Washington, D.C.
October 15-17, 1997
Deanna Marcum, President
Council on Library and Information Resources
Thank you. I have a very limited amount of time to talk to you today, so I am going to be, I hope, uncharacteristically blunt. I hope you will forgive me for that, but I have decided that I only have five minutes. I’ll make it count.
Preserving Digital Information, published jointly by the Research Libraries Group and the then Commission of Preservation and Access, received high praise when it was released in May 1996. The reviews were uniformly laudatory. In fact, the publication just won the Society of American Archivists’ Preservation Publication of the Year Award. It is cited in virtually every article about digital preservation that has been published since the first draft of that paper appeared in 1995, and it is available on the Web at http://www.rlg.org/ArchTF/.
While everyone agrees that it is an eloquent presentation of the issues, I must ask: Does anyone agree with the fundamental assumptions that underlie all of the recommendations in that report? I have heard almost no discussion on two of those assumptions, listed at the beginning of the report. I would like to paraphrase them for you. I would like ARL to consider these assumptions.
The first of the two is that a process of certification for digital archives is needed to create an overall climate of trust about the prospects of preserving digital information. The second assumption is that certified digital archives must have the right and accept the duty to exercise an aggressive rescue function as a fail-safe mechanism for preserving valuable digital information that is in jeopardy of destruction, neglect, or abandonment by its current owner.
I revisit these assumptions with you this afternoon, for your reaction to them will determine how we should proceed as a community of research libraries, committed to preserving the intellectual record.
Is it possible, at a time when there are great pressures to make no distinctions among research libraries, to support a few of them as digital repositories for the common good? Now, the question that comes up always is, “Who will establish the criteria?” This seems to be the question that stops progress. How can we assure that, in addition to being a traditional research library, an institution also meets the criteria for being a digital archive? Can we organize ourselves to monitor information that is born digitally, to assure that it is available over time?
We can no doubt agree on one fundamental truth: that a primary role of research libraries is to preserve information that supports research and teaching for as far into the future as possible. We have not understood that truth to apply only to print on paper. And this is agreed upon, our greatest challenge is to figure out how we can meet our obligations.
The ARL Preservation Committee endorsed the RLG/CPA report, and this meeting did, in fact, grow out of a discussion of that report. However, ARL has not yet commented on the recommendations that were listed at the end of that report, and certainly not on those two fundamental assumptions. So, allow me to put the question to you very directly: Does ARL wish to become an organization that specifies the standards, criteria, and mechanisms needed to certify repositories of digital information as archives, as called for in recommendation number seven? Does ARL wish to take on the assignment of preparing a white paper on the legal and institutional foundations needed for the development of effective, fail-safe mechanisms to support the aggressive rescue function, to make sure that endangered digital information is protected?
To me, it seems essential that ARL answer these questions. What I have said to the Preservation Committee is, if the word “certification” is what is getting in the way, perhaps we can find another word. But, I would like very much to see ARL consider what role it will play in specifying just what we mean when we say that we are going to preserve digital information. And how will we know it is being done? As many speakers have pointed out, we can’t see it, so we must have other means of assuring preservation over time.
I also want to let you know what CLIR is doing, as a result of this report.
We had a very good discussion with the CLIR board about the next steps we should take, and we decided that we could add to the information base about digital archiving. Perhaps that is the most important role we can play. We have done two things.
We convened our technical advisory committee, and asked them to look at the recommendations and let us know if they were technically feasible. They endorsed the report and urged us to raise money to support pilot projects. We have tried to do that, and we have already begun to fund a few of them. We will do as much of that as possible.
The CLIR board also concluded that we should take a closer look at the digital archiving models that are now in place, and from them try to make some assessment of what is working, what isn’t, under what conditions, and for what kinds of materials.
As Meredith mentioned to you this morning, we have hired Jeff Rothenberg as a consultant to work with us looking at the various models of digital archiving and to begin to describe the existing conditions for certain kinds of materials. We hope that from that project we will be able to develop a checklist of what any organization will want to consider when it is thinking of becoming a repository for digital information.
We have talked to the ARL Preservation Committee about serving as an informal advisory group for that project, and the Committee has agreed to do so. We are very pleased about it. And we will be talking with ARL, through the Preservation Committee, about the project as it develops.
Thank you very much.