Preservation

I was sorting through a couple bins of damaged books from the Young Research Library yesterday and came across a 1957 edition of S.R. Ranganathan’s the Five Laws of Library Science (Madras, India: Madras Library Association, 1957). The half title page included the fabulous illustration above used by the Madras Library Association.

S.R. Ranganathan was a president of the Madras Library Association, but I don’t know if he was at the time this logo was designed or when the book was published. He also had a brilliant mind – one of the greatest in the library field ever. » Read the rest of this entry «

I gave a talk for the Amigos “Digital Preservation: What’s Now? What’s Next” conference today in which I trotted out what I consider one of my better formulations of (one of) the model(s) I use for thinking about preservation. This model says that preservation consists in sustainable efforts, optimized over time. The change is from thinking of “preservation” and “preserved” as closed efforts or checklists of pre-defined actions to be completed. Instead, the focus is on ranking the “preservation” of things and having a process for “preserving” them.

With that distinction made, it becomes clearer that preservation/preserving is a function of strategy and management and that preserved/preservable is a function of technical knowledge about the specific types of objects in an archives’ care. For the strategic side of the process, I think Snowden and Kurtz’ Cynefin model is the most useful thing going, closely followed by Shenton and the British Library’s work on Life-cycle Collection Mangement.

For the objects themselves, I propose the following model:

• Substrate: tangible substance(s) that carries media
• Media: material(s) that record information
• Transport: means(s) for perceiving media
• Language: system(s) for interpretation of media

In this way, digital preservation and artifactual preservation can be dealt with as different instances of the same basic problem. Preservation succeeds when failures in all four factors are eliminated, corrected, or mitigated and there is a sustainable process in place that will support prevention and repair or recovery at appropriate times.

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Since I’m posting from my alma mater bibliotheca, we’re coming up on the deadline for our summer internships, and have several of our student assistants about to hit the job market, I thought I would share some thoughts on getting an education for preservation and conservation.

I got into this line of work by happy accident. I decided on Indiana University because I could dual enroll for music and library science. I took a part-time job in an early book digitization project that was co-funded by the Preservation Department and the Digital Library Program. One thing led to another.

At the time, UT Austin was the standard-bearer for library and archives preservation and conservation education, and the roots of that program were in the program at Columbia University, the first of its kind in the US. Outside of UT, Pittsburgh was the other center for preservation education, though to my knowledge Pitt didn’t have the same conservation options as UT. In the last few years, though, the preservation tracks in both of these programs have diminished or disbanded. In 2011, it’s very hard to give a concrete answer to the question of how a library and archival science student should get an education in either preservation or conservation.

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Today, I want to take a break from preservation administration think pieces and write a little bit about tools of the trade. Preservation administration is arguably a subset of management, and the old adage that “you can’t manage what you can’t measure” has led to lots of preservation data collection. Various projects have measured costs, environmental conditions, productivity, and condition of materials in the collection. All of this is part of what gets variously called “data-driven” or “evidence-based” practice, the gist of which is that before doing something, you ought to have some measurable indicator of success or failure so that you can assess the impact of your work.

When I started at UCLA, there wasn’t a lot of data to go on. We needed to do a condition survey and since we didn’t have much in the way of staff, we needed a clever way to get data quickly. I decided to repurpose some work I did at NYPL when we needed to get condition information for the Rose Main Reading Room on short notice. This survey started from asking what possible preservation outcomes we had available to us and then collecting a set of data that would guide us through that decision tree. Other condition surveys have tended to be descriptive, collecting data to describe the items in the collection. This was diagnostic, collecting data to sort the collection into categories for preservation action.

Both types have value, of course, so we put some flesh on the bones of that NYPL survey and did a few rounds of data collection and that was pretty good. But most preservation surveys trace their roots back to the Yale survey in the 80s and the methods Carl Drott developed for collection managers to sample for usage in their printed serials collections in the 60s. When I called up a colleague in the UCLA Statistics Department and talked to them about what I was doing, they very nicely suggested that the state of the art in statistics had come a little ways in the last 30 or 40 years. So, they put three undergrads on the project of hacking through the data that I had, and in this post, I want to give a taste of what they did.

If you already know about Differentiation and Fuzzy Cluster, CART, and AGNES, there’s nothing to see here. If not, read on for bewildering charts and sophisticated statistics.

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At the IPI workshop today, we naturally fell to talking about the relationship between collection managers and facilities managers. One of the hurdles in optimizing collection storage environments is that these two groups simply have different ways of working, each one adapted to the general requirements of their work and customs of their profession, and often enough, these are very different cultures. In the course of the discussion I mentioned to my (soon-to-be-emininetly-employable) students, Nora Bloch and Jacque Geibel, that this was an instance of a general problem we’ve talked about in preservation administration, and that’s the subject of today’s preservation week update. Let’s call it problems versus processes.

I suspect that every preservation librarian can quickly rattle off a list of specific problems they have on their to-do list. For me, there’s an incoming Ethiopian poster collection, Nazi-era press leaflets, recordings of Roy Newquist’s interviews, four volumes of Variedades that were somehow missed during a microfilming project in the 1990s; the list goes on and you get the picture. Each one of these is important, each one has a collection manager or three advocating for it, and enticingly, each one has a beginning and an end. These things could get actually and truly done.

And if I did all of them, several months would go by and the preservation objectives of the UCLA Library and its ability to be a trustworthy steward of the human record would be advanced barely at all.

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Preservation week starts today and throughout the celebration, I’ll be writing daily updates on key principles that help me out as a preservation administrator. I’m writing these quickly. Partly that’s because there is quite a lot else to do in this preservation week, but also because I think there’s some value in sharing thoughts unvarnished. I’d welcome comments and conversation. After preservation week, I’ll take some time to clarify, respond and revise. (Comments on the form are moderated before public posting, so you can write off the cuff, too.)

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“Tangible records” is not the most poetic pair of words, but I think it’s a crucial idea and it’s no accident that I’m starting off with this idea for Monday in Preservation Week. Preservation can get complex very quickly, as one finds out all the known constraints on any particular preservation plan and identifies all the information that’s lacking. Remembering to come back to the question of what is actually recorded and how that recording occurs is a critical check and a great guide to priorities.

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Google Video will be taken offline soon. And for those of you who read that and blanch, Archive Team has some advice: http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Google_Video

This a good reminder about what it means to be a trustworthy digital archive. For day-to-day reliability, a network service like Vimeo, Google Video, or YouTube is a good choice. These services farm out the work of good system administration, so that the work is done in an environment that has a high stake in success and is able to operate systems on a scale that leads to tremendous benefits. These services have remarkable uptime, they’re resilient, and they save individuals the pain of managing backup routines and doing recovery tests and all the other hassle of good system administration. For all these reasons, I think that LOCKSS-like network services have tremendous value and need to be a key piece of our preservation infrastructure.

There is another part of the digital preservation problem that has little do with technology. Reliable technology exists in unreliable organizations. If you’re banking with a provider that doesn’t have the same goals for posterity as your do, then you need an exit strategy. This goes for online video services just as it goes for the real estate of a storage facility. » Read the rest of this entry «

The UCLA Library Preservation Department is offering two internships for the summer of 2011.

Application deadline is April 29, 2011.

The visiting internship program offers capstone experiences to individuals enrolled in graduate preservation or conservation education and provides pre-program experiences to qualified students who are applying for Masters-level training in conservation.

Preservation Administration

The intern will work with the preservation officer to complete a project in one of the following areas: audit and assessment of the condition of a library collection, development of disaster response and business continuity plans, or review and quality control of a preservation process. The intern will work with staff and collections to collect data that guides preservation decisions and assists with project management. Typical projects include collection surveys, environmental monitoring, business continuity planning and review of materials for preservation contract services.

Conservation Treatment

This internship will provide experience to pre-program students for individuals planning to attend graduate level conservation programs. The internship will focus on conservation decision making, treatment and documentation for library and archival collections. The conservation intern will work under the supervision of the collections conservator to perform repair or make enclosures for materials selected from the collections. Relevant literature will be reviewed prior to conservation treatment and all projects will be documented. » Read the rest of this entry «

The following press release was distributed this morning, about the next phase in planning for the WEST project. I’ve noted WEST before, and it deserves a longer post in the future. For now, I’ll just add that I’ll be serving on the Operations and Collections Council. As the preservation guy on the team, I would be delighted to hear questions about preservation, conservation and stewardship as they come to mind.

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PADG, an email discussion list for the preservation cognoscenti , has included some threads on “digital books and the impact on libraries” and “brittle book  replacement in the digital age.” For preservation administrators, those two topics immediately call to mind our three R’s: repair, retention (and rehousing, its tag-along dog), and reformatting. The discussion on PADG touched on the level of support needed for general collections conservation, library binding, and reformatting. I had some on- and off-list conversations around those topics and wanted to share some observations I made, since they say something about how UCLA’s preservation program is shaping up.

But, before I bury the lede, let me state that I think general collections conservation workloads are nearing a plateau. This stream of repair work is traditionally identified at the circulation desk and the indicators point to an overall decrease in general circulation. Since demand for services has generally outpaced capacity in conservation labs, the net effect may be that general collections conservation support can stay as it is and still meet the overall need. There are plenty of near-term caveats that figure into my thinking about this:

• I suspect that UCLA can get a higher yield of materials sent for treatment. UCLA has a young preservation program and we’re fiddling with internal workflows. Consequently, there is still some business to drum up from libraries that aren’t yet in the habit of sending materials for treatment.
• We need to add some capacity to support mass digitization projects, which require pre- and post-scanning repairs. Ironically, this may ultimately reduce the amount of circulation and repair need system-wide, by facilitating electronic access to our holdings.

This is not the end of general collections conservation, obviously. I think that this is “reduced pressure” in the sense of a river no longer overflowing its banks during a flood. What I hope this means is that my current staff will be able to make a shift from “frenetically busy and overwhelmed” to a more humane “completely and productively employed.”  I think there’s a strong parallel to be drawn with the reduction in serials bindery, and likewise, I think there are some a great opportunities in this shift. » Read the rest of this entry «