By Colin Webb and Deirdre Burgess, National Library of Australia and presented to the First National Symposium, Book and Paper Group, AICCM, Canberra, March 2000
Digitisation who cares? Whats it got to do with us?
These are questions that are important to us and to the National Library. In this presentation Deirdre and I want to explore whether they are questions that are important to us all. We would like to describe our journey and our experience, and then discuss some of the implications. The reason for doing this is to engage with you in an expanding dialogue on how, as preservation professionals, we can manage our role regarding digitisation.
I should declare my own position on this: I think digitisation is important from a preservation point of view, although maybe not from quite the perspective one often hears.
Let me begin by recalling something that happened to me about 20 years ago. A friend who had trained with me as a teacher told me he was going to retrain to teach computing. My reaction was complete dismay. Couldnt this intelligent person see that teaching young people to use computers was abusing his sacred trust as a teacher? This sounds ridiculous, but I was quite serious. So when I hear people talk about luddites, I have inside knowledge. The passion has gone, but Im probably still on the side of anyone who is feeling uncomfortable with digitisation as a topic at a conference of conservators.
But I hope that by the time we have finished our presentation you will see that, uncomfortable or not, this is a journey at least some of us have to make, and that we might as well do it as intelligently and professionally as we can. This does not require a turning away from our professional values and perspectives: quite the contrary. It demands that we sort out those values and perspectives and apply them to new challenges.
What we are talking about here as "digitisation" is just a way of making copies of things in our collections, using digital technology. Scanning, digital photography, digital capture, digitisation, digitalisation, digital imaging - all terms to describe what is basically just making digital copies.
Over the years most of us have become accustomed to people making copies of the objects in our collections. Most of us have at least a tolerant attitude to photography, so long as the copies are made accurately, at minimum risk to the original document, don't have to be made again and again, and are kept in their appropriate place, which might be for reference use, display, or registration and identification purposes.
Those of us working with archives and library collections have long come to see preservation microfilming in a similar light. After many years of struggle, we have developed some standard ways of doing things, to achieve some consistency - but basically, the process is still one of making copies.
We have a role to play in deciding when microfilming, photography and other copying programs are appropriate, and a legitimate role in managing such programs. They may not carry the glamour of hands-on treatment work, and they do not achieve the same results as individual conservation treatment, but copying programs are sometimes the most appropriate preservation option because they are achievable when other options may not be.
Can we see digitisation in the same light? I think we can, but it comes with baggage that often gets in the way. For one thing, digitisation proposals are usually driven by someone else, whereas no-one was very excited about owning microfilm projects.
Another part of the digitisation baggage is the hype. About 5 years ago a senior executive of a national institution in Canberra said publicly that digitisation could replace all other preservation work, that it would become the preservation option of first choice, offering great savings to collecting institutions. In case this sounds like a singular view from outside the profession, I must say that I heard a similar comment from a preservation manager of my acquaintance, who told me he thought digitisation would solve most of our preservation problems.
Not surprisingly, I have heard other preservation colleagues say: "All this digitisation stuff is bunkum - it's got nothing to do with us; it's just toys for the boys."
So, we the hype gave us a spectrum of attitudes. We had digitisation equals preservation, full stop. We had digitisation as a fad that would soon pass. We had it as something we could ignore. We had digitisation as something to resent and deplore as it took away our resources, seduced the decision-makers in our institutions, and made us look old-fashioned and irrelevant.
As I have already suggested, my natural inclination is probably at the sceptical, "luddite" end of such a spectrum of views.
However, as we were confronted with proposals for real digitisation projects in this institution, we had to make some choices. The choice between luddite and convert became increasingly unhelpful, and increasingly at odds with what I hold to be our professional responsibilities. We needed to find a place of more worthwhile engagement than just the apparent alternatives of total technology enthusiasm and total rejection.
I suspect we are not the only people to be confronted with this dilemma.
So perhaps we need to be interested in digitisation simply "because its there". We are going to see more of it, reaching deeper and deeper into our collections. If digitisation has any positive preservation potential, we need to be interested in it. If it has any negative potential for harming our collections, we also need to be interested in it.
We would like to tell you about one project we were confronted with, how we dealt with it, and some of the basic lessons we learned from it.
In 1994 the National Library, the State Library of NSW and the University of Sydney Libraries started talking about a possible collaborative digitisation project. While it certainly had preservation objectives, it was not really preservation driven like almost all digitisation projects it was really about improving access. The people shaping the project were not really preservation people, although it is greatly to the credit of people like Ross Coleman of University of Sydney and Alan Ventress of SLNSW that the preservation objectives were taken so seriously. The proposals very quickly came before people like Alan Howell and myself to make some decisions about roles that we, as preservation professionals responsible for collections, needed to take.
There were actually four levels of decisions we were confronted with:
As the name implies, the Australian Cooperative Digitisation Project, 1840-45 is a collaborative initiative between four main partners. They are, the University of Sydney Library, The State Library of New South Wales, the National Library of Australia and the Monash University, each of whom is making a large contribution in terms of time, expertise and money. The project was substantially funded by the Australian Research Council who provided a research grant in order to provide digital access to the material and also to ensure its long-term preservation.
The primary purpose of the project was to enhance literary and historical research on nineteenth-century Australia by providing improved access to, and preservation of rare material confined to a few major library collections. The bibliographical source for material was Ferguson's Bibliography of Australia from which 75 journals and 4 novels were initially identified as the subject for the project. The period 1840-45 was selected by an advisory group of academics as significant for recording, for the first time, the development of a colonial culture and an emerging sense of an Australian identity in the colonies. This period followed the end of convict transportation to NSW and preceded the influx of the gold-rush migration, heralded the introduction of representative Government in 1842 and witnessed the early years of mass free migration to the Australian colonies. It was a period marked by an upsurge in local publication in both old and new centres of settlement to meet the demands of the increased population and the commercial opportunities emerging in the colonies.
As you can imagine a great deal of effort went into the early stages of conceptual planning, preparation and testing. As the ACDP was intrinsically a collaborative project, this presented great benefits as well as challenges for the Project Management Team.
It was decided very early on that it was desirable to microfilm the material in order to provide the long-term preservation of the originals and then digitise to provide access to the information. The team also recognised that, due to the exploratory nature of the project, there were a great number of risks associated with undertaking a project of this magnitude and sought to manage them by:
The decision to outsource by contract subsequently made it necessary to employ a vendor to undertake the microfilming and digitisation of the selected material. This was done through the selective tender process. This in turn created its own set of problems, as the successful vendor needed to set up the required infrastructure (by investing in expensive imported hardware, and undertaking considerable program and software development) to provide the level of throughput and quality required by the project.
The next step in the process involved the identification, selection and checking of the original material which proved to be rather complex. Identifying complete sets, or filling gaps when parts of titles may be held by different institutions required the input of staff with very highly developed bibliographic skills.
It also required the selection of the best copy for the project. This was not only the best copy physically but where practicable with significant contemporary annotations that would add scholarly value and interest. Some consideration was also given to the utilisation of existing microfilm as a source for scanning.
While the print material itself is out of copyright, issues such as rights over the master microfilm, and rights over the final digital images also needed to be considered.
Where necessary some initial conservation work on the original hardcopy material was also undertaken. As the original material is rare and of cultural significance, great care was taken not to damage the originals. Concern about the physical integrity of the original material was always of great concern to the project partners. Access was to be enhanced, but the original material was also to be protected. Bureaux were requested to, wherever possible, use cradles in order to minimise any strain being placed on the material during the filming process. Nevertheless, in certain circumstances, the disbinding of books, journals and newspapers became necessary to allow the microfilming and subsequent digitisation of the material to the highest possible standard without "gutter shadow".
The National Library of Australia was assigned the prime responsibility for the development of a document control structure (ie how information is put together within a file) and a management and retrieval system that would allow significant browsing and retrieval of the digital images. As you can appreciate, a great deal of effort was given to the planning, testing and consultation prior to the commencement of production work. The need for user-friendly software which would enable efficient browsing, zooming, down-loading from the Internet etc was also critical to the success of the project. File types, compression and file sizes were all issues which needed to be addressed and which also had a bearing on the final product.
It is important to understand that in all cases other than the four fiction titles, we are making digital pictures of the pages and not searchable text. It was always recognised that it would be good to be able to do both, however, the characteristics of the original material - small and variable typefaces, poor print quality, and complex arrangement of print on the page - meant that the Optical Character Recognition (or OCR) software was ineffective.
And finally for each title reproduced by the ACDP, catalogue records were created for the original hardcopy version, for the microfilm version and the digital files.
As I mentioned previously and due to the sheer magnitude of the project, there was a great potential for complications to arise. Some of the complications include:
And just as the project was nearing completion, we found that we needed to purchase another dongle. Now some of you may be asking, "What in heaven's name is a dongle?" Well, a dongle is a device which attaches to a computer and counts the number of converted images. Its very mention may bring a few smiles, but believe me it was also very important to the project.
What did we learn from this project that might be useful to us as preservation managers?
For a start, we can get rid of one question can digitisation take the place of the originals? The answer is generally a loud "no". You can do impressive things with digital imaging and enhancement software, but digital copies are still copies, and thankfully the tide of values seems to be running with the sanctity of the original.
On the other hand, can digitisation provide a suitable preservation strategy for replacing intrinsically unstable originals such as nitrate and acetate film materials or brittle newspapers, where ultimately the only effective preservation strategy will be replacement? Yes it can, but only if you do what is necessary to achieve that goal in terms of image quality, and only if you understand and act on your responsibility to maintain the digital files long term. If these can be achieved, yes, I believe we can use digital imaging to make replacement copies of originals that werent going to survive anyway.
Can digitisation provide copies that will reduce the need to handle fragile originals? It certainly can, but the question we need always to ask is whether or not it will.
There are two aspects to this. The first is the quality of the copies - they need to be good enough to satisfy most demands for use, now and into the future. We know we can spend thousands - hundreds of thousands of dollars on microfilming, and still find users who refuse to use the microfilm, and curators who will make the originals available. In fact, that's probably one of the strongest preservation arguments in favour of digitisation: people are more likely to use a digital copy than a microfilm copy. But it doesn't just happen - you have to work out what will be required to obtain the quality you want, and take the many steps needed to achieve it. This is one of the "neon light" lessons we've learnt: digitisation can achieve some preservation objectives, but only if you manage quite consciously, and conscientiously, to achieve them. They do not come automatically with the territory.
The second aspect of this handling issue is that while we can assume digitisation will lead to less handling, in some cases it may have the opposite effect. Sometimes, when our lesser known collections hit the Internet we see a greatly increased demand for access to the real thing. If this demand is for increased display, it may be very hard to deflect the demand to digital copies.
So, the preservation pluses can be real, but they don't happen automatically.
Are there any preservation negatives? There certainly can be.
Any copying process presents risks. Digitisation can expose vulnerable originals to high levels of light, heat and handling. We recently measured temperatures of around 28 degrees C for two days for a bound manuscript diary that was being digitally photographed. We decided this was acceptable, but only just.
Scanning equipment also present a range of risks of physical damage, from surface scratching, to chewing up originals put through sheet feeders. We need to know what equipment will be used and how the material will be prepared. From other peoples experience we know that some scanning bureaux expect to guillotine the spines off volumes to make them easier to handle. These things do not need to happen, but they are risks we need to manage. As Deirdre has mentioned, in ACDP, and in other projects, we have ourselves agreed to disbind or loosen the sewing of volumes so they can be more safely captured. These are preservation decisions we need to take responsibility for.
And finally on the down side needing to be managed, there are all the issues associated with preserving the digital copies themselves. You can keep your fingers crossed and hope your IT area will look after it, or you can accept the fact that it takes preservation resources to ensure you get a long-term perspective on managing your digital collections.
So, there are some preservation positives, if we can get them, and some risks or negatives that we need to be very mindful of. Digitisation is not preservation, but it is one of those things that we cannot safely leave completely to someone else.
The cost of that involvement can be high. ACDP, for example, was a massive drain on our preservation resources, and it skewed our reformatting priorities for at least the past two to three years.
But digitisation happens. We have a choice of involvement or non-involvement. Over time, as we learn through being involved, and as we offer the good things that we can offer, we increase our opportunities to influence what happens. For example, we have recently been able to argue against a project proposal on the grounds that we do not have the resources to prepare the material adequately in the timeframe that the digitisation program will impose.
I want to finish by moving back from the theoretical to the practical. What does all this mean in the real world? For NLA, it means Preservation have been involved in all significant digitisation projects. The nett preservation gain has been small, but we have learned a lot about what we need to be involved in and what can be left to someone else.
At an institutional level, the Library is drafting a Digitisation Policy. It includes some statements:
Among the Librarys digitisation goals: " by digitising its collections the Library will increase access to and help to preserve rare and fragile collections by providing digital surrogates".
Among the principles underlying its activities: " the digitisation of items in the collection will not diminish the Librarys commitment to the preservation and care of these items. The digitisation process used will not endanger these items".
We say we will select projects at least in part based on the contribution they will make to the preservation of Library material. "While recognising that digitisation will not cancel the need to preserve original items, digitisation will assist preservation goals by reducing the need for originals to be physically handled "
There are other relevant statements, but those few give a sense of where we are trying to go.
And finally, at the cross-institutional level, we are participating in a Commonwealth working group that is trying to develop best practices in digitisation of collections. This is an exciting development, but I regret that of nine institutions represented, only two have seen fit to involve preservation staff. We could see this as a missed opportunity.
So we would very much like to see a more active discussion of digitisation programs in this country, and we think that it would be a good thing if we could take our preservation perspectives into such a discussion.
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