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Moving Beyond Double Fold

In his April 18, 2001 comments on Double Fold, by Nicholson Baker, Craig brings out a precept and asks us to think about it:

“Hmm. What exactly is intellectual content? Today's assumed answer to this question is where library preservation made the wrong turn. We don't know the answer and we can't know the answer. Only future generations will be able to mine the artifactual evidence passed on to them for the answers in their time. Forever. Think about it.“

My first thought confirms Craig's remark since our sense that we can evaluate intellectual content derives from management of more or less mass produced texts where the content takes on a hovering presence relative to the tonnage of copies. But even in this context the presence of intellectual content is still well downstream with a readership review that is generations removed from the period of the production of the text. The threshold of copyright expiration, at least, is involved. So it is likely that intellectual content...in the decisive preservation management sense...is not something engendered with the production of books.

Stretching intellectual content beyond the meaning of the disembodied text is probably a good idea in any conservative approach to preservation management. But in this domain the commodity is located not only downstream from the period of artifactual production, but it is also located at a point that is always advancing into the future. This is because physical evidence physically accumulates. Here an arbitrary point of interpretation necessarily interrupts the evaluation, at the same time that larger cycles of veneration and neglect may also be at work to confuse the preservation manager.

Perhaps the judgmental grip that we have on selection for preservation may be a product of our judgmental grip itself and not necessarily be linked to large or small intellectual content in books. This would somewhat explain our continuing need for a kind of reaffirmation provided by advisory organizations and their reports on the role of artifacts and the technologies of reformatting.

moving beyond "intellectual content"

One optional path from these impasses is to de-emphasize the precept of intellectual content in preservation management. The precepts substituted can be those that study and evaluate the dynamic and interactivity of original and copy and the measure of the continuing role of source collections in the context of technologies of duplication and surrogate delivery. This positioning would extract preservation managers from the upstream and downstream situations and bring forward concern for the streaming of knowledge and information transmission. That is pretty much what Craig is saying, I think.

If “everything” is saved in original format or only one five hundred thousandth (as Nicholson Baker recommends), the preservation manager would be intent on managing the interactivity between original and copy. In this approach the preservation manager could even monitor the end of interactivity...again just as Craig points out. But the preservation manager would advocate time itself as the best selector and try to counter discard and weeding policy. Just as repair methods cannot be applied to lost or stolen materials, so too, preservation managment cannot be applied other than to the interactivity of original and copy.

And such positioning is not reclusive in a larger view of access and library services. The preservation services can be extended to preservation imaging, and, in cooperation with other collection managers, a new infrastructure constructed to assist researchers intent on digital publication. This new infrastructure, though technologically innovative, will not primarily interface the technologies of image capture, transmission and delivery, but instead will turn around and interface the source collections. Centers for the Continuity of Source Collections in the Context of Digital Delivery....will pop-up.

the continuity department

The name can probably be shortened. In "context of digital delivery" is only pandering to a recent fad. The scope is quality presentation to all reading modes. "Center" can also be left out as code word. There are too many Centers anyway, including Centers for the Book. Even in a library and archival context the "of source collections" is not as easily dispensed with, but we may be able to get the name down to "Continuity Department".

The mission of the Continuity Department is to maintain source collections in all modes of presentation and states of revelation. Among the component services are relevant interactive reading services, relevant thresholding and dubbing of source media between reading modes, a specialized practice of conserving meaning in source collections, a specialized practice of marking or preserving ordered relations among works, and a political agenda to assure and advocate continuity of the source collections and the study of the interactivities.

(to be continued)