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Preserving Preservation

The preservation specialty is moving beyond care of physical collections as trendy new sectors are opening up. These range from "digital assets" management to "systems security" to opportunities in the "heritage hospitality" industry. But preserving preservation requires more than entering new markets. Preserving preservation requires making the long view popular. Taking the long view, in both planning and resource allocation, is not that popular. Current realignments may be short term choices, but what about a longer view?

Preserving preservation transcends culture wars between user and systems oriented approaches and between analog and digital information, or print vs. visual literacies. The concept of preserving preservation attaches value to the persistence of knowledge regardless of its use and asserts that the production, maintenance and use of knowledge can be as defining as its content. The preservation function is a defining access service of libraries. This specific function could be characterized as the assurance of a subsequent circulation. The assured reconsultation of library materials is the counterpart of the replication of scientific experiment.

Such disarming assumptions project the preservation field beyond a reactive role to an active, agenda making role. Using historical perspective as a predictive mechanism would add dimension to the preserving preservation concept. For example the experience and threat of impermanence in established analog media such as audio or video tapes already illustrates "new" risks and costs of digital media. These vulnerable analog collections impose cycles of copying, not for reader services, but for mere survival. These same analog holdings impose maintenance of playback equipment as well as embedded operating systems within this equipment. Digital media add nothing new to this cost matrix except to compound its influence.

Preserving preservation focuses on transactions across time. That this transaction's value can either fade or reappear suddenly makes it difficult for preservation to persuade libraries and their users that it is a constant. In addition the established methods of preservation and conservation tend to be of a lesser magnitude than the influences of natural aging, forces of technical obsolescence and powers of cultural change. Alkalization of paper, for example, counters effects of deteriorating paper. Presumably alkalization purchases the ability to sustain in-put and out-put over time, but physical deterioration and changing delivery modes all got there first. The compensating preservation and conservation treatment measures are both purely reactive and of a mismatched magnitude.

Needed is a linkage between any failure of access across time and a preservation of preservation concept. A long term agenda is needed to counter risks inherent in the interactions that lead from transient information to lasting knowledge.

Where is the Collection at Risk and Where is the Disappointed Reader?

Ross Atkinson,"Managing Traditional Materials in an Online Environment: Some Definitions and Distinctions for a Future Collection Management", LRTS, 42:1, 1998, talks about the political dimension of the new configuration. He is recommending adaptation to a reading and research mode that will dissolve the bibliographic object that has made collection management possible. But he is not ready to dissolve the collection management function. "More than ever, the collection itself is an information object."..."the ability to change the relationships of objects to each other, and of users to objects, by adding values to (or deleting values from) objects already selected - will remain a fundamental information service." Ross describes the precarious position of libraries as they attempt to straddle both the on-line and off-line collections. He maintains that if the synthesis is not maintained it will only need to be reachieved later, at greater difficulty.

This precarious dichotomy is viewed from the objective direction, viewing the information objects. As Ross points out the scope of the collections can also be viewed from a subjective perspective of the user. This is quite a series of docotomies.

From the subjective approach it first seems that the on-line vs. off-line dysfunction is traded for off-site vs. on-site reading. But on second glance it is apparent that the off- and on-site reading modes each want to be indifferent to the objective division of the collections. The two modes both aspire to sweep across the whole collection simultaneously. The off-site reading mode wants access to the entire collection, loan operations and format conversion available for online use. The on-site reading mode likewise is no longer satisfied to be confined to the off-line collections as bookless reading rooms illustrate.

A Long View

If the reader can make the leap to envision a multiply accessed collection, is that leap also possible for collection managers including preservation managers? One approach is to view all collections, both on-line & sourced anywhere and off-line & sourced locally, as available in both reading modes...to any degree possible. Restrictions of copyright, conversion content loss and incompatible systems of bibliographic control then only intensify, but the goal is to convey from any source to any reading mode.

In this hypothetical environment, even the thresholds for conversion, the difficulty of transfer from various sources to various delivery states, become a positive feature. Such thresholds preserve the direction of conversion, from source to surrogate and distinctions of content as in analog to digital presentation or from eye audible to ear audible to machine encoded music. Thresholds provide a layer of organization of content that is lost when various media are converted to a single medium or single reading mode.

In this double two-way scenario, bridging access and bridging formats, a preservation role emerges to preserve all reading modes. This means that the preservation manager will monitor and counter damage as information objects lose one or the other of their reading modes. Such loss can occur in numerous ways, as with discard of off-line copies following their on-line acquisition. In this bridge-all context, it is likely that new meaning will emerge from information or knowledge projected in multiple and in composite reading modes. The meaning of source collections only increases with new reading modes. Resulting new disciplines and research methods will also need reading mode preservation services.

The preservation of reading modes is a Long Now agenda. A focus on reading mode preservation will help to define the particular value of libraries as mediators of different media for different readers. A focus on reading mode preservation will position the field between the churn of delivery technologies and the continuing role of the source original. Will a focus on reading modes preserve preservation? If stored knowledge and its readership does disappear so will preservation. But even decisions on casual attire now require vast information.

(see also)

Gernt Van Vught Veritas Still Life c. 1658

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