCLC Symposium, “Regional Print Management: Right-Scaling Solutions“. The talk was recorded and can be viewed on OCLC Research YouTube Channel.  I discussed the development of ReCAP and an investigation of strategies and technologies for sharing collections that was funded by teh Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. That work is detailed in a report available from ReCAP. The project explored policies, workflows, and technologies require to reposition ReCAP from being three collections sharing a facility into a shared collection, developed and operated by three partners.

Forthcoming Chapter on Print and Digital Preservation

I have a chapter scheduled for a forthcoming book entitled Rethinking Collection Development and Management, edited by Christine Copp Avery. I’m writing on the ways that print and digital preservation intersect and while there is probably a whole monograph to be written on that topic alone, here’s the current version of the chapter for your review and comment until I get around to that. I’ll replace this with the pre-print and the final version as the work moves towards publication: Print and Digital Preservation.

Doldrums

The doldrums are more politely known as the Intertropical Convergence Zone and in maritime lore, they are the period of the voyage where the ship drifts in dead air and still seas. In the doldrums, one waits (and waits, and waits) for the wind to change or a current to pass, and then leaps to action to make the most of the gust or ripple to edge a little further onwards. In the mean time, the ship drifts hither and thither, turns stem to stern, and everyone gets pretty surly.

You can see where this makes a nice metaphor for the labor market in libraries, archives, and museums.

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Performance Capture in Preservation

Performance capture is one of the lively topics confronting preservation professionals in libraries, archives, and museums right now. My major encounter with this problem was at UCLA Library, where we had a strategic plan that led to an actual performance capture report and the hiring of a real live person to work on the issues it framed. I got to thinking about the issue again over the weekend, after watching two fascinating videos of Keith Haring painting (at Brooklyn Museum) and reading an article about Nicholas Serota’s work at Tate.

I was a musician and occasional actor before I made my retreat into the stacks, though, so performance capture  is something I’ve encountered from a variety of angles. There’s a lot to be learned by the preservation profession from the work on historic performance practice in the performing arts. Part of the lesson is theoretical, I’ll even dare to say epistemological. But happily, a more immediate lesson is practical, and I’ll double dare say we can bring lessons from the performing arts to bear on preservation practices in the present time.

Some comments about the New Media and Social Memory Symposium at the UC Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive made by Gunter Waible and Perian Sully are a good indicator of the issues as stake.

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A Framework for Preservation

I had the pleasure of speaking with a class taught by Jean-François Blanchette last week. It was such a good experience that I’m getting two posts out of it, in fact. In this one, I want to give some scope to an idea that I mentioned to them in passing. It’s become a standard part of my fundamentals of digital preservation teaching and I think it’s time to give it some air here on the web.

It is a commonplace to say that we can’t think of digital preservation in the same way we do paper preservation, but I contend that the opposite may be true. I find it useful to think about all preservation efforts within a shared theoretical framework and then try to identify the specific technical knowledge required to make that framework sit up and stay forever.

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Preservation Week Posts

For Preservation Week 2011, I wrote a series of posts for the UCLA Library Preservation Department Weblog. Those are linked here and archived after the fold.

  1. Monday, April 25: Tangible Records
  2. Tuesday, April 26: Projects versus Progress
  3. Wednesday, April 27: Data!
  4. Thursday, April 28: Preservation Education
  5. Friday, April 29:Preservation Administrators and Conservators

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Collections of Record

Some remarks related to two recent snippets from reading about the evolving landscape of shared collections:

From Rick Lugg (http://sampleandhold-r2.blogspot.com/2011/02/misspent-funds-or-strategic-reserve.html)

A strategic reserve of both print and digital scholarship seems an obvious choice. But like the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, this should be coordinated at the national or regional level, and the costs should be borne by the entire community which depends upon that reserve. As a community, we have begun to move in this direction, through participation in trusted print repositories and trusted digital repositories such as Hathi Trust. Investment in these programs, through both dollars and contributed collections, will gradually assure that “misspent funds” are converted to something more lasting and cost-effective.

From Gary Frost (http://futureofthebook.com/2011/01/booknotes-74/)

From remote storage to high density storage to shared print archive, the revamp of the status of print continues. The preservation perspective is in revamp as well. At first the attractions of security and more optimal storage provided benefit. Then the dissolve of classified shelving, more sweeping relocation and disaster risk caused pause. Now systematic discard is pending.

I will add a few notes for preservation management in this context.

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Survey Methods

I owe many of my favorite ideas about library preservation assessment to birds and trash. I have a friend who does ornithological research into the effects of habitat development and disturbance on breeding shorebirds, specifically the changing relationship between humans and arctic shorebirds in response to a new landfill in Barrow, Alaska. Birds being generally more migratory and less long-lived than library books, his methodologies for data collection and analysis have always been more agile than mine.

It was only natural to think of him when I happened across a copy of Sokal and Rohlf‘s Introduction to Biostatistics at the Strand a while back. I snapped it up immediately, and it’s turned out to be an enjoyable way to brush up my statistics. One of the reasons that I like biological analogies is the necessity of considering change over time in biological processes. Put another way, biology and preservation are both concerned with the developments of the relationship between inherent and environmental factors. Indeed, the role of “inherent vice” is one of the earliest theoretical models for preservation, even though the term has been deprecated in favor of a permanence/durability model. Sokal and Rohlf make a very powerful observation as they introduce their ideas of biostatistics:

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