Staff Papers
The likely impact(s) of digital technology on conservation/ preservation in Australia.
Prepared for the National Newsletter of the Australian Institute for Conservation of Cultural Materials July 2000, by Colin Webb, Director Preservation Services, National Library of Australia
As a senior preservation manager involved in digital preservation, I'm often asked whether I think digital technology will be a good thing or a bad thing for preservation.
I don't think I know the answer to that question - it lies in some deeper questions about 'good for whom', and how you measure 'good'. I certainly think it will have an impact, or many impacts, and that there are ongoing roles for preservation people and preservation principles, but whether they are good roles and whether preservation people get to play them depends a lot on what you are looking for, and whether we can bring enough value and leadership to them.
I am most interested in the impact of digital technology on preservation, as the broader set of responsibilities for keeping collections, objects and/or the information or values they convey available for use for as long as they are needed. This includes conservation as a subset but I don't want to spend time arguing definitions here.
Over the past few decades our profession has done a wonderful job of understanding the materials making up our collections, and how they deteriorate, and devising ways of preventing damage, of stabilising existing damage, and of repairing things that have been damaged. We've had our share of losses, but generally the story has been very positive. This has been strongly associated with a strong emphasis on materials science and objects as physical things subject to physical deterioration.
Depending on your perspective, digital technology presents either just a new set of challenges and opportunities, or a fundamental reshaping of the mindset with which we have approached preservation in the past.
Let's look on the bleak side for awhile.
- There's a possible impact on our collecting institutions: will they even continue to exist? A quiet struggle is going on to see who survives in the face of competition from non-institutional providers of information and cultural experiences. Even if some survive (as they will!), we may end up with fewer institutions.
- There's definitely an impact on what's in our collections, especially in libraries and archives at this stage, although likely to affect all institutions. There will be many, many more non-physical "things" needing to be kept accessible - "things" that hardly even register on the radar screen of our material sciences based preservation mindset. And when they do, they tend to take us down dead ends such as focusing on the deterioration characteristics of digital carriers like floppy disks and CDs, when the real accessibility issue lies elsewhere and doesn't have very much to do with deterioration phenomena at all. If our job is to maintain the accessibility of what users may want to access, a materials conservation approach is only going to address part of our collections. We will have to bring some different approaches, skills and tools to the task of keeping collections accessible and understandable.
- Digital technology may well also impact on the demand for our services. It's becoming obvious that digital information does not preserve itself: it will require a very innovative, sustained and expensive effort even to work out how to preserve access to digital information. Institutions will rightly decide that there are people other than preservation professionals who need to be involved; they may also decide (wrongly, I believe) that preservation professionals don't have any role to play. In other words, managing digital information definitely includes a preservation role, but preservation professionals may not be invited to fill it.
- Digital technology will not do away with our large and growing collections of analogue "things", but it will influence how they are managed. At the broadest level, the high cost of digital preservation is likely to compete with analogue collections for resources. The few institutions in this country trying to address digital preservation issues have already had to make choices about diverting resources.
- Digital imaging - making digital copies - is having a growing impact. It's a fantastic tool that allows us to make good copies that can be accessed (almost) anywhere in the world at (almost) any time by (almost) anyone, simultaneously and (almost) instantly. Done properly, it achieves huge increases in accessibility without significantly adding to the preservation burden on the original. No wonder that it has been adopted so enthusiastically by institutions, even with its costs and difficulties. There are a number of potential preservation impacts, ranging from demands that material be prepared and processes be monitored or managed by conservators (if we're lucky), through a vastly increased burden in preserving the digital images themselves, to the possibility that some institutions will see digital imaging as a replacement for other preservation action (something already widely accepted in photographic and audio conservation). Again, my own strongly held view is that digital technology increases the need for preservation professionals to be involved, but it's no sure thing that everyone sees it this way.
- More speculatively, I suspect the combination of digital imaging, digital communications and competitive pressures will lead institutions to collaborate much more. In the library world, we're likely to see preservation efforts focused much more on smaller collections of unique material. Because these will become the preservation collections from which networked access is provided to the world, preservation responsibilities, though spread over a smaller collection, will be much more accountable.
- All of this raises some interesting issues for conservators. We increasingly operate in a market place where there may be a reduced demand for the things we do well, and a growing demand for preservation-type services that we and others may feel we are poorly equipped to provide.
But there are many positives, and I don't think we should be pessimistic. Digital technology itself could free conservators from having to deal with endless numbers of less important items, much as microfilming has done but in a more user-friendly manner. Digital imaging also does offer a genuine prospect of reduced pressure of use on important items. I still think the nett effect is to increase the preservation burden, but there are benefits if we can manage to achieve them.
From the point of view of our own involvement, we have more assets to draw on than we may think. While I've said that our preservation paradigms aren't very helpful in looking at digital information, in fact there are many principles we have used with analogue collections that are important in dealing with digital collections, eg understanding what you have, thinking ahead, understanding threats, thinking holistically, looking for underlying principles, setting priorities, documentation, critical thinking, working collaboratively, sharing information. These have come to seem just as important in our training as the techniques of repair.
Digital technology also gives us the means of communicating rapidly and effectively.
In my own institution there are many encouraging signs. Preserving access to digital information is publicly acknowledged as a critical core function, and our Preservation section has been involved from the start. It is also seen as a key player in all digital imaging projects. However imperfect our response has been, (and it is far from perfect), we have managed to direct some solidly preservation-focused resources into digital preservation while increasing the effectiveness of our traditional collection preservation and conservation programs. All of our preservation managers are involved to varying degrees in digital issues, but a number of our conservators have been able to keep on treating and managing all the physical things that need their attention, while our digital preservation people have been able to focus on digital things.
On the other hand, it's still not at all clear how we will manage to meet our digital preservation responsibilities, both in terms of methods still needing to be developed and of how we manage to put procedures and resources in place.
At a personal level, I sometimes also wonder whether the path we are on is sustainable. We are on it largely because of the "busybody" approach to preservation management we have taken in recent years: we take an interest in most things that happen in our institution, and often step outside our comfort zone. We frequently find ourselves sitting in meetings thinking "I have no idea what these people are talking about", often wondering whether it is worth it, feeling very exposed and sometimes unwelcome. My only comfort is knowing that just about everyone else involved feels as far out on the edge as I do.
So, I'm not at all sure whether the overall impact on preservation/conservation will be positive or negative. Both, I guess. Neither good nor bad is inevitable: what happens is at least partly in our hands. If we can see enough need or enough value in it to be involved, and if we can convince others that we bring enough value to it to be included, I think we can make good things happen.
But good or bad, it's going to happen. This is one bandwagon that's not going to stop because a bunch of conservators don't like it. I think our task is to work out how, not if, we are going to live with it.
Colin is Director of Preservation at the National Library of Australia, but these comments represent his own views, not those of the Library.
