Posts
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.
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.
Recruitment and Intellectual Community
The talk I gave to Jean-François Blanchette’s class this month has turned out to be a twofer. I wrote earlier about the framework I have been toying with for thinking about preservation, but I was actually invited that day as a “guy who hires people”, and asked to talk about what I look for and how libraries are thinking about assembling their workforce.
Dr. Blanchette’s class had been talking about the skillset required of MLIS graduates and had read the SAA report “New Skills for a Digital Era.” I commend that report to your attention, along with AOTUS David Ferriero’s keynote and post about the competencies required in current librarians and archivists. With that sort of company, my own thoughts won’t add much except emphasis. I’ll turn the tables, instead, because I have some thought about what employers should be looking for in the new talent.
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.
Cited in Future of the Book
Well, Christmas has come early for me. I’ve been quoted in the November 13 edition of the Future of the Book. Nothing says geek-chic like a nod from Future of the Book, in my opinion. FofB is the brainchild of Gary Frost, and is one of the great blogs from the time before blogs were so called. Gary is one of the big thinkers and great practitioners in conservation and preservation.
Here’s the quotation, slightly amended for clarity, but do yourself a favor, and read more at http://futureofthebook.com.
Preservation is one of the library and archive community’s big goals, and digital preservation in particular is relatively well supported at present. Still, we should always remember that the technical aspects of preservation that we talk about on these lists are merely synonymous with preservation as it appears in our institutional mission statements.
The high-level, “intrinsically good” preservation function of libraries consists in having collections under institutional ownership, describing and disclosing their existence, and providing the place or means to use them. It’s important for those of us in the preservation trenches to keep in mind that the library basically gets up and goes each day – links resolve, PDFs are downloaded, images are viewed, databases are queried, books are checked out, articles are read – without any direct effort on the part of the preservation department.
A lot of preservation work (in digital preservation especially) is speculative, asking questions about how long the present state of affairs will continue, what will be necessary for that continuation, and how changes can be made gracefully. As a result, I would suggest that the only realistic conversation to have about preservation management is how to manage risk in a situation where preservation will always be a primary institutional goal, but a secondary operational priority. If you find that paradoxical, I agree, but I think it has the advantage of being an accurate assessment.
Infopeople Webinar: Fundamentals of Digital Preservation
On Thursday, December 8, I’ll start a series of webinars on core issues in digital preservation for Infopeople, a library services group in California that is supported by the California State Library and the California Preservation Program. Dec. 8 is the first installment in a four-part series. The presentation on December 8th gives a framework for critical thinking about digital preservation, rather than giving a list of interesting acronyms and specific technologies.
Future webinars in the series will provide a deeper introduction to file formats used in digital libraries and the core issues in reliably storing digital content for the long-term:
- Webinar #2: Tuesday, January 10: Text and Image Formats
- Webinar #3: Tuesday, February 7: Storing and Managing Digital Collections
- Webinar #4: Tuesday, March 20: Audio and Video Formats
Each webinar is only an hour, so we leave out more than we cover, of course. I’ve created an additional post with some follow up links to resources: http://jacobnadal.com/259
All of these webinars are intended to help you get started in building digital collections, not to raise barriers to building good digital collections. In subsequent sessions we’ll look at specific types of digital collection to assess current standards and future risks, but we’ll do that through the lens of doing the things worth doing right now while also being smart about limiting future preservation burdens.
For the first installment, we’ll start with a trip back in time through the decipherment of Linear B, as a way to show that the issues at stake in digital libraries are not foreign to our profession. Instead, I suggest that they are substantially the same issues we’re used to, presenting themselves in a new technology and media.
But the technology and media are new! From Linear B, we turn to some of the specific quirks of digital media, formats, and encodings, and wrap up with a little discussion of timelines – what 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://infopeople.org/training/digital-preservation-fundamentals
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.
AMIGOS Digital Preservation Conference: Core Issues in Digital Preservation
On August 12, 2011, I’ll be part of an Amigos Library Services web-conference, “Digital Preservation: What’s Now, What’s Next?“. My section is at 11:00 Central (12 Eastern, 9 Pacific) and it’s one of my favorite things to teach, “Core Issues in Digital Preservation.”
I’ve been using the story of decoding Linear B as a way to make the metaphor on digital preservation for years now, and an updated version of that talk will be at the heart of this presentation. I’ll also take the attendees through the process of crafting the ALA/ALCTS definitions of digital preservation. And finally, I’ll spend some time on the real theme – what’s now, what’s next – with a discussion of the most important areas of focus for today, versus emerging or potential problems that can be left for later.