The new challenges of digital preservation require new participants: we are seeing ‘the privatisation of preservation’ (Burrows, 2000, p.143). Stakeholders other than those who participated in the old preservation paradigm, whose legal and moral rights must be considered, are becoming significant players. Others are starting to participate as it becomes increasingly evident that the cultural heritage institutions traditionally charged with preservation responsibility cannot continue to carry this responsibility in the digital age without widening their range of partners in the endeavour. Digital preservation ‘also affects information on long-term genetic research, monitoring global environmental change, locating nuclear waste sites, establishing property rights, storing and authenticating electronic criminal evidence, etc’ (B. Smith, 2002, p.135); it is also
‘a consumer problem’:
Individuals are storing an increasing portion of their social and personal memory on digital media with the mistaken belief that this will ensure 1111
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that those memories will always be available to them for consultation.
Today no one is able to provide such guarantees (B. Smith, 2002, p.135).
While some of the digital output of individuals is being stored in their own computing environments, a very large amount of it exists publicly on the web.
Not only are new kinds of stakeholders claiming an interest or claiming control, but higher levels of collaboration among stakeholders are seen as neces- sary for digital preservation to be effective. Localized solutions are not perceived as likely to be the most effective; the problem is large enough ‘to warrant a world-wide effort’ (B. Smith, 2002, p.136) and the preservation of digital material will become ‘essentially a distributed process’ where ‘traditional dem- arcations do not apply’ and one for which ‘an interdisciplinary approach is necessary’ (Shenton, 2000, p.164). Collaboration is considered more and more as the only way in which viable and sustainable solutions can be developed, as the problems are well beyond the scope of even the largest and most well- resourced single institution. (UNESCO, 2003, Chapter 11 explores collaboration in more detail, and Chapter 9 of this book provides examples of collaborative activities).
Who, then, are these new stakeholders? What are their preservation roles likely to be in an increasingly digital environment? An early expression of this was made by the Task Force on Archiving of Digital Information, whose influ- ential 1996 report set much of the digital preservation agenda for the rest of the decade. The report suggested that ‘intense interactions among the parties with stakes in digital information are providing the opportunity and stimulus for new stakeholders to emerge and add value, and for the relationships and divi- sion of labor among existing stakeholders to assume new forms’. It proposed two principles, the first that information creators, providers and owners ‘have initial responsibility for archiving their digital information objects and thereby assuming the long-term preservation of these objects’ and the second that where this mechanism fails or becomes unworkable, ‘certified digital archives have the right and duty’ to preserve digital materials (Task Force on Archiving of Digital Information, 1996, pp.19–20). The implications of these principles are still being worked through today.
Information providers, creators and owners, and certified digital archives are new stakeholders, but there are many others. Hodge and Frangakis note that other stakeholders identified in the literature include disciplines, commercial services, government agencies, passionate individuals, rights holders, benefi- ciaries, funding agencies, and users (Hodge and Frangakis, 2004, p.15); they add trusted third parties to that list (Hodge and Frangakis, 2004, p.20). UNESCO’s Charter on the Preservation of the Digital Heritage lists ‘hardware and software developers, creators, publishers, producers, and distributors of digital materials as well as other private sector partners’ in addition to ‘libraries, archives, museums and other public heritage organizations’ (UNESCO, 2004, Article 10).
Lyman and Kahle suggest that many different communities must ‘learn to work together if the problem of digital preservation and archiving is to be solved – computer scientists, librarians and scholars, and policy makers’ (Lyman and Kahle, 1998). Some of these communities were communicating in the old preser- vation paradigm, one example being the collaboration of scholars and librarians to identify the core literature in specific discipline areas for microfilming and scanning projects (see Gwinn, 1993 for example in agriculture). The extent
22 Why do we Preserve? Who Should do it?
and nature of collaborative activity, however, will need to intensify. Howell, an Australian preservation manager, indicates other stakeholders: ‘managers of digital archives, representatives of the public interest and public policy, and actual and potential users of digital information’. One major challenge, he suggests, is to meet the requirements of all stakeholders while still ensuring that preservation and access objectives are also met, especially for digital materials which may have commercial value (Howell, 2001, p.140). Another Australian articulation lists the stakeholders in the Australian digital preservation context as ‘government bodies, the corporate and academic sectors, software vendors, creators and publishers, libraries and archives, networked information service providers and the digital material audience of present and future generations’
(Kerry, 2001, p.13).
Some attention has been given to the role of scientists and scholars as stake- holders in digital preservation. The way in which scholars’ work is being transformed, most notably in the sciences, but also in the social sciences and the humanities, has been investigated. The increasingly data-driven approaches to science that are currently in fashion use ‘very large primary research data sets, particularly in the genomics and earth sciences’ (Howell, 2001, p.133). This means that increasing attention is being given to the long-term preservation of digital scientific data (see, for example, National Research Council, 1995, ERPANET/CODATA Workshop, 2004; Hodge and Frangakis, 2004). The dissemination of scholarly output provides an example of the transformations of this ‘new-model scholarship’ (Smith, 2003). No longer do scholars rely solely on formal print publication mechanisms for transmitting their research. Instead, more and more emphasis is placed on other mechanisms: pre-print archives in high-energy physics and in mathematics, e-repositories (often university-based), the development of web sites and internet discussion lists that are based around communities of scholars, all of which have preservation implications.
A useful illustration of the major changes that will be required is in the keeping of personal correspondence. Its value as a source of historical information has long been recognized. The extensive use of e-mail has diminished the likelihood that personal correspondence will remain accessible to future historians. Lukesh asks: ‘Where will our understandings of today and, more critically, the next century be, if this rich source of information is no longer available?’ as scien- tists, scholars, historians and many others increasingly use e-mail (Lukesh, 1999).
Pre-digital paradigm preservation habits mean that scholars, scientists and other creators of e-mails retain the expectation that librarians and archivists will continue to collect and maintain materials ascertained to be of long-term value, usually well after the time of creation of the materials. But with e-mail (and in fact all digital materials) this cannot occur because the digital materials will quickly become inaccessible. (Reasons for this are explained in Chapter 3.) With digital materials, suggests Smith, ‘the critical dependency of preservation on good stewardship begins with the act of creation, and the creator has a decisive role in the longevity of the digital object’ (Smith, 2003, pp.2–3). For most creators of digital materials this is a new role.
Publishers are another stakeholder group whose responsibilities and roles change as more of their output is distributed in digital form. Some national libraries are developing cooperative arrangements with publishers to ensure that preservation responsibilities for digital publications are understood and shared.
One example is the agreement between Elsevier Science and the Koninklijke 1111
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Bibliotheek (the National Library of the Netherlands) through which the Library receives digital copies of all journals on Elsevier’s ScienceDirect web platform.
The National Library of Australia and the Australian Publishers’ Association are developing and trialing a Code of Practice for Providing Long-Term Access to Australian Online Publications. This code ‘outlines the conditions and responsi- bilities that each partner agrees to observe in order to ensure Australian online publications remain available for use into the future’ (Phillips, 2002).
Some express doubts about the interest and willingness of for-profit organi- zations to participate in digital preservation initiatives. Search engine companies, for instance, ‘are not in the business of long-term archiving of the web or even a portion of it, nor should they be expected to take on this responsibility’. The entertainment industry is increasingly digital, and its products, audio and video, have a well-established place as ‘critical resources for research, historical docu- mentaries, and cultural coherence resources’. Even given the prevailing political ethos, it is impossible to envisage a situation where market forces will be suffi- cient to ensure the preservation of this digital material. The opposite may be true: ‘in some cases market forces work against long-term preservation by locking customers into proprietary formats and systems’ (Workshop on Research Challenges in Digital Archiving and Long-term Preservation, 2003, pp.x-xi).
An Australian example illustrates some of the issues and the difficulties in finding viable solutions. Pockley’s search for a suitable home for his digital compilation The Flight of Ducksis described in his evolving online report Killing the Duck to Keep the Quack(Pockley, 1995- ). This case study makes it clear that some traditional cultural heritage institutions lack knowledge of the issues. Some
‘are unlikely to be able to bear the costs and complexities of moving digital content into the future’; others will ‘deliberately or inadvertently, through a simple failure to act, render the information irretrievable’; and for some it is ‘easier to ignore the existence of digital work or to treat it as somehow less worthy of collection and preservation’ (Pockley, 1995-, Section 4. Death in Custody). Three different custodial environments illustrate three sets of prob- lems. RMIT University did not accept custodial responsibility for online research during the development of the work, which was submitted as a doctoral thesis at this university, and it had no infrastructure to support long-term access.
Political and ethical issues also intervened, as some members of the University’s Ethics Committee suspected it might be culturally offensive. The National Library of Australia accepted the site for PANDORA, but has been unable to capture the password-protected area, which contains restricted material, so that the compilation is not preserved in its entirety. Cinemedia, a Melbourne-based organisation established in 1997 to cater for the screen-culture needs in the state of Victoria, next hosted the compilation. However, this arrangement was not fully satisfactory: Cinemedia retained control of all material and had the right to remove the whole or parts at any time, and lacked an infrastructure for preservation of online work (Pockley, 1995- ).