Theme 7: Preservation of Critical Materials
From Establishing a Research Agenda for Scholarly Communication
Enormous efforts are directed toward preservation, primarily and historically to traditional materials. Recent significant initiatives, including the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) at the Library of Congress and its grantees, are addressing digital materials. The scholarly community has ongoing concern about the relationship between the preservation of materials – whether legacy, digitized, or born-digital – and the emerging systems of scholarly communication. It is unclear whether institutions are attempting, or able, to match preservation and archival methods with increasing demands, even though long-term stewardship is crucial to future access and use by scholars.
Preservation of digital material is a technological problem, but also an economic and political problem. Long-term preservation solutions depend on scalable economic, technical and organizational infrastructures, and public policy agendas and an intellectual property regime that accommodate preservation concerns. Despite efforts at many levels for preservation of digital materials, we are still seeking clear directions and responsibilities. For example, who takes responsibility for archiving the web, including selection, rights clearances, etc.? How can this effort be organized or coordinated among multiple actors?
Systematically preserving print collections presents another enormous cooperative effort. In the transition to digital formats, how do we determine the optimal treatment of print and other legacy content? What about audio and visual materials in multiple formats? One basic determination is the optimal number of copies of any tangible material that should be preserved.
Illustrative Challenges
Though conservation and preservation science as applied to paper is fairly well developed, new digital formats are served by inadequate science and experience. At the same time awareness of the value of other kinds of legacy forms require new investments in preservation science to address, for instance, various audio-visual media as well as older digital carriers like CDs, floppy disks, and hard disks.
An urgent need is to learn more about the kinds of collaboration and economies of scale that are applicable to preserving the scholarly record in all of its formats. We need insight into how to parse the problem and produce complementary and comprehensive approaches across formats, disciplines, institutional capacities, and more. Determining the size of the problem and finding the resources is another challenge.
The question of preservation is deeply intertwined with issues of access. Will future access require us to document and preserve the research processes that produced the content, their provenance and underlying assumptions, in addition to machine readable and human readable forms of the content itself? How should the legacy scholarly record be made available digitally to scholars who need it? For an audience accustomed to digital information, how do we ensure that the full scholarly record remains available?
Research Possibilities
- Conduct meta analyses of large-scale preservation efforts to inventory the forms of collaboration in which libraries are involved, and the distribution of responsibilities, in order to characterize approaches, and analyze gaps in coverage or approach.
- Survey leaders in all sizes of academic libraries to assess a) where they believe responsibility resides for preservation of print materials and of born-digital content and b) what local actions or policies exist on preservation.
- Study the potential cost savings of reducing the acquisition, processing and shelving of print books and journals to reallocate funding to digital content creation and preservation. On a system-wide basis, suggest methods to determine how many copies of a particular book or tangible resource are needed and for what purposes.
- Propose and pilot new ways to assess enduring value and to preserve scholarly software, data sets, web sites, blogs, wikis, and other components of the scholarly record beyond traditional publications.
