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Recognizing Digital Preservation Methods

Comments on “Recognizing Digitization as a Preservation Reformatting Method” ARL Preservation of Research Library Materials Committee By Gary Frost

Introduction

This ARL Report provides a look at preservation in the digital environment. In this environment, preservation may be “reconceived” and the components do sound different. Refreshment, redundancy, migration and emulation appear strange to the context of traditional library and archives preservation.

On second look, the process of refreshment (moving files to new storage media without altering their format or content) is parallel to a process of alkalization of paper and migration (periodic transformation of files to new digital formats) is not that unrelated to traditional reformatting. Other components of the new preservation may not end up in the preservation practice. Checks for integrity, authenticity and cross-collation may transfer to security functions while emulation methods may be subsumed by disciplines previously concerned with transliteration and paleography.

Whatever components remain within the practice, the incorporation of digital preservation will produce an awesome extension of preservation activities. One of the adjustments will be the useful integration of analog and digital preservation. But that integration can simply follow the interactivity that is already apparent between on-line research and paper based research and between screen-based and print-based reading. Recognizing digitization as a preservation reformatting method therefore includes recognizing digitization as a popular literacy reformatting.

Recognizing Digital Reformatting for Preservation

The essence of preservation reformatting is duplication for the long run. At first it may appear that any persistent duplicate will work, but there are differences. Paper duplicates from paper sources work as a second paper copy and are used as such. Microfilm duplicates have reader resistance while digital duplicates have enthusiastic reader acceptance. There are also great differences in delivery and distribution systems for the various duplicates. All are finally evaluated on their capacity to provide both persistence and access. The preservation benefit is provided by assured persistence during periods between access, and especially following long disuse. Can digital preservation formats provide such benefits? If so, what are the costs?

The prospects for persistent retrieval are not bleak. Natural aging may provide surprising longevity for properly stored media. Meanwhile, the promise of persistent digital retrieval is already presented by cached searches and cached websites, by persistent bibliographic utilities and digital publications.

However, one cost consideration, presented by digital preservation formats is obscured. Previous preservation formats, such as paper or film, simultaneously provided documentation, or rendition of the source item, and recording, or effective continued access to the captured content, from the same format item and for a single cost. Digital formats separate these costs and estimates indicate that both imaging and maintenance of image retrieval may be high. Any recognized digital preservation format must afford both costs.

Another cost factor obscured is that much current digital delivery is provided in an on-demand environment as exemplified by interlibrary loan or course work reserves. The ARL Report considers collection driven approaches and one-time capture, but an on-demand environment requires an entirely different, on-going association with source collections including repetitive capture for differing renditions. In fact the report is silent on the destiny of source collections. A premise of leaf mastering, or storage of paper and film based source originals for use only as copy masters, is not discussed.

The leaf master scenario is criticized for reasons of cost of storage space and retrieval costs. But maintaining whole collections for on-demand imaging is less expensive than whole collection digitizing and less expensive than maintaining the surrogate digital collections. Another attribute of leaf master collections is their capacity to enable future digital renditions of content unrestrained by the resolution of a surrogate. Source collections are just more capable of fulfilling unforeseen research requests.

Finally, a larger context of reading behaviors and reading methods should be considered. Much of the ARL Report actually notes these aspects, but under the guise of format characteristics. The appendix 2, for example, is less a list of benefits of digitization as a preservation format than it is a list of benefits of digitization as a reading mode. A more explanatory context for the report would be provided by describing the interplay of differing reading modes, especially the interplay of the print reading mode and the composite on-line reading mode, than by neglecting this context or, worse, by relegating any specific reading behavior to obsolescence.

Positioning Digital Reformatting for Preservation

Brian Stock in his book The Implications of Literacy, Princeton University Press, 1983, narrates the social transitions accentuated by the advent of textuality and the consequences of reading. These historical transitions, apparent by the early middle ages, “gradually acquired the capacity to shape experience itself and to operate as intermediaries between orally transmitted ideas and social change”. He describes how the interaction of the parent communication modes of orality and writing produced changes in each other resulting in preaching and discourse acting as if it represented text and text acting as if it offered testimonial.

Such a momentous interaction of reading modes also appears underway in our own time. Now print is interacting with on-line, screen based, reading and each mode is beginning to define the other. In the current transition technologies have emerged that are capable of compiling the presentation of the three parent reading modes; verbal/visual, writing and print, into a single screen based presentation. Considering this perennial dynamic it may be conceptually useful to direct preservation activities such as reformatting to the service of hybrid reading activities that bridge between print and on-line reading. Inherently, a digital preservation reformatting practice that interlocks surrogate image and original source, is just such an activity.

An obvious interaction of print and screen based reading is evident in research library circulations. The steadily rising numbers of electronic reference and e-reserve uses and a steady slight decline of print collection circulations have now intersected. One suggestion is that these curves will cross and continue their separate trajectories, but are these trends independent of each other? We can interpret a relation of these trajectories and one interpretation is that increased electronic searching has made access to print collections more efficient and therefore less, ah, voluminous. Such a possibility would provide a very positive indicator for both screen-based and print reading.

Other interactivities between print and on-line resources are more acknowledged. Digital formats have already intermingled primary and secondary sources and have already opened to readers the scholarly production cycle from writing to publication. And the scope of access is now extended from an Amazon book review page to a specialized academic listserv all offering layered resources with changing content, multiple reading approaches and changing delivery systems. If an invigorating new interaction of reading modes is emerging it would be reasonable to ask how digital preservation reformatting can serve these dynamic research methods. Let’s imagine such a mandate for digital preservation reformatting.

Recommending Digital Reformatting for Preservation

It is possible to suggest that the preservation function of a digital surrogate is embedded in its continuing relation with a persistent original. Three reasons for this recognition of digitization as a preservation reformatting method are (1) currently digital reformatting is predominately applied to special materials, (2) digital preservation reformats provide a different reading mode for the study of originals and (3) digital preservation reformats are intended to persist long enough to sustain parallel study of surrogate and original.

So far digital reformatting has been predominately applied to manuscripts, original photographs and rare or inaccessible imprints that will not be discarded following imaging. This is in contrast to much previous microfilm reformatting which has been predominately applied to discard able newspapers and other serials. The momentum to digitally reformat and digitally distribute rare local items continues and this circumstance lends special consequence to the continuing role of the source originals in the context of digital delivery.

The ARL Report neglects this factor from the history of digital reformatting. The commitment to long-term preservation of electronic records is posed narrowly as a digital library problem and not as a challenge to provide long-term interactivity between persistent digital and analog libraries. But the most curious perspective of the Report is not that omission. While the Report enthusiastically elaborates the attributes of screen based reading it implies that this new reading format will supersede, “with a new generation of users”, communication in the verbal/visual, written and print modes of study. Such an eclipse has never occurred before in the history of reading.

In a quest for funding efficacy, the ARL Report promotes digital preservation reformatting as a strategy for preserving preservation itself. A different approach to funding efficacy would illustrate how digital preservation reformatting will provide a different reading mode for the study of originals. Another promising quest for funding efficacy would illustrate how digital preservation reformattings will persist long enough to sustain parallel study of surrogate and original.

This second premise of sustained parallel study of surrogate and original can be persuasive. It projects a sense of the importance of multiple readings and interpretations derived from comprehensive connectivity. It suggests a need for on-line prompts for a provenance and status of the original. It encourages references between on-line and off-line image resolutions. It prompts innovative, non-damaging capture routines. Focus on the sustained parallel study of surrogate and original also introduces the long-term persistence factor that is only addressed by strategic preservation policy. Now, more than ever, we need digitized preservation reformats to augment the meanings of preserved originals.

The gracefully written and succinct ARL Report establishes the reality of digital preservation reformatting. Now preservation officers must sell this invention in a context of churning reading behaviors, changing research methods and a mixed regard for truly persistent on-line resources.

10.04.04