Association of Research Libraries (ARL®)

Frances Groen, Director of Libraries
McGill University

Introduction

When Deborah Jakubs and Duane Webster were discussing with the panel today's presentation, they asked us to think about strategic issues regarding digital initiatives in special collections departments. In thinking about this issue, an analogy came to me while I was reading Canada's national magazine, MacLean's—one that was, if not academic, at least highly strategic. Peter Gzowski wrote a fine tribute to Wayne Gretzky, who recently retired after 20 years as a hockey superstar. In analyzing what made Gretzky such a great player, Gzowski said that where lesser players see the position of other individuals in the game, Gretzky sees situations. He knew where every player was situated at any given moment, what he was likely to do, and how he would do it. He watched, not where the puck was, but where it was going.

Although the worlds of special collections and professional hockey are far apart, the skills that made Gretzky the Great One can provide us with an analogy for making strategic choices in creating digital objects from our special collections. We need to think strategically about where the special collections department is going, what its strengths are and how it fits into the scholarship and research that are occurring at our university. The need for strategic thinking is important in the university, where the perceptions of the value of digital technology still vary. Scholars continue to express concern that funds presently used for purchasing books and journals will be directed to technology, including the creation of digital documents. In a similar cautionary vein, scholars, and, some librarians, express concern that our collections are growing more similar, given national research priorities and limited funding. It is clear that this trend could prove a threat to the growth of scholarship.

Strategic thinking can help in considering the two issues I want to talk about this morning:

1. selection of materials from special collections for digitization
   
2. preservation of access to these digitized materials

Selection of Materials for Digitization

The collections that we are putting on the Web are, in a very real sense, publications that may be accompanied by a great deal of descriptive material. They are created to make the items more accessible and more understandable. Through digitization, we enhance an original printed volume or a manuscript in a way that a reference librarian or a cataloguer can help to bring together related materials, but in digitization, we add an extra step—not just providing the link to but the actual text of those materials.

In selecting and creating digital objects the library has the potential for developing and enhancing its role as a publisher. To the classic mission of the library—to acquire, to organize, to make available, and to preserve the collections—is added the role of creator. If the librarian is not restricted in the production, the enhancement of the digital copy through the use of hypertext links and enrichment from other media such as sound becomes a creative act, producing a critical text based on the original work. In this scenario, the division of special collections becomes a museum of the history of the book (complete with facsimile reproductions) and an electronic publisher.

If we view the digitization of a rare book and the addition of links to critical and otherwise enhancing materials as a creative act, it becomes obvious that the creation draws upon resources throughout the entire collection of the library, not only the rare book division. Identifying those supporting (secondary) materials situates the rare and special collections division within the context of the entire library. What materials exist to enrich the context? What multimedia (recordings of readings, interviews) can be added to enhance the primary material being digitized? The rare book collection no longer stands off from the center, but is the focal point for enrichment of scholarship through enhancing access to a rare collection and its integration into the scholarly culture.

This is a powerful new role for the library to play, but it is also a costly one, especially in terms of human resources. For this reason, the selection of materials for digitization must be strategically considered. The factors that influence the selection of materials are both internal and external to the library. Some of the reasons for digitization of special collections are:

1. First and foremost, the compelling rationale will be the preservation of the artifact by producing a surrogate copy. Not only does the contents become available over the Web for all who need to use it, the original document, sometimes fragile from use and age, is protected.

However, Nicole Bouché expresses a note of caution in her pamphlet on the digitization of the Boswell Papers at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

"It is unlikely that the Beinicke will embark on any large scale scanning of manuscripts or archival collections. Apart from the aesthetic advantage of a digital image, the library sees little scholarly benefit to be gained ... In the vast majority of cases, there is little to be revealed by viewing a digital image that is not already readily apparent from a photocopy or microfilm or from routine inspection of the original. Serious scholarship still requires consultation of the original."

1. The project must support the scholarly and research agenda of the institution.

2. The strengths of the collections will determine whether or not to digitize. Comprehensiveness of a collection will be a significant factor in influencing the choice of material for digitization.

3. The availability of special grants and other sources of financial support to pay for the project are also considerations. As an example, a private foundation supporting medical research may be interested in the digitizing of a 19th century tuberculosis collection. Research in this historic disease is revitalized as a result of its re-appearance as a secondary infection in the modern hospital.

4. The relevance of the collection to the local culture, for example, native authors, local political history, and the archives of business. Government support is most likely to be forthcoming for the digitization of political cultural historical artifacts.

5. The knowledge of librarians involved in special collections will be a strong motivation. The scholar/librarian may well be returning to the library in the guise of the information specialist with in-depth knowledge of both digital technology and special subject knowledge.

The Preservation of Our Digital Initiatives

In commenting on this, I want to ask you to think about one of our first experiences with the creation of a digital object—one that we all have experienced—the development of our online catalogues. As librarians, we worked hard to develop standards for the creation of these catalogues—the use of which has served well for three decades. However, we did not think a great deal about the preservation of that digital object—the online catalogue. Perhaps this is because its preservation was being taken care of, if not by design, by virtue of the fact that we were required to migrate the data as we changed systems. And, since the catalogue was a dynamic database, we maintained software that allowed us to continue to "read" the catalogue over decades of use.

My University, and I suspect that this is not atypical—maintains secure offsite storage of the mission critical digital records of the University—financial and pension, student records, and also our library database, creating magnetic tape records for storage. The main point of this storage is that essential records are duplicated offsite in case of a disaster. Whether the equipment to read these files exists, has not been a question that concerned us so far. A few years ago, Nicholson Baker wrote his essay entitled, "Discards" on the end of the card catalogue and created, as a result, a great deal of antipathy in the library community. This has always puzzled me since, among other things, Baker, has an extraordinary respect for librarians—indeed he argues that the real reason to protect card catalogues was that they held the irreplaceable intelligence of the librarians who worked on these.

As someone who began her career as a cataloguer, I felt a recognition of truth of much of what Baker was saying. While I do not wish to rake the still hot coals of Baker's arguments in "Discards," I do want to use the example of how something can be "lost in translation". This does not argue against the enormous, value added—preservation/access and dissemination of the digital environment. It simply recognizes the fragility of the medium. It serves to emphasize why care in the development of preservation standards in a digital environment is important.

The hard reality of digital preservation is that there is no preservation without access! The "slow fires" of paper deterioration in a print environment are replaced by the "time bomb" that explodes in a digital environment if preservation issues are not addressed. Unfortunately, the most visible digital initiatives in libraries have been those that force us to focus on access, leaving preservation to be considered by someone else or at a later date. Some examples of access-centered digital initiatives are:

• a necessary mass of e-journals
  
• digital finding aids
  
• Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and the International Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) and other sources
  
• electronic reserves
  
• digitization of theses

In digitization initiatives in special collections, however, the focus shifts with emphasis on

• preservation
  
• enhanced access
  
• electronic publishing

The leadership and research provided by the Commission on Preservation and Access of the Council on Library and Information Resources is important if research libraries are to meet the challenge of digital preservation. In the Commission's document on preservation (Council on Library and Information Resources Commission on Preservation and Access, January 1999) Jeff Rothenberg outlines the lack of a clear solution to the problem of preserving digital information—a group of 21 experts reached the conclusion that there was as yet no answer to the technical, legal and political issues surrounding this problem. Rothenberg summarizes and evaluates the possible approaches currently tested regarding digitization projects based on the transformation of original paper documents and the preservation issues surrounding those documents that are "born digital." His summary of current approaches covers:

1. Reliance on hard copy That is, printing and saving a hard copy of digital documents.

2. Reliance on standards One of the most serious losses of digital data results in shifts between network, hierarchical and relational databases which often necessitate the redesign of documents or databases. Forcing documents into standard forms is not satisfactory since these frequently are "competing" standards and functionality is often lost in translation.

3. Reliance on Computer Museums

4. Reliance on Migration Rothenberg characterizes this approach as one based on "wishful thinking". To keep a given digital document alive we will need to migrate documents in perpetuity—migration that may vary by document type and will require large and sustained funding.

Rothenberg's preferred solution is emulation. This includes the preservation through emulation of a digital document's original software which will allow it to be run in the future despite its being obsolete. This solution is "annotate, encapsulate, transliterate and emulate."

The key to the survival of a digital document using the emulation strategy is in saving the explanation that accompanies the document (including explanation on how to use the encapsulation, user documentation, version and configuration information for all software to be run under emulation, and the emulator specifications). Sound explanations must remain readable by the eye, to ensure that saved documents are not lost.

Conclusion

What conclusions can I, as a Director of a medium size research library, embarked upon some digitization initiatives, draw from these complex and costly digital preservation strategies? In the first instance, I believe that the loss of a surrogate (digital) copy, no matter how creatively enhanced, must take second place to the need to preserve the scholarly artifact.

Secondly, given limited finances, we will continue to turn to microfilm as the most reliable and cost effective alternative to the preservation of digitized rare materials.

It is becoming important, as the decade of digitization progress, for librarians to give serious thought to two questions:

• How will digital documents affect what the library will be collecting in future?
  
• How will reading and cognition be affected by these digital initiatives?

We have yet to understand the ways in which reading and learning are different in the digital environment. "Digital" is a different way of accessing knowledge, but is it a different way of knowing?

In his Order of Books, Roger Chartier has provided us with an optimistic text describing the world which scholars have dreamed of:

As the twentieth century wanes, our dream is to be able to surmount the contradiction that long haunted Western Europeans' relationship with the book. The Library of the future seems indeed to be in a sense a library without walls, as were the libraries that Gesner, Doni, and La Croix du Maine erected on paper. Unlike their catalogues, which furnished author's names, the titles of works, and at times summaries of or extracts from the works, the library of the future is inscribed where all texts can be summoned, assembled, and read: on a screen. In the universe of remote communications made possible by computerized texts and electronic diffusion, texts are no longer prisoners of their original physical, material existence. Separated from the objects on which we are used to finding them, texts can be transmitted in a new form; there is no longer a necessary connection between where they are conserved and where they are read. The opposition long held to be insurmountable between the closed world of any finite collection, no matter what its size, and the infinite universe of all texts ever written is thus theoretically annihilated.

At the same time, Chartier used a cautionary note, taken from D.F. Mackenzie's "Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts," his Panzzi Lectures of 1985 at the British Library. Form does, in fact, effect meaning—Mackenzie claims, and text is more than semantic content. In the transition from the codex to the computer monitor, the text is no longer the same because the conditions of comprehension are modified. How these modifications are going to effect reading and, comprehension and interpretation are important questions that will mould what and how the Library collects. The enhanced digital objects that libraries are creating provide tools to enhance cultural competence. They may also be changing fundamentally the ways in which readers "know" texts.

Copyright © 1999 by Frances Groen