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Reading Modes and Library Preservation Agenda

Definition

What is a reading mode? In this discussion reading modes encompass all reception means not even excluding aspects of touch and smell! The parent modes (1) the oral/verbal reading mode encompasses auditory and visual transmission, (2) the reading mode of writing encompasses direct written exchange between an author and reader and the (3) print reading mode encompasses fixed conceptual works interrelated in libraries.

In addition to these three parent modes, this discussion includes a fourth, composite reading mode. This mode requires layers of technological support and a thresholding and integration of the multiple transmissions into a single, screen based interface. (see diagram)

Such a scope for discussion of the reading act is at the far extreme of the study of the reception of print literatures alone. The discussion is also beyond a wider limit including reading of all genres of alphabetic transmission extending, for example, to commercial signage. Finally the scope is widen to include reading acts involving non alphabetic transmission that are present in the oral/verbal mode. This mode includes the reading skills applied, for example, to lectures or musical recital.

Definition of a library preservation agenda is equally wide in this discussion. The agenda extends to all activities needed to assure and project the transmissions of all the reading modes. As a result the discussion approaches the library preservation agenda from the perspective of the reading modes and maps the preservation activities in a context of the different requirements of each reading mode.

Reading mode approach to preservation practice

What does a reading-mode-first approach suggest for the preservation agenda? Let's identify the some of the most obvious influences.

The three parent modes should be reflected in distinctions of practice and that is apparent. The print and writing modes reflect the long established distinctions of archival and library preservation. The distinct practice of preservation of magnetic media of audio and video recording media reflects the partitioning of the aural/verbal/visual reading mode. (see diagram)

The technologically supported composite mode of on-screen reading should impose even more distinctions in preservation practice and that is also apparent. In this domain the process of maintenance of digital resources is almost antithetical to their preservation. These resources are live with layers of links and continuously revised data that cannot be usefully conveyed to an archival state. This feature is related to the layers of technology that intervene between content and the reader since the interface is a necessary precursor to the act of reading. In essence any preservation of content must first attend to the preservation of the interface and its delivery systems. Then, at the point of delivery, preservation is inverted from a long term process to a short term process concerned with permanence and authentication over very brief periods; preservation in terms of seconds

There is question if the preservation function can be conveyed directly to the this new reading mode. Generally, on-line readers consider digital resources as transient and subject to revision. Static, stored, persistent collections delivered digitally may also be subsumed in wider digital information known for its mutability and impermanence. "Archiving" of digital content just as easily assures managed de-acquisition or deletion as frequently as it assures migration of data forward. In this context the preservation function itself will need preservation. For example, digital records managers now perceive archives as a corporate liability and provide automated deletion of accumulating e-mail every sixty to ninety days.

Risk and Opportunity

Other quirks of preservation practice imposed by the composite reading mode are special effects on the established practices in the parent modes. The composite mode also enables selective delivery of any reading mode to any other. Analog audio tapes can be digitized and mounted at a website, print books can be imaged and delivered as digital facsimile, a website can be printed out. This thresholding between reading modes only produces more classes of resources that may need preservation.

In such a new context partitioned reading modes will transform each other so that comparisons cannot be made using their previous identities. Already a synthesis of print and on-line modes is apparent. In a simple example; hyper "text" is not native to cyberspace and "hard" copy is not native to print.

The print and writing mode conservator needs the library to achieve a digital services center for mediation of the paper collections. If new meaning is mined from the stored collections it will make them easier to preserve. Likewise if meaning of the stored collections is diminished and dissolved, they may be incrementally discarded. Storage must provide imaging serves. Otherwise the storage agenda is a euphemism for demeaning the status of source originals. In a context of access to all reading modes, drawing out new meaning from the stored collections is more crucial than mending stored collections. On a wild note, direct digital interface to the paper collections may be a method to accelerate the building of exclusively paper based, print and archival collections.

The influence of multiple reading modes on the preservation agenda will be, hopefully, to establish the continuing role of the source original in the context of digital delivery. Without such a continuing interrelation between sources and delivery products, the preservation function overall will be greatly diminished in significance. Preservation advocates must counter any demeaned status of originals if they wish to counter a demeaned status of their profession.

A case history - metadata, reading modes and the long short view

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 earlier in the year. I just got a copy in March of 2001. After reading it I had the feeling that generations of understanding of the issues of the preservation of digital works have occurred in the years between.

For one thing there are now issues where there was once only the problem of defining the problems which was the preoccupation of Time & Bits conference. Another feature of the Getty publication is its celebrity approach to the discussion. For the Getty and 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 aural/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 the “too fast” rate of change. 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 short view

So what does the advent of a composite reading mode with its associated technology mean for preservation? 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.

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