A paper presented by Colin Webb, Director Preservation Services, at CONSAL 2000, the 11th Congress of Southeast Asian Librarians Conference, Singapore, 26th - 28th April 2000
Preservation is part of the core business of those libraries that seek to maintain their collections for ongoing use. Digital technology and increasing collaboration between libraries are likely to impact on how libraries see their preservation role, and how they try to fulfill that role. This paper looks at the preservation paradigm that has served libraries well in the past, exploring the questions of whether there will be an ongoing need for preservation in the future, and if so, what its concerns might be and what might be needed to prepare for a different preservation paradigm.
What is the role of preservation in the library of the future? Will digital technology overcome all of our preservation problems or will we still need to actively manage the accessibility of information? What do we need to do to prepare for the future?
Let me begin by saying that I do not know the answers to these questions. In a time of rapid change it is hard to predict what the library of the future will look like, let alone what preservation issues and solutions it will enjoy. However, we can make some educated guesses. As a preservation manager, making educated guesses about the future is part of what I am paid to do in order that we can prepare for it in a sensible manner. Therefore I have frequent cause to think about these questions as I try to prepare my colleagues and my institution - and most emphatically myself - for what we will need to be doing in five, ten or twenty years time.
From this you will gather that this paper is intended to be a small exercise in future guessing, to see if we can pick up some clues as to how we can prepare for the preservation responsibilities that lie ahead of us.
I define preservation, at least in a library context, as the processes of keeping collections and the information they contain available for use for as long as they are needed. Such a definition begs many questions, of course, such as: available for what kind of use? And: needed by whom? However, I believe this is a good enough working definition to take with us on this exercise.
Preservation has played an important role in libraries. Because of the "things" that libraries have collected, preservation has developed with a strong focus on preserving physical material: understanding why materials deteriorate and what we can do about it.
a. The threats preservation is used to dealing with
Our collections are made up of materials that are naturally subject to deterioration, caused or influenced by many things, including:
We all know that preservation is about protecting our collections from such threats, or salvaging and repairing them to compensate for their impact.
Of course, our view of preservation, and our sense of priorities, are both influenced by our working context including the kind of collections for which we are responsible, and the kind of threats that are most pressing. For example, in Canberra, where the National Library of Australia is situated, the climate is generally dry and often cool; the air is clean; we have few insect pests that worry us; we are most unlikely to suffer major floods or earthquakes. We have good buildings with reasonable air conditioning systems and reliable electricity supplies. We generally have access to well-trained and well-paid staff. Our traditional preservation priorities tend to focus on dealing with brittle papers, repairing library materials damaged in being used, ensuring the building systems work on the few days of high humidity we experience, and preventing disasters like water leaks and fires.
I know that my preservation priorities would be different if I worked in a different environment, such as one with mould, insects and other pests as constant threats, with high levels of humidity and heat and polluted air, with unreliable building systems or energy supplies, with very few trained staff and inadequate resources to stop damage happening or to repair items when damage occurs.
Whatever our experience and our situation, however, we can recognise that the business of preservation has been to deal with threats of damage or loss.
b. Preservation responses
One would have to say that at the theoretical level at least, the preservation profession has developed good responses to many of these threats. For reasons of limited resources, libraries are often unable to apply them, but we generally know what to do.
We have a range of good strategies for preventing damage. We know that reducing temperature and humidity levels will slow down deterioration, and that we need to filter out air pollutants and control exposure to light and UV. We know how to store, package, and handle collections, and how to train staff and users to do what they can to protect library materials and minimise the impact of use. We are aware that we need pest control programs and disaster plans. We have even developed national and international campaigns to eliminate the use of unstable materials such as highly acidic papers in publishing and cellulose acetate film in record photography. We have developed good microfilming techniques and standards that allow us to make reliable and long-lasting copies of unstable material or items in high demand.
When our preventive measures fail, the conservators have developed some very effective treatment strategies that can respond to most kinds of damage for most kinds of materials. We have access to a wide repertoire of approaches that draw on long-standing traditions of maintaining and repairing collections developed over many centuries in many parts of the world. We also make use of a great deal of scientific knowledge and technical development that has become available over the past 30 to 40 years as professional conservators and conservation scientists have looked for better ways of protecting and stabilising and repairing documentary materials.
Alongside the practice of preservation, we have developed mature approaches to managing our preservation programs. We are used to identifying needs, setting priorities, planning and managing projects, bidding for resources, developing skills, allocating responsibilities, evaluating progress, adjusting plans, learning from mistakes and celebrating successes.
Given the right resources, preservation has become one of the mature, functioning areas of libraries, able to draw on a great deal of shared knowledge and some standard ways of approaching problems. There is a sense that we know what needs to be done: we just need the resources and support to get on and do it.
However, libraries are changing in quite profound ways. The information they have access to is changing, how they do business is changing, and the demands and expectations of their users are changing. Many of the assumptions upon which library preservation has been based seem to have been shaken.
I want to focus on two quite obvious and related changes: the impact of digital technology, and where collaboration might lead. There are many other changes happening in our library and information world as well, but these two areas seem to have particularly interesting and challenging implications for the preservation role, and for the questions of whether we will continue to need such a function, and what it might have to attend to.
a. Digital technology
The introduction of digital technology is old news: libraries have been dealing with it as a collection issue for at least 20 years. Many of the changes wrought by it are obvious and widely discussed. We are seeing vast amounts of information of varying value published in digital formats, and many libraries are investing heavily in creating digital versions of analogue collection material.
I want to consider the preservation implications of digital technology in libraries, both in terms of managing digital information coming into our collections, and in terms of using digital imaging techniques as a preservation tool that might help us to manage our existing analogue collections.
b. Collaboration
Greatly enhanced prospects for collaboration between libraries is just one of the doors opened by digital technology. This is going to be driven by the demands of users for access to information wherever it originates, but it will also be driven by libraries themselves, as they look for opportunities to reduce their costs while improving the services they can provide. Collaboration will also be driven by a survival instinct, as libraries find themselves competing with other providers in an information market place. By working together, libraries will be able to leverage off each other to offer extremely powerful services, based on great expertise in finding, defining, managing and delivering information that people want. On the surface, this may not appear to have much to do with preservation, but I believe it will have a profound impact on what we do and how we do it.
While I am going to discuss them separately, I believe we will feel the impact of these changes working together over the next decade or so.
On the surface, digital technology appears to offer few preservation problems. Bits and bytes are easy to copy, so there should be no problems in developing an unending chain of copies into the future, and having copies all over the world in case of disaster. However, we already know that the reality is not so simple and that there are very significant technical and management problems. The two main factors leading to inaccessibility of digital information: changing technology platforms and media instability, are relentless, with the potential to render digital information useless. This becomes a critical preservation problem for libraries, because libraries unable to give access to information have no future.
In the past we have understandably, but wrongly, tended to see preservation as what happens after everything else has been sorted out, towards the end of the natural life-cycle of documents, books, photographs and so on. With digital information we cannot afford to build preservation programs on such an assumption: the inaccessibility factors operate on such a short time span that the problem becomes pressing as well as critical.
This means that preservation functions will have to be much more focused on digital collections than they have been so far. Libraries that have a custodial function will need to bring preservation perspectives to bear on the ways they manage digital information from the beginning.
What will we need to do to preserve access to digital information?
One thing we know we have to do is to bring digital information into a safe place where we can manage it and have time to make good decisions about its long-term preservation. The world of changing websites, unstable floppy disks and individual computer systems is not a place where any particular digital resource is secure for very long.
Margaret Phillips, my colleague from the National Library of Australia, will cover much of the territory to do with these highly necessary, preservation-enabling archiving steps for online publications in her paper tomorrow, Managing Chaos in the Cyberworld.
Long-term preservation of digital information across generations of technological change is a daunting challenge. At this stage we still do not know for certain how we will achieve it. There is much research going on at a conceptual level, and some practical experiments underway. There is also a lively debate between proponents of different approaches. As well as an interest in developing standards (which should ease but not solve the preservation problem), and new formats that might not be affected by either technological change or the forces of media deterioration (which seem to be noble but doomed hopes), most attention is being given to two approaches: migration (in which files are copied to new operating systems and converted so they can be accessed in each new technical environment), and emulation (in which files are maintained in their original formats and accessed using emulation software that recreates their original operating environment). At the National Library of Australia we believe we will have to use both approaches, as some resources will migrate to new standards without problems while others will require special software to access them from their original format.
Internationally, there is not much interest in maintaining museums of technology, although we know that we will have to keep some hardware and software in order to maintain accessibility while we are adopting other approaches. For good reasons there is also little faith placed in data recovery as a preservation strategy, although we are using it to good effect on individual items where it is crucial to recover something of the data, even if there is some loss of formatting and other functionality.
The National Library of Australia is very interested in these debates at a conceptual level, and in trying to participate in and contribute to them. But as well as progressing the theoretical debate, we are also committed to making progress with practical things that will be useful for now as well as for the future. We need to take this action so that we don't lose the chance to save what we can now, and so we can influence the discussion in directions that might address our needs. Even when solutions emerge, we will need to decide what is applicable to our situation. To do this we need to be well-informed and aware of what our needs really are, in order to recognise what will work for us and what is actually the solution to someone elses problem.
Those practical things include:
We believe these should all assist us in building pathways from current archiving to long-term preservation.
As we search for these pathways we can see some positive trends emerging that should give us encouragement:
Despite these positive trends there are also some negative influences tending to push workable answers further away:
These trends lead me think that the preservation problems applying to digital information will not be easily solved, but will remain a very significant challenge to libraries for a long time to come. With great optimism, an Australian colleague recently said that the injection of some millions of dollars and dedicated research might make it possible to develop software tools that would solve the preservation problem automatically: a system that would accept digital information resources in one format and automatically convert them to different formats, again and again, without loss. Such tools are some way in the future; even if and when they do appear, they will have to operate in a context of human-driven decisions about what needs to be preserved. It also seems likely that technology will change significantly enough over time to make such tools themselves obsolete.
Digital technology is probably not going to reduce the size of our analogue collections in the foreseeable future. While the number of publications existing only in digital form will continue to grow, it also looks likely that libraries, or at least some libraries, will continue to collect growing collections of papers, books, journals, photographs, maps, paintings, films, videos, and all the other non-digital things that go into our collections. Even if these collections did not grow at all, we have our existing large collections of these very physical materials to manage.
We have not found any viable large-scale panaceas for the underlying problem of deterioration: the best we can do is to retard its progress and ameliorate its effects.
I need to go back to my earlier description of preservation as a mature, functioning part of libraries. This somewhat complacent comment hides a truth that our analogue collections and our management of them will remain problematical for a long time to come.
As with digital preservation, there are some trends, generally positive, that are worth noting:
I have already mentioned the positive role of preservation microfilming. Given the expected long life of the materials, microfilming is often referred to as a proven preservation technique. In recent years we have seen improvements in standards, and the widespread filming of materials such as newspapers that have an uncertain future in their original format. With high standards, microfilming can produce copies that divert the pressure of use from fragile originals; if sufficiently well made, those copies can also eventually replace unstable originals that become unusable.
However, it is easier to talk about preservation standards for microfilming than it is to achieve them.5 I have seen many microfilming projects that failed to deliver preservation goals, for a variety of reasons, including:
In other words, the apparently 'easy preservation option' of the past 30 years demands substantial inputs, significant planning, and a lot of control if it is to achieve its preservation potential.
Apart from those not-insignificant considerations, the main concern that has emerged with microfilming as a preservation strategy in recent years is the reluctance of users to use microfilm. In a service-oriented, client-driven world, this is a powerful difficulty.
The alternative that has encouraged users to speak up and declare their dissatisfaction with microfilm is, of course, digital imaging. From an access point of view, digitisation is streets ahead - and we all know it. Many of us have clung to the idea that we can have the best of all worlds by using microfilm to create a reliable preservation copy that can be safely put away, and digitising to create an acceptable access copy we can make available to users. This was the basic principle behind our largest digital imaging project to date, the Australian Cooperative Digitisation Project 1840-1845, conducted over the past 5 years by the National Library of Australia, the State Library of New South Wales, and the University of Sydney Libraries.6 After digitising something like 60,000 microfilm images of mid-19th century Australian serials, we are still uncertain about the viability of this approach. Microfilming gave us a reliable preservation copy, but it added very substantially to the costs of the project. We also know we will seek to maintain the digital files permanently, so it seems reasonable to ask whether we really need the microfilm copy. We will not know the answer to such a question for some time, at least until we have managed to develop and test the infrastructure and procedures for managing digital files long-term. At least until then we will probably be pleased to have the microfilm.
Does digital imaging itself offer us any preservation answers for the future of our physical, analogue collections? This is a complex question. We need to look for an answer in the preservation pluses and minuses that digitisation can produce.
Digitisation can offer some preservation benefits, but as with microfilming, it is entirely possible for digitisation to happen in ways that give us absolutely no preservation benefits.
There are two main ways in which digital imaging seems to offer potential preservation benefits: in providing preservation replacement copies for unstable originals, and in providing access surrogates that relieve the pressure of access from valuable or fragile originals.7 In both cases, the benefit depends on achieving suitable image quality (which must be good enough to satisfy most demands for use, now and into the future), and on understanding and acting upon the responsibility to maintain the digital files in an accessible state long-term. These two conditions both require informed, conscious decisions that are reflected in well-controlled specifications, quality control management, and considerable investment of resources.
Digitisation's ability to reduce use pressures on fragile originals is also uncertain. We need always to ask not just whether it can have that effect, but whether or not it will. The answer requires some understanding of user behaviour: Internet availability sometimes leads to increased pressure for access to the original.
At the same time, digitisation may present some threats that need to be minimised, such as exposure of vulnerable and valuable originals to high levels of light, heat, and handling; unsympathetic preparation, and unsuitable scanning equipment.
Rather than solving all the preservation problems of our analogue collections, digital imaging appears to offer some benefits but only if we manage it properly to achieve them, and some potential negatives requiring management. Preservation does not come automatically with the digitisation territory, and its net effect is usually to add to the preservation burden when one takes into account the long-term maintenance of both analogue originals and digital copies.
We are convinced that without being firmly managed the technology tends to run ahead of the objectives that should be driving its use. To achieve the positive preservation potential it seems to have, while avoiding the preservation pitfalls, digital imaging must be based on, and surrounded by, very clear and robust policies, procedures, and understandings. As these are put into place, we can expect to see digital imaging playing an increasingly useful - but probably never complete - role in preservation. Digital technology will be a powerful tool but by no means the only one, and by no means a self-driven, self-managed one. Library managers and preservation managers will need to be clever to choose when digitisation is appropriate and cost-effective, and clever to manage it well.
Regardless of its preservation benefits or otherwise, there will undoubtedly be increasing use of digital imaging to enhance access to our collections. It seems likely that there will be a major role for preservation in helping to manage digitisation programs as part of multi-disciplinary teams required to achieve a range of institutional objectives.
The purpose of this rather lengthy digression on microfilming and digitisation has been to illustrate the view that while there are some encouraging tools, there are no once-and-for-all solutions to the preservation demands of our analogue collections. It looks very much like libraries will have to continue to struggle with their analogue collections and the influences that tend to make them unusable, while also meeting the challenges of preserving digital information in a range of formats. Rather than doing away with the preservation role, this looks like a future with a growing set of preservation needs.
Resources and support issues are so significant for most libraries that the good things preservation can do for collections and accessibility are often constrained. A likely feature of preservation in the library of the future is an ongoing struggle with those resource issues.
We will have to do a better job of sharing our expertise and resources. For many libraries access to training to develop the necessary levels of expertise will help, but in many cases there remains the basic problem of resources.
We will have to develop better ways of doing things, even in libraries that are well resourced. We will continue to look for improved processes, materials, and approaches. Innovation is being driven in part by the commitment and initiative of people working in the preservation field, but also partly by economic pressures. They are pressures I expect to feel for as long as I am a preservation manager, even in a relatively well-resourced and well-managed institution like the National Library of Australia.
Many libraries are not so well placed. We will need to find better ways of dealing with critical preservation problems where resource shortages are so acute that collections face disaster. This is an international as well as a local responsibility. Extensive cooperative microfilming programs seem to have achieved much in many regions where the resources for other kinds of preservation action are insufficient. I will be interested to learn how effective they have been in this region, and whether people believe such programs can continue to be effective in delivering what users want as technology changes.
While collaboration is going to be critical in bringing information together where users want to use it, it will also have some profound implications for the preservation function in libraries.
I have already suggested that libraries are moving to service short-term goals of information access, just in order to survive. Will this trend squeeze collection building, collection management and collection maintenance? The answer is probably yes, and no. For many libraries it will be less critical to own a collection and more critical to have access to information and tools that help users take advantage of access. At the same time, there is widespread recognition that someone has to collect and keep information.
This may well mean that fewer libraries will need to maintain collections themselves, and that libraries may maintain smaller physical collections of largely unique materials. In such a scenario, the libraries that retain collection building and archiving or preservation roles will have an increasingly critical responsibility.
An inter-connected collaborative world has great potential for confusion about responsibilities as libraries use their connectedness to serve information from decreasing numbers of copies. This would make the situation for digital resources similar to environmental resources: as the numbers of individuals decrease the impact of any disaster is more disastrous. When we have just one library holding a piece of information and serving it to the world, the options for recovery if something goes wrong are greatly reduced.
To deal with this potential, we are likely to see more coordination of preservation efforts, and more sharing of information about who is preserving what material. We have already seen the development of some interesting models such as international microfilm registers. We can expect to see something very similar with digital imaging: the costs are simply too high for anyone to be willing to risk repeating work that has already been done by someone else.
We probably have to extend this approach to all forms of preservation activity, so that we all know who is taking responsibility for preserving what material, and whether they are doing it in ways that can guarantee ongoing accessibility for everyone else?
There are already many models of collaborative preservation action. One I am very familiar with is the National Plan for Australian Newspaper (NPLAN), developed by the Council of Australian State Libraries and supported by the National Library of Australia. Under this plan, each State Library accepts responsibility to find, catalogue and preserve at least one hardcopy of every newspaper title published in its jurisdiction both in the past and in the future. The National Library accepts responsibility for a small number of titles of national coverage. Taken to its logical endpoint, the NPLAN could mean that each title is preserved by one library only, with remote access being provided through microfilm or digital images.
In such an environment we all become much more accountable to each other, and to the wider community, for what we do. We may well have to become more interested in how- and how well - other people are preserving their collections. If another library says it is preserving newspapers by microfilming them, for example, everyone who is relying on that microfilm has an interest in how well it is done, and how well the film is stored. Quality control suddenly becomes everyone's business, not just the private concern of the library doing the work.
It will not be easy to negotiate the kind of mutual-accountability arrangements this implies, especially if they are to have any meaningful impact. However we do it, a future preservation function in libraries is likely to include ongoing assessment or certification of what other institutions are doing, while ensuring that our own preservation activities deliver what all our stakeholders need, not just the readers in our own reading rooms.
Many people look to the development of national preservation plans as a way of rationalising preservation efforts, while improving the likelihood that everything needing to be preserved is being preserved. It will be a very great achievement to take such an idea and make it more than a fascinating intellectual exercise, more than a series of well-intentioned agreements, and more than a set of very broad guidelines about standards. I am very aware of these issues, as in Australia we have developed a National Conservation and Preservation Policy and Strategy,8 and now I think it is time to talk about how we will develop a national preservation plan, at least in the library sector, that addresses some of the issues I have been discussing in this paper.
We are convinced there is a strong preservation role in the libraries of the future, or at least for some libraries. It is likely to be an even more complex and pressing role than in the past.
For a long time we have realised that we have to use many approaches, and that they must be supported by a strong management direction that applies resources where they are needed most, rather than just doing what we have always done because we have always done it. We will need to strengthen our ability to adapt to changing preservation needs, without losing sight of the skills and processes we need to maintain. We will also probably need a new breed of preservation specialists with IT skills and training in preservation thinking.
What can our present preservation paradigms bring to this? For at least some of our responsibilities we will have to forsake the conservator's focus on materials, how they deteriorate and how to fix them, and learn to think in terms of archival processes rather than archival materials. On the other hand, it would be a great mistake to equate this shift with giving up a long-term preservation perspective, something we will need as much in the future as in the past.
We also need to bring our teamworking skills to the table. Preservation in many libraries has been seen as an isolated activity but in fact it always works best when it is well integrated. With many lines in libraries blurring in the face of the pervasive challenges and opportunities of digital technology, preservation professionals need to work effectively outside their own area of specialisation.
An effective preservation role in the library of the future will require flexibility, a willingness to change, proactively seeking a useful role that draws on the expertise and perspectives we already have, while developing whatever new expertise and perspectives will be needed. Willingness to listen, consult, learn, and to form alliances and partnerships, will all be important. We can expect to have to deal with diversity and ambiguity. And we will need to look for opportunities while being wary of dead-end paths that look promising but lead nowhere. I suspect these qualities will be in demand for more than preservation.
Colin Webb has a varied background in bookbinding, paper conservation, archival and library preservation, microfilming management and digital preservation. He has worked as a senior preservation manager in the National Library of Australia since 1993, during which time he has been closely involved in most of the Library's initiatives relating to the management of digital collections. He was recently appointed Director of the IFLA Preservation and Conservation Regional Centre in Canberra, and is a member of the Research Libraries Group Preserve Advisory Council. He was a member of the Steering Committee for the Australian Cooperative Digitisation Project 1840-1845, and is part of the International Advisory Group for the PADI (Preserving Access to Digital Information) subject gateway maintained by the National Library of Australia. He has a deep interest in the future of libraries and in the way the preservation profession responds to the challenges of digital technology.
1 Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS), CCSDS 650.0-R-1, May 1999.. Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS) Draft Recommendation for Space Data System Standards. [Online]. Available: http://www.ccsds.org/RP9905/RP9905.html. (viewed 30 March 2000)
2 These include the Networked European Deposit Library Project (NEDLIB - http://www.konbib.nl/coop/nedlib/) and the CEDARS project in the United Kingdom (http://www.leeds.ac.uk/cedars/), both of which maintain informative websites that are well worth looking at.
3 National Library of Australia. PANDORA Project. 2000. [Online]. Available: http://pandora.nla.gov.au/about.html (viewed 30 March 2000)
4 National Library of Australia. PADI Preserving Access to Digital Information. 2000. [Online]. Available: http://www.nla.gov.au/padi/ (viewed 30 march 2000)
5 Microfilming can serve information preservation ends when we can certify that the filming is complete, accurate, legible and reproducible, filmed with consistent density on a stable film base that has been properly processed, with the right duplicating and service copies, and properly stored, used and managed. If we also intend to preserve the objects we have filmed, the filming processes need to minimise the threat of damage to the originals in the way they are handled, prepared and filmed.
6 National Library of Australia. Australian Periodical Publications 1840-1845. 1999. [Online]. Available: http://www.nla.gov.au/ferg/ (viewed 30 March 2000)
7 These are benefits already identified for microfilm. Digital imaging may or may not do these better than microfilm, but of course it has many access advantages, especially for material in demand.
8 Cultural Ministers Council Heritage Collections Council. National Conservation and Preservation Policy and Strategy. 1998. [Online]. Available: http://www.amol.org.au/craft/publications/hcc/hcc_policyandstrategy_1.asp (viewed 30 March 2000)
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