Jacob Nadal

By a string of coincidences I came across this Rogue Librarian post. It raises the importance of individual efforts in preservation and the need for tools like CLOCKSS that allow users to keep their own stuff safe and provide a low barrier of entry for preserving digital information.

It looks like the SXSW panel that was having this discussion talked mostly about the contemporary slew of information generating activities, blogs in particular, and the tools involved. Of particular interest is the notion that creators ought to have the tools to preserve their creative output:

Unless individuals are given the tools to preserve their own digital collections, future historians will have only secondary sources like textbooks and newspapers to tell them about the past. Our sense of history will be spotty, flat, biased, and unverifiable. [from Rogue Librarian]

The nuance I'd really like to see is between preservability and preservation. Helping someone make their blog (or anything) preservable is a matter of using well-documented and doggedly implemented standards, and creating effective safety nets against catastrophe (like CLOCKSS). Preservation of those resources is a matter of making the transition to some thing that (here commenceth an incomplete and unordered list of reasons why preservation librarians don't sleep well):

• creates and maintains the metadata that enables their use and discovery
• stores them in an optimal environment
• insures that they are accessible under the most liberal possible terms
  • creates facsimiles in contemporary formats to enable access
• promotes their existence
• fixes them in a particular form at a definite time
• documents subsequent changes
  • insures that those changes do not reduce their longevity
  • insures those changes are reversible
• minimizes risks to their longevity
• performs corrective treatments when materials are damaged or have decayed
• responds to catastrophes in a manner that minimizes damage to, and inaccessibility of, materials
• monitors the materials and their environment to predict potential problems

There are lots of good things in Web 2.0 to facilitate this. Standards are on the rise to promote interoperability and some agnosticism about how you access digital data. This sort of lean/clean design could translate into lighter loads on those who inherit this material. I hope this means that individual authors and their first generation of advocates will be operating with technology that makes it easy to acquire materials and create a preservation process for them.

The other pole to this is the need for some pretty serious IT infrastructure for this. Partly this is about capacity: Any one person's blog and worthwhile files and flickr account maybe only a few gigabytes. But when we start to think of the top 100 authors of our decade, we're suddenly in the range of terabytes. Then we add the care of things like digital audio and video, which quickly add up to petabytes worth of data. This is the sort of thing that, pace Mr. Moore, costs a lot to maintain both in terms of the raw hardware requirements and the need for someone to manage things.

The other part of this is organization. Even a peer-to-peer system like LOCKSS, with all its scrappy anti-authoritarian connotations, can't perpetuate a digital collection unless someone keeps the boxes plugged in. At present, I think we need our Olde Heritage Institutions for just this reason - they will be here after we are not. Unfortunately, they are not lean and clean, plays well with other kind of places. So how do we bring the right approaches and tools into the right institutions? How do we do the consciousness raising?

Big data storage has traditionally been the province of what I like to think of as BigIT (for it's inflammatory pronunciation options), which has also been traditionally closed off and unresponsive to "outsiders" - the people who use their services particularly, and especially those who say heretical things like "Lotus Notes' user interface is so awful that it is eating away at my soul." Of course, since Lotus Notes recently burned a black and weeping hole in my life my views are somewhat blinkered at present. So this is probably a topic to save for a later post.

We see the same problem in other areas of library preservation, though, with architects and building engineers. They don't like to be told that things are not working - the general philosophy seems to be that if you don't have the expertise to cause the problem, you don't have the right to complain about it. I'd like to see us make the positive shift here. To the idea that if we have the expertise to create a solution, we have the right to do so.