Digital Preservation: Selecting
Lori Ross
LI827XI
Summer 2013
Imagine yourself standing in front of a library collection and you being the person to
decide on what to do in the preservation process on each one. With the option of
digitalizing materials, do you do this? And if so, how many of the collection? Then, which
format for each do you want to use that will give researchers and others the best digital
copy that they can have?
There are many things a librarian needs to look for when selecting materials for
digitalization as preservation. There are many more decisions that are needed to be made
before you even pick the formats in which to digitalize each item. I would like to talk about
what people are doing to preserve the different materials via digitalization. And why the
different people think digitalization will work for most people.
First, a little fast background on preservation. For libraries concerned with the
preservation of materials in their collection, preservation tactics is something that had
become second nature to them. You repair and fix materials that were torn or otherwise
damaged. For special materials, you have a climate controlled area that helps slow down
the destruction of those materials. If the material could not be preserved in-house you had
someone come in to repair the damage.
Then the digital world came to be and gave libraries a whole new way to save the
collection, without taking away the collection and locking it up from researchers. But with
this option there are preservation questions and concerns that come with it. Does digital
take the place of the real material? Or do we want to save the real material but give people
the option of viewing it via a digital version? Then there is the materials that start as a
digital material, such as this paper. What should a library do to preserve the large amounts
of data that are generated in today’s world?
The Library of Congress (n.d.) talks about the treatment of handling the different
materials and how you should handle them during copying.
Treatment work that is performed is necessary and critical to the stability of the
materials. About one-half of the treatments could be considered minimal
stabilization. Examples include: humidifying and flattening foldouts in books;
ensuring that no text is obscured by creases; mending tears selectively; drycleaning where necessary; mending weak and torn folds where handling might
cause further damage; and placing very thin and iron-gall ink damaged sheets or
mold damaged materials into polyester film encapsulations.
Full treatments have been carried out on some pamphlets, music scores, and
small bound items, such as manuals, with brittle paper or covers, which require
complete rebinding in order to be scanned safely. Flat paper items receive full
treatment when the minimum acceptable treatment will take the same amount
of time.
Photographs mounted on brittle and curved boards also require more treatment,
both for handling and aesthetic reasons. The normal treatment is stabilization of
boards by mending breaks, filling losses and providing additional support for the
boards. Mounted photographs and most books are scanned with an overhead
camera to minimize risk to their fragile structures.
Along with preserving a collection in digital form, Librarians and staff have to think
about the long term issues that could arise with doing this. Stephen Nichols (2001) talks
about the future cost to maintain both the digital surrogate and the physical “source”
artifact. “The larger problem may be that, as preference for the convenience of surrogates
grows in the digital library, the continuing preservation needs of the source artifacts may
be eclipsed by the resource needs of creating and maintaining digital files, the long-term
costs of which are unknown (p. vii).”
But with digitalizing an artifact and collection, what should the library do with the
original? “A policy should also be established regarding the use of original items when
preservation photocopies or microfilm are available. Access to an original should be
permitted only if physical examination of the item will provide answers to questions that
cannot be answered by the reproduction (Drewes & Page, 1997, p. 265).” By doing this you
can preserve the artifacts and still give access to researchers who want to view them. Keep
in mind that many places still use microfilm, but have started to put their materials in
digital format for easy search and retrieval.
So are you wondering why and how you would decide what materials should be
digitalized? Ezra Shiloba Gbaje and Zakari Mohmmed (2011) reveal in their article Digital
preservation policy in national information centres in Nigeria, the requirements that they
look for in order to digitalize something. “In order to achieve this, it requires digital
materials to be understood and managed at four levels: as physical phenomena; as logical
encodings; as conceptual objects that have meaning to humans; and as assets of essential
elements that must be preserved in order to offer future users the essence of each object
(p. 2).” So with these guidelines in mind, a librarian can see what information they might
need. Also the discussion above from the Library of Congress can be used also to
determine if the materials should be digitalized to preserve the information that the
artifact has.
An example of the use of digitalization is stated in Nichols (2001) article on how
after digitalizing a special collection it became more popular than when it was just in print.
"This predilection to scan special collections rather than monographs is based in part on
the idea that special-collections materials—maps, photographs, manuscripts—have
traditionally received little use because they exist in single copies in one collection. Once
made easily accessible, these materials may become high-use items (p. 25).”
There are issues that some people have pointed out when digitalizing a collection
that the formats change and that means that the collection would have to be updated every
time a new format is done to ensure that you can access the digital material. Along with
this problem is where to store all the digital material that has come from it. “As several
organizations struggle with the sustainability of digital storage for materials, Stephen
Morales, the Project Director for the Digital Preservaton Network (DPN), provided insight
into a distributed, long term preservation model still under development. Instead of
keeping all materials on fully accessible servers, DPN aims to develop a federated approach
that would allow the storage of low use data in a dark archive with multiple replication
nodes. DPN itself is still in the early phase of organizational development, as governance
structure and other teams work to establish the leadership, the architecture, and the
services. Consideration of succession rights to data is one of the key areas to avoid orphan
datasets that can neither be reused nor deleted (Schubert, Shorish, Giles & Frankel, 2013, p.
5).”
Does this mean that I believe that it is great to digitalize your whole collection? I
would have to say in some ways, yes, it would be good to digitalize it. You would be able to
access the materials that you want to view without further damage to the original. You
would be able to have more users and researchers access the material. In some cases,
researchers might not know that a specific item is in the collection if there was no easy way
to view and access it. You would also be able to help preserve your collection in a format
that many people in today’s world know and use in many ways.
So to recap what you need to do for digital preservation. Be sure to use a format
that is up-to-date and is accessible to all. When choosing your selection on what needs to
be digitalized, look for materials that have a higher chance of being destroyed if handled
too much and know that you should still let researchers have access to the original
materials if they need it.
References
Conservation implications of digitalization projects. (n.d.). Library of Congress. Retrieved July
15, 2013, from http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/techdocs/conserv83199a.pdf
Gbaje, E. S., & Mohammed, Z. (2011). Digitalpreservation strategies: A case study of Nigerian
natinal information centres. IFLA Journal, 37(3), 218-227. Retrieved July 15, 2013.
Lavender, K. (1997). Preservation education for the library user: The special collections
perspective. In Promting preservation awareness in libraries: A sourcebook for academic,
public, school, and special collections (pp. 263-279). Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Nichols, S. G., & Smith, A. (2001). The evidence in hand: Report ofthe task force on the artifact in
library collections [PDF]. Washington, DC: Council on Library and Information Resources.
Schubert, C., Shorish, Y., Frankel, P., & Giles, K. (2013). The evolution of research data:
Strategies for curation and data management. Library Hi Tech News, 30(6), 1-7.
Retrieved July 15, 2013.