Article Abstract - "Preservation in the Age of Google: Digitization, Digital Preservation, and Dilemmas," by Paul Conway

When I Shadowed Doug Sanders in the IU Preservation Lab a couple weeks back, I wanted to follow the experience up with some readings on preservation and/or conservation. Admittedly, I remain a bit unclear on the differentiation between conservation and preservation. According to A Glossary of Archival & Records Terminology, by Richard Pearce-Moses (from the SAA Archival Fundamentals Series III),

Conservation is defined as:
n. 1. The repair or stabilization of materials through chemical or physical treatment to ensure that they survive in their original form as long as possible. -- 2. The profession devoted to the preservation of cultural property for the future through examination, documentation, treatment, and preventative care, supported by research and education.

Preservation is defined as:
n. 1. The professional discipline of protecting materials by minimizing chemical and physical deterioration and damage to minimize the loss of information and to extend the life of cultural property. -- 2. The act of keeping from harm, injury, decay, or destruction, especially through noninvasive treatment. -- 3. LAW - The obligation to protect records and other materials potentially relevant to litigation and subject to discovery.
preserve. v. 4. To keep for some period of time; to set aside for future use. -- 5. CONSERVATION - To take action to prevent deterioration or loss. -- 6. LAW - To protect from spoliation.

If you ask me, the difference still isn't entirely explicit in looking at those definitions alone. In a successive note, however, the author elaborates in saying that conservation is sometimes considered treatment for damage repair. Alternatively, preservation activities are considered a subdiscipline under the responsibilities of the conservator. That said, I will refer to preservation throughout this post rather than conservation, as I believe it more accurately relates to my intended idea of preservation as minimizing information loss and extending the life of materials.


Getting back on topic...

In response to my curiosity about the conservation profession and preservation activities, Cherry suggested that I look into Conservation OnLine (COOL), a resource for conservation professionals operated by the Foundation of the American Institute for Conservation (AIC). The site is a great resource which contains information pertinent to various facets of conservation and preservation work according to types of cultural property, materials, and subjects. It includes a news section, a directory of conservators and allied professionals, and links to other related groups which may be of use and interest.

The site also links to the Journal of the American Institute for Conservation (JAIC), which hosts a wealth of articles from the journal's publication run dating 1977-2005 (only articles three years old and older are accessible in a digital format; others are available to AIC members only in print format). Journal articles are freely accessible to all site visitors. Though I browsed through the full run of titles and read a number of article abstracts, my lack of training in conservation and preservation made most topics slightly intellectually inaccessible. As I mentioned in a previous entry, the conservation/preservation field is a small one which requires years of specialized trainings through extensive coursework and hands on experience. In searching through various journal databases to which IU subscribes on a quest to find more generalized articles on the topic, I came across "Preservation in the Age of Google: Digitization, Digital Preservation, and Dilemmas," by Paul Conway, as originally published in The Library Quarterly, Vol. 80, No. 1 (January 2010). Conway, a researcher and professor at the University of Michigan and has been heavily involved in the archives, preservation, and technological dialog for more than thirty years.

Though I am certainly aware of the shift to digital in all facets of life, both commonplace and professionally, I remain curious as to various opinions on how the archives community will prioritize and integrate this change. Conway's article presents an excellent introduction to the changing face of information with respects to the interests and practices of preservation professionals. It was published just over a year ago, but I think Conway's points are still quite valid.

The article looks at both "digitization for preservation" and "digital preservation," explaining that these are two separate concepts with entirely different actions and objectives. "Digitization for preservation" is explained as "digitizing" a tangible/physical resource as a way to prolong the life of information potentially even beyond that of the object itself. The articles does not give examples of this practice, but I assume any digital curation of a physical collection may fall under this heading. If I understand correctly, examples of digitization for preservation include some archival collections at IU (e.g. Herman B Wells speeches and the Andrew Wylie papers)content on the UNC's Southern Historical Collection, the University of Michigan's massive Google Book digitization project (of which IU is also a participant), and the wealth of digitized historic records available through Ancestry.com.

Alternatively, "digital preservation" means ensuring that born-digital information remains viable for the enduring future. This sort of preservation includes any and all content in digital format (including the digital products of "digitization for preservation"). Not all digital information is necessarily worth saving, but any that is requires a plan to make sure that information remains accessible. It cannot be assumed that just because a document, site, or application is accessible now means it will be accessible one, five, fifty, or a couple hundred years down the road.

Conway frames his discussion in the context that nearly all information is now going digital, yet the concept of prolonged preservation of said information is still not configured into the cyberinfrastructure plan. This is likely because those working at the front end of technological development consider the product but not its broader, long-term implications. In the present, we do not often think of the products of our daily interactions as being part of our cultural heritage--newspaper articles, advertisements, modes of entertainment, music, photographs, etc. However, all of the aforementioned items are commonly present in archival collections. Our daily interactions and modes of information sending, retrieving, and exchanging are our unrehearsed, authentic cultural heritage. At present, many of these things are increasingly present in our lives in digital formats. Without a foresighted preservation plan for this information, decades of cultural insights are threatened.

While those pioneering cyberinfrastructure, informatics, and information systems may have thoughts of longevity on the back burner, Conway poises preservationists to reconsider the realities of their professional future and take part in the digital dialog in the interests of making preservation a priority. Throughout the article, he speaks to the preservation community in terms of fundamental values and reconfiguring priorities. Conway discusses two reports on these matters: Preserving Digital Information and Preservation in he Age of Large-Scale Digitization (both affiliated with the Council on Library and Information Resources). He also touches up on traditional preservation practices and a basic history of the discipline's major trials and triumphs, cost effective prioritization, financial strain, and the impending crisis of material degradation affecting audiovisual formats.

The discussion narrows down to five poignant recommendations that Conway suggests to the preservation community. These include prioritizing for preservation quality environments (i.e. dark, cool storage with relative low humidity), shifting resources toward audiovisual digital migration, accepting digital technologies and embracing them to build collections, digitizing materials based on assumed impact (looking at a home institution's collections independently as well as in tangent with digitization projects pursued elsewhere), and come together to formulate standards and best practices for digital collection building. He encourages preservation professionals to learn new technological skills in the selfless interests of preserving cultural heritage resources.

My only hesitation with Conway's recommendations lies with what I interpret as Conway's belief that technology will settle and become to some degree static; he makes several statements to this effect. However, I do not know that anyone can predict technology will reach a state of complacency. For this reason, I expect that digital preservation strategies will always be, to some degree, in flux. Furthermore, computer science is not finite in the fashion of physical material science; material composition can be definitively broken down to each specific molecule. Digital data is based on a system of interpretation and requires the aid of a machine to be intelligible by humans. Each additional change in technology requires a new form of computer mitigation. The only hope for long term preservation lies in a collaborative effort between those interested in information creation and those devoted the information preservation.

One thing I was slightly disappointed by in this article was its fleeting mention of Google and its various initiatives and developments toward user-centered, unmitigated information seeking, fluidity vs. fixity of information, and instant gratification. Conway did not elaborate on how Google's anonymous style of all-encompassing information access will affect preservation priorities or infrastructure, and I am sure that much more can be said on this topic, however I also understand that this topic is at the same time entirely broad and still not entirely defined.

The content of this article was certainly different to what I learned out at the Preservation lab. Here at IU, digital and physical preservation are not interrelated departmental bodies. I suspect this is the case at present for most large institutions, and I am certainly curious to learn how such arrangements will develop in the coming years. Still, call me a luddite, but I cannot imagine that someday, I may have the good fortune to browse item-by-item through the Mystery Writers of America mss. on the Lilly's website. Manuscript collections are, in my mind, much too gargantuan to make item level digitization feasible. I know that this merely means repositories will prioritize digitization projects, as they do already, but I am also comforted in my belief that the physicality and connective nature of "traditional" archival collections will likely not become obsolete--if only for the reason that digitization for preservation is not feasible given financial, temporal, and data space constraints, but also because the archives may well be one last place where a person may revisit a past before digital information proliferated. There will still be fragile pages to turn, rusty paper clips to remove (or not), and enigmatic handwriting to decipher on coffee-stained letters. Technology may be changing, but human nature and the value of tactile connection will surely not change quite as fast.