Managing the preservation of and access to the intellectual efforts of scholars is pretty central to the process of learning and creating new knowledge.  With regards to print material, the systems for archiving and preservation are so old and well-established by librarians, archivists, and publishers that they are practically invisible to scholars.  It wasnt always this way, of course, the standards and processes that make it possible for published books and articles to make their way onto library shelves has taken decades to work out.  But worked out they now are, so well in most cases that they are mostly invisible to scholars, if not the librarians and other professionals that work to keep them running on a daily basis.

These systems were designed for a world of print materials.  The increasing amount of research and information that is born digital, circulates digitally, and (often) dies or vanishes digitally is often completely invisible to such systems.  Campus libraries serve as the central point of storage and access for print materials, but there is typically no such central point of access or storage for digital information scholars produce.   There is typically also no provision for long-term, permanent access to the material.  As a result, what is fast becoming a considerable amount of an institutions intellectual output is inaccessible to the larger campus community (and the world at large), and its very existence is precarious.

A concrete example may help to illustrate the point Im trying to make here.  When I was still working as a librarian at a small liberal arts college a few years ago, several female scholars collaborated to create a website commemorating the anniversary of the admission of the first female scholars to the college.  The website had commentary and text from many of the scholars, as well as interactive features, and multimedia such as images and interviews with female alumni.  It represented a major scholarly effort to capture and organize important historical information about the college.  The website ran successfully for several months, until the anniversary had passed.  The question then became: what to do with it?  One of the scholars responsible for creating the website contacted me, knowing my reputation as a tech-savvy faculty member, and asked me what I thought she should do.  She wanted the information and features of the site to be preserved.  But there was little I could do.  The library had no infrastructure to support the preservation of digital information.  We had no staff or resources to devote to curating a digital collection.

What I ended up doing was not a very good solution: I burned the web pages to disk and deposited it in our physical archive.  For all I know, it sits there still.  Given the rate of change of web technology and standards, the multimedia and interactive features will continue to be accessible for maybe another five years.  The text will be accessible for longer, those standards dont change as much.  No one will migrate the content to new formats as standards change.  I doubt anyone will even be aware of its existence once a few years pass.  It will likely sit on the shelf, forgotten, until someday an archivist runs across it, tries to see whats on it, and seeing that its mostly unreadable, throws it away.  The time and effort put into creating it will be wasted, and valuable information will be lost.

From what I have seen, this is not a rare occurrence.  Universities routinely put hours of staff time and money into creating digital material that is often erased or lost when the person who created it moves on and their hard drive space is wiped.  I have seen people duplicate effort as they create digital white papers or training materials that someone else on campus has already made, just because there was no way to be aware of the existence of the material.  I like to say that its like throwing money right out a window. The infrastructure that we have is inadequate for dealing with the challenges digital materials pose in terms of access, storage, and long-term preservation of digital material.  Thats a problem for anyone who values scholarship.  Some are already predicting a digital dark age in which substantial amounts of our own history and intellectual effort will simply cease to exist over time.  Digital information is much more volatile than print.  Its susceptible to the deterioration of the physical media its stored on, it can be erased by a good electrical surge, and most importantly, the systems and protocols used to access it become obsolete, rendering the information inaccessible.

As you might imagine, theres a tremendous amount of discussion about this in library circles.  When I still was a librarian, I was always a bit perplexed, though, at how the issue didn't seem to register to most scholars, even those who were actively engaged in digital scholarship.  When I spoke to faculty members about what was going to happen to their new whiz-bang digital resource once it was done and they needed to store and access it long-term, I usually got blank stares.  Now that I am a budding scholar myself, I think I understand at least part of the issue: time.  Junior faculty and graduate students especially dont have very much of it, and with the relentless pressure to produce or perish, its about all a struggling faculty member can do to finish the current project and plan the next one.  Preservation of the work is a secondary issue, if it registers at all.  I suspect there are also other reasons, but those Id like to hear about from you.  How much do scholars think about preservation issues?  What do they think about them, if and when they do?

I think scholars have a pivotal role to play in ensuring that information thats born digital gets preserved, at least in the short term.  In the absence of the kinds of mechanisms established for archiving and access to print materials, librarians need help identifying, describing, and loading digital resources into spaces where they can be accessed and preserved.  There are a number of intertwined issues here:  how can librarians learn about research efforts that produce digital outputs that are of use or interest (and how do we define use and interest)?  Where can we put them so they can be cared for and easily accessed?  How can we best facilitate searching and access to the material?  Who will do the work in the aforesaid loading and describing?  These issues, and the potential role of the scholar in solving them, are what Id like to explore in this series of blog posts.