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The Changing Status of Physical Book Collections in Context with Their Mass Digitization

How do books work?

The reader’s experience of a book is paced across time and the tactile behavior of the codex accompanies all the processes of assimilation and comprehension of content. This basis of tactile investigation prompting assimilation of concepts is deeply embedded from evolutionary experience. Primate dexterity and distinctive right and left handed manipulation prompted both neurology and evolutionary advance of the brain. Conceptualizations were prompted by tactile investigations and arms leveraged actions.

This learning path of the hands prompting the mind is exemplified by the codex book. Later cultural traits of personal possession of objects including actions of portability and display are well reflected by the codex. And book possession can also be shared across time and culture indicating the codex capacity for persistent existence and library accumulation. The physical configuring of books in classified library arrays prompts researchers to conceive latent books, yet to be written, situated between and among those shelved. Conveying concepts in physical objects is not a paradox, but an embedded mechanism of learning.

Until recently, this function of the library print collections has been maintained. Sudden, new changes in the functions of the print collections are now occurring in context with digital research and these will influence all services related to them. The functionality of the codex must now be reviewed in context of inter-functionalities. An array of factors interplay the comparisons of print and screen reading. Exclusive attributes of print as contrasted with screen based presentation of books include legibility in the sense of immediacy of meaning , efficiencies of haptic assimilation of content and physical persistence or default preservation and reliable re-access.

At the same time, computer assisted key word searching, mediated reference works and hyper-textuality as well as digital technologies of connectivity all enable screen presentation of books to act as discovery tools or bibliographic utilities. As such they expedite print based research and continuing print presentation.

Why situate print preservation in a context of digital delivery?

Various preservation risks and preservation advances can be associated with efforts to provide screen access to print collections. Concerns have ranged from damage or discard following imaging to the decommissioning, and eventual "Googlization", of classified order of books in their description, access and in their shelf order. As such, risks extend from loss of items to demise of library function.

Preservation advances in print preservation have followed other developments in digital library services. Here the incentives to better adapt the libraries to digital research and instruction have resulted in the increasing relocation of print collections to purpose built storage. Sudden preservation advantages of optimal storage environment and strict security have been assured in these new archival warehouses. But the codex mechanism has found little vindication in the new era. Difficulties of imaging a codex on a flat bed scanner suggest an obsolete format rather than an up-side-down copying method. The vision of the codex cut and dis-bound for automated document feed is acceptable in the new environment. The exemplary codex structural mobilities and haptic codex attributes of hands prompting the mind as the reader pages through content; these attributes are now obscured. Book conservators are now among the few that advocate for the future relevance of mobility and function in the codex binding.

The leaf master role

Digital discovery and research methods tend to privilege screen reading, but evidence suggests that screen presentation of print serves a utility function; enhancing access but not necessarily superseding resolution from print sources. As a counterpoint, print functionality now includes relations with digital resources. Where screen copy has replaced paper copy, a “leaf master” status can emerge to continue the role of the source original in the context of digital delivery.

Since the print collections serve as the source for imaged content, screen resources that mirror print are easily backed-up by print. Text authentication, completeness, scale, image quality and color, cannot be exactly confirmed by the on-screen surrogate. Additional risks are associated with the persistence and retrievability of on-line resources in general. Back-up print collections are much less vulnerable to media or delivery failures. It is also important to recognize the inherent back-up role of print collections not yet digitized. Indeed, the justification of the leaf master role and the agenda of print preservation can be as easily established for collections not yet network delivered.

In the library context, print has long performed this backup role. In view of a half century of reformatting to microfilm media and screen presentation, the digital capture and delivery of print is not unprecedented. Preservation benefits and disadvantages of such reformatting are also well established and occasionally reviewed. A particularly interesting attribute of preservation reformatting is its inherent complement to large scale commercial reformatting exemplified by Google Print. Preservation reformatting, or "brittle book" processing, selects titles in damaged condition while automated commercial scanning selects titles in good condition.

It is time for libraries to take credit for the services that they perform which make the mass book digitization projects rational activities. For example, only libraries will image the deteriorated books. Corporate book digitization projects promote themselves as high production activities compared to the slow and careful reformatting of libraries, but these high speed capture projects cannot be bothered or delayed by difficult and fragile items. So, the library reformatting exactly complements and fulfills the mass conversion projects. In the same context, corporate conversion programs cannot be distracted by any standards of image quality and copy authentication which are so carefully achieved and maintained by library reformatting.

And what happens if a book must be (heaven forbid) rescanned? Just who is both mastering and backing-up these precarious, corporate fly-bys? And, finally, corporate book digitization assumes that you can have access without preservation. Is that really possible? Not if access is an activity across time and...er, across generations. In that context preservation IS access.

While large-scale digital initiatives have engendered new libraries and new library services the interesting keyword here is "initiatives". Now evaluation must begin to discover if digitized collections can have persistent as well as initial usefulness. In the longer term digital persistence could prove more difficult to achieve than digital initiatives. The Council on Library and Information Resources white paper, "Preservation in the Age of Large-Scale Digitization", concludes that while libraries can hope to preserve the vast bit streams of mass imaging projects, the "enduring access of enabling on-line discovery and retrieval of material" is complex and uncertain. Pro-active preservation effort is needed, but this report assigns no specific role to preservation departments. This fact alone suggests a tentative state of the challenges.

The report mentions that an appreciable portion of print collections are "either brittle or at risk" and that "digital copies may be the only versions of work that will survive into the future." There are at least two suspect elements in this position. First, it is arguable that in the long run the acidic print collections will persist and re-master more reliably than the digital collections. Another questioned aspect is the assumption that preservation of print will inevitably be compromised by traditional use and circulation of print originals. The option of converting print from traditional use to a leaf mastering status is not considered. Print collections can easily persist in the long run if they are protectively stored and strictly used as imaging masters.

Another momentum is in motion to converge with an assigned leaf mastering role for print collections. This is the trend to wider and wider use of non-circulating storage for print collections in secure and protective archival storage facilities. These purpose-built facilities are well equipped and well suited to accommodate a leaf mastering role for print collections. Add an imaging-on-demand service to their on-site capacities and these facilities can aptly be named "collections preservation centers".

The preservation department can readily assume the implementation and maintenance of the leaf mastering print collections. The preservation department can monitor strict security and protective environmental control for leaf master collections. It can evaluate risks and plan for disaster. It can also provide non-damaging image capture from difficult and fragile items and needed preparatory conservation treatment. The preservation department can provide oversight of authentication and copy legibility or quality control of digital copy and reformat production. It can re-house or enclose the leaf master items for storage. Such duties are easily assigned and readily assumed by the preservation department and they quickly relate preservation services directly with the strategic agenda of large-scale digitization of library materials.

Going forward

A focus "on information access made possible by new technologies" has dominated recent library and information studies. While access is migrating to screen presentation at the same time options are opening for reassignment of paper based collections to a persistent mastering and back-up role. Curiously, such a new paradigm may shift eye reading to the screen and "machine" reading or image capture to print.

Such a shift in access strategy would progress to inevitability if long term library service cannot sustain multiple costs of maintenance of digital collections as both mastering and delivery resources. It looks as if affording persistent access to screen presentation will be costly enough. Perhaps it is advisable to engage the practice of preservation in management of the mastering duties of protecting more easily and economically persistent print as a dynamic copy master. The Council on Library and Information Resources report includes this comment; "A number of funding agencies make grants available for preservation surveys, conservation treatment, and reformatting. Some of these funders may question the value of maintaining and preserving print collections that are available in digital format. If the value of preserving such print publications is not articulated and justified, funders may shift their priorities." What better way to justify print preservation than to assign it to a strategic mastering and back-up role for digital collections? Reformatting experience has by now confirmed the recurrent need to recapture across generations of standards, technologies and research agendas. The connection is inherently there, exemplified in a new, extended "purpose of retaining the original" as defined by the leaf master. 02.19.08/glf

leaf mastering status

Council on Library and Information Resources white paper

Comments following the report publication

endnotes

(1.) As an example of codex format innovations and efficiencies see; Grafton, Anthony and Williams, Megan, Christianity and the Transformation of the Book, Harvard University Press, 2006. Legibility of screen delivered text is impaired by navigational challenge, transmission delay and screen drawing error. In addition screen text is read through layers of mediation, including network login, search parsing, application reformatting and ramified linking, and these mediations themselves become diversionary.

(2.) Haptics refers to the study of touch as a mode of communication. Print is rich in both author/publisher intended meaning as well as unintended meaning of its material and cultural nature. As an example of haptic evaluation see; Frost, Gary, “Reading by Hand, Haptic Evaluation of Artists’ Books”, Bonefolder 2/1, fall 2005. http://www.philobiblon.com/bonefolder/vol2no1contents.htm

(3.) Wilson, Frank R., The Hand: How its Use Shapes the Brain, Pantheon Books, 1998.

(4.) Research library acquisitions budgets are just now crossing a line of 50% allocations to digital, screen delivered resources.

(5.) "Ironically, many librarians were unhappy with a 2005 OCLC report because one of their key findings was that in the public's eye, the library brand is books. That finding is troubling if people think of libraries as ONLY about books. But we will be in much more trouble if our users stop thinking even that. Do you want a book? Go to Google or Yahoo or Amazon.com. Where will libraries be then?" Trudi Bellardo Hahn, on "Mass Digitization" in the January issue of Library Resources and Technical Services

(6.) trends in library storage construction: See For example; "Shared High Density Storage Solutions", ALA Pre-conference, June 2007, http://www.library.duq.edu/lama/

(7.) An ongoing effort to advocate for the codex in the context of screen based reading is presented at http://www.futureofthebook.com/ A general bibliography relevant to the discussion is also maintained there.

(8.) Kevin Kelly commented in a discussion on the role of Google Book Search that the screen presentation acted like a "hybrid between a catalog and a library" or a "network of universal text" rather than books themselves. He discounts the assumption that, once scanned, books will not be scanned again. That prospect, he says, "is so unlikely on so many levels, one hardly knows where to begin with it." http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/08/the_google_exch.html,

(9.) I find screen writing and reading advocates too obsessed with departing from an environment of print when they should be obsessed with adventuring in the environment of electronic text and engine searching; the fundamental features of word processing and field sorting that have identified screen writing and reading from the start. (10.) The author began to use the expression leaf master in 1987 (guest talk at School of Library Services, Columbia University) and incorporated the idea into various discussions since. Leaf master collections are preserved primarily as imaging masters. This assigned use converges well with imaging or print on demand technologies. see for example, Transmitting Books, 2001, http://futureofthebook.com/storiestoc/leaf

(11.) The print collections are the real "server farms". The electronic server farms presenting the simulations appear to me as accessories and the attractions of screen reading and engine searching appear to me as great additions to the meaning of the tangible collections. Evidently, this is an upside down view, but I offer that is one that converges vigorously with future roles for preservation.

(12.) A further metadata tagging is needed to convey the "provenance of the original" to trace the state, condition and access arrangements of the source original.

(13.) For example, Nicholson Baker, Double Fold, 2001 and the library preservation community response.

(14) Preservation reformatting trends toward fulfillment of subject coverage as it sustains access to titles that can be lost to deterioration. Large-scale commercial reformatting trends to bias of subject coverage, avoiding titles in poor condition. The nature of this bias is uncertain, but it certainly disfavors cheap publications; perhaps those associated with subversive social, economic or political topics. The complementary relation of the two selection processes, working together and ultimately providing integrated access to collections, should be leveraged to confirm the value of preservation reformatting.

(15.) CL&IR report citation http://www.clir.org/activities/details/mdpres.html (16.) originally considered for storage of "lesser used" materials, these storage facilities with their assured inventory control are now being used for new acquisitions and special collections. See For example selection for Ft. Mead facility of Library of Congress.

(17.) A naming contest is underway to displace the typical naming of these facilities as "remote storage" buildings. A name "archival library" begins to connote function, but is entangled in established definitions. A name such as "collections preservation centers" begins to describe functions and lends a more positive connotation.

(18.) In fact, the preservation department already provides these services.

(19.) Weigand, Wayne A., "Libraries and the Invention of Information" in Companion to the History of the Book, Blackwell, 2007, p.540.