futureofthebook.com
preservation and persistence of the changing book

Introduction

Commentary

Reports

Workshops

Store

Links

Time & Bits

The links listed in Time & Bits, Managing Digital Continuity were active as of July, 1998. The publication reports on sessions of the Time& and Bits conference, co-sponsored by the Getty and the Long Now foundations, earlier in that year. I just got a copy in March of 2001. After reading it I had the feeling that an understanding of the issues of the preservation of digital works has been achieved in the three years in between.

For one thing there are now issues where there was once only the problem of defining the problems which is the theme of Time & Bits. Another feature of the publication that now seems a little dated is its celebrity approach to the discussion. For the Time & Bits participants the future was in the charge of culture and technology and the high profile representatives of those domains. We now know that the future is also in the hands of practitioners; those who maintain the routines of culture and technology. The celebrity approach assumes that the future can be modified. The practitioner approach assumes that adaptation to the future will work. The whole metabolism of the future depends on both the projectors and the responders.

its the metadata

The Time & Bits publication overlooked the fundamental that is defining the practice of preservation of digital works. Digital works risk assessment, reformatting options, collection development, administration of projects and institutional responsibility all hinge on the production and analysis of preservation metadata. An infrastructure of metadata attached to digital works can only arise out of routine and maintenance but that is the nature of preservation. In Time & Bits the term metadata is not even mentioned.

Progress and preoccupation with preservation metadata is awesome. The OCLC/RLG white paper of a working task force on the state of preservation metadata standards correlates the standards already established by teams in Australia, Europe, UK and US.

its the reading mode

Time & Bits also misses the mark with an assumption that we are exactly at the point of purchase of a different grip on knowledge and exactly at the moment of a new human destiny which deserves a new culture and a new technology of communication. This assumption is akin to that of any generation that assumes it is exactly at a turning point of human endeavor.

If we are witnessing a singularity in history it is brought on by arrival of access methods commensurate with knowledge. This is accomplished, in human terms, by the advent of a composite reading mode that combines all others. So the oral/visual reading mode, the reading mode of writing and the reading mode of print are now combined in an on-line reading mode. The Time& Bits participants seem to be searching for some kind of bigger news while the dissolving thresholds of the reading modes is the momentous singularity they hunt for.

A composite reading mode explains away a lot of stuff including the apprehension that the rate of change is too fast. If access technologies dissolve thresholds between reading modes the reader’s adaptation is instantaneous. No one using the early telegraph thought to desire a transmission rate for a written message that was, say, half of the previous overland time. The telegraph removed a threshold between modes of orality and writing and communicators surged forward. In these terms the present rate of change in technology assisted communication is surprisingly slow.

The advent of composite, universal reading mode also explains away conspiracy theories that “digital technology is busy taking over culture and civilization.” Perhaps the invented explanations are provided because 90% of infrastructure is invisible and the future is all around us. We have already arrived at the implications of the composite reading mode and history is backing into the future ascribing all the strange feelings to a paraphernalia of communication technologies.

the long view is the short view

So what does the advent of preservation metadata and a composite reading mode with its associated technology mean for preservation of digital works? It means that the preservation long view is now a short view as well. Not only must preservation be considered in a timely manner, the preservation action must be taken before cycles of deterioration. In turn, the long short view seems to mean at least three other things; (1) what can be preserved is permeated with what cannot, (2) the preservation process of care, perseverance and routine maintenance is as important as the remnant survival and (3) librarians rule.

Starting with (3), President Bush maintains that measures to control global warming should not be implemented if “it hurts consumers”. Laura Bush maintains that kids should learn to read. (2) In a consumer and consumption driven society, preservation is counter-cultural. This means that practitioners must preserve preservation itself. (1) Almost nothing is preserved as persistent stored information but almost everything is preserved for extremely short periods. The subversive agenda is to claim that preservation enables the needed atrophy.