Handbook was launched in 2002 as the work of two authors: the 2016 edition
credits thirty-three.13 The Digital Preservation Awards in 2010 had one winner: in
2018 there were 6. In 2009 the DPC had 2 staff and in 2018 there are 7. In 2009 DPC
had 33 members: in 2018 there are 83. This growth is welcome, but it generates a
certain amount of disruption. The community is diverse and the use cases for
preservation tools are more demanding, the requirements more expansive and
expectations more exacting. It may seem like a good time to move into the digital
preservation business but only for those able to deal with these disruptive, dynamic
and eccentric requirements.
This growth has not been a straight line and there are some significant challenges
associated with it. Again, it is worth remembering that practical and concerted
digital preservation really began in the late 1990s, coinciding with an unprecedented
economic boom. It was such a long boom that economists and bankers
congratulated themselves that this was the new norm. They were wrong: it turned
out that significant and unsustainable assumptions were hidden in a financial
sector that wasn't able or willing to prepare for the crash that would come. The
question arises whether casually unsustainable assumptions embedded themselves
into our plans for digital preservation in the early 2000's, too?
OAIS set a high standard for digital preservation in 2002.14 It has provided a shared
language and some shared processes. It needs to be read through the prism of
reasonable aspiration in 2000's: there is no explicit encounter with values or vision
and too little expectation of changing context. Mind the Gap anticipated many of
the technical and policy challenges but did not foresee the machinations that
eviscerated the public sector. It's not a surprise that since 2010 it has become a lot
more fashionable to talk about minimal effort ingest15, parsimonious preservation16
and 'Preserving Digital Objects With Restricted Resources'17. This is not simply
about lack of resource: it's about competition for resources.
Seen in this context it is worth recognising that the digital preservation community
has not been immune from the blunt trauma of economic conditions either.
Consider, for example, the widespread redundancies and recruitment freeze that
followed the banking crisis in 2008. Many agencies in the UK with an interest in
digital preservation simply closed down in the turmoil that followed, including
several significant DPC members and founders; and those that survived had little
choice but to shed many of their previous complement of archivists, conservators
and librarians. The normal employment cycle stalled and new generations of
students with new skills were effectively locked out.
This had a profound effect on individuals and it postponed the emergence of a new
'digital preservation' profession. Existing professional channels were reinforced
instead, and salaries were fixed at levels congruent with library and archive posts,
which further inhibited the recruitment or retention of in-demand developer skills.
The last decade has confirmed the earlier view that digital preservation is tricky.
We've become used to the idea of working without all the resources needed to do all
the things which seemed necessary in 2002. In many practical senses this generation
are materially worse off now than when 'Mind the Gap' was published. David
Rosenthal has observed that "Money turns out to be the major problem facing
the future of our digital heritage".18 In 2006 it was all but impossible to anticipate
the scale of the challenges that would arise.
Preservation, Access, Impact
The 'Mind the Gap' report makes almost no mention of users, except in the context
of the exploitation of intellectual property. This seems the most significant gap of
all.
For digital preservation, considerations about the users are mostly expressed via
dissemination efforts, most immediately in the design and delivery of
'Dissemination Information Packages' and the 'Designated Community' (See
Lavoie19 2014 for fuller explanation). However, access and dissemination alone
offer little justification for preservation: access is not an end in itself any more than
preservation is. For example, the 'Blue Ribbon Task Force' examined the value of
digital preservation insofar as it secures 'depreciable durable assets' which are 'long
lasting and produce a flow of value through time'.20 It is hard to think of a single
case in which access alone brings benefits because value is constituted after access.
Like preservation or interoperability, it is a necessary but not a sufficient condition
for impact. There is no doubt that digital preservation needs to be configured around
access: but access will only make sense if it is configured to enable the benefits that
accrue from timely, dependable and supported use of data.
This may sound like a word play but it has significant implications for the practical
digital preservation. It is easy to describe an access function, much harder to
translate 'impact' into concrete actions within preservation plans. It gets even
harder when we need to demonstrate the links between the implementation of a
digital preservation plan and the outcomes in terms of impact and value that
depend upon it.
hoofdstuk 3
12 Waller, Sharpe Mind the Gap p. 37
13 Digital Preservation Coalition Digital Preservation Handbook (2nd Edition, 2016) online at:
https://dpconline.org/handbook last accessed 3/10/2018
14 Lavoie, Brian The Open Archival Information System (OAIS): Introductory Guide 2nd Edition, Digital
Preservation Coalition Technology Watch Reports 14-02 (2014) online at:
http://dx.doi.org/10.7207/twr14-02 last accessed 3/10/18
15 Bolette, AJ, Blekinge AA and Christiansen, KF 'Minimal Effort Ingest', in Proceedings of the 12th International
Conference on Digital Preservation (School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill, 2016) online at: https://phaidra.univie.ac.at/o:429591 last accessed 3/10/18
16 Gollins, Tim Parsimonious Preservation: Preventing Pointless Processes! A Simple Step that takes Digital
Preservation a Long Way, (Online Information 2009, 2009) online at https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/
documents/information-management/parsimonious-preservation.pdf last accessed 3/10/18
178
william kilbride minding the gaps: digital preservation then and now
17 POWRR Preserving digital Objects With Restricted Resources (Digital POWRR, 2012), online at:
http://digitalpowrr.niu.edu/ last accessed 3/10/18
18 Rosenthal, David Storage Will Be A Lot Less Free Than It Used To Be (DSHR Blog, 2012) online at:
http://blog.dshr.org/2012/10/storage-will-be-lot-less-free-than-it.html last accessed 3/10/18
19 Lavoie OAIS (2014)
20 Blue Ribbon Task Force Sustainable Economics for a Digital Planet: Ensuring Long-Term Access to Digital
Information, Final Report of the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access
(BRTF, 2009) p. 25
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