Month: October 2011

METRO Webinar on Digital Preservation

On Monday, October 24, I’ll be giving a webinar on core issues in digital preservation for METRO, a library services group in New York. The presentation gives a framework for critical thinking about digital preservation, rather than giving a list of interesting acronyms and specific technologies.

The webinar actually starts with a trip back in time through the decipherment of Linear B, so show how the issues at stake in digital libraries are not foreign to our profession. Instead, I suggest that they are substantially the same issues, presenting themselves in a new technology and media. From there, we turn to some of the specific quirks of digital media, formats, and encodings, and wrap up with a little discussion of timelines – waht matters today? what matters in the incipient fututre? what can I leave for some future generation of archivists?

I have presented versions of this material before, and the feedback has been positive, especially for librarians and archivists who need to have digital preservation in their planning, but don’t have a degree in computer science. I hope you’ll tune in. Registration and information about related events here:http://www.metro.org/en/cev/109

Unusually Effective: Policy, Evidence, and Strategy in Collection Management

On October 20, 2011, I’ll be the guest speaker for the UCLA GSE&IS Colloquim Series, in a talk I’ve called “Unusually Effective: Policy, Evidence, and Strategy in Collection Management.”

I’ll talk about some of the ways that UCLA Library’s Preservation Department is engaged with the issues at stake in stewardship of the printed record and the best ways to structure preservation programs, as part of our mandate to bring the Library’s role as a collection of record into operational reality. The research project I’m featuring on October 20 applied economic models of information preservation and methods from operations research to the “preservation review” function developed for the UCLA Library. In this process, holdings data are used are the primary driver of preservation decisions about lost or critically damaged materials, as an alternative to traditional methods, which relied on idiosyncratic domain knowledge or canonical lists or resources.

In my talk, I’ll extrapolate from the results to date to propose methods for preservation management in a cooperative, but not centrally administered, library environment and discuss complimentary relationships between artifactual and digital collections. I’m still in the research and development process on this, as you might guess from the academic tone of the preceding paragraphs. If you’ve followed the saga about library discards that has spread from Cracked.com to NPR, this is a talk that is essentially about how libraries can develop a rational retention process and avoid bad discard decisions within a highly automated process that respects our very limited time and money.