Institutions such as libraries, archives and museums have traditionally consid- ered one of their primary roles to be preservation, ensuring that the cultural heritage of the societies they are a part of is available for use by future gener- ations as well as by current users. Preservation is one of the core business activities of these institutions, and they have developed preservation systems and technologies to provide continuing access to cultural heritage materials (NSF-DELOS Working Group on Digital Archiving and Preservation, 2003, p.4).
This preservation role has, however, always been one in which major concep- tual challenges are embedded. For whom are we preserving? Who exactly are the future users? Because the resources available to cultural heritage institutions (libraries, archives and museums) are seldom sufficient for the preservation of all materials, some selection is required. What are the implications of selecting one item or category of material over another one? How might this selection shape the ways that future generations think about us? Such selection decisions have been the matter of considerable debate, sometimes charged with political and polemical emotion, and they are not easy ones to make. ‘Every choice to preserve is at the expense of something else’ (UNESCO, 2003, p.73).
54 Selection for Preservation – The Critical Decision
Selection decisions – what should we preserve?, for how long?, who takes responsibility? – are essential in managing collections of heritage materials. They are necessary because ‘there are usually more things – more information, more records, more publications, more data – than we have the means to keep’
(UNESCO, 2003, p.73). The networked environment has exacerbated this situa- tion. In the pre-digital print environment the business of publishing provided (and continues to provide) some filtering, some quality assurance of the product, through mechanisms such as publishers’ readers who make decisions based on quality, relevance to a defined public, and saleability. As noted in Chapter 1, increasing quantities of information are being produced digitally, and it is easier for individuals and organizations to make available to the public – to publish – without any intervening quality assurance measures. The ease of mounting information on web sites has meant significant increase in the amount of information readily available, but it has also meant significant variability of its quality. The inevitable result has been an even stronger requirement to select materials for preservation purposes in the face of insufficient budgets, expertise and facilities. ‘Digital preservation will be expensive’, the Cedars Project reminds us in response to the question ‘why do we need to select?’ ‘Of one fact we can be sure: digital preservation will require more resources than preserving print material’ (Russell, 1999). And, unlike non-digital material such as paper- based artifacts, where there is a ‘comfort zone’ (Jones and Beagrie, 2001, p.30) in which to make selection decisions before the materials deteriorate, the time frame in which decisions about whether or not to preserve digital materials is very short.
Selection decisions for cultural heritage materials – and this increasingly includes digital materials – have been the focus of considerable debate. The issues have been articulated most clearly by the recordkeeping professions. Cook summarizes many of them. Archives, he suggests, are:
a source of memory about the past, about history, heritage, and culture, about personal roots and family connections, about who we are as human beings and about glimpses into our common humanity through recorded information in all media, much more than they are about narrow accountabilities or administrative continuity (Cook, 2000, p.5).
But there are many dangers:
Memory is notoriously selective – in individuals, in societies, and, yes, in archives. With memory comes forgetting. With memory comes the inevitable privileging of certain records and records creators, and the marginalizing or silencing of others (Cook, 2000, p.5).
Views such as the ones Cook articulates are not the only response to selection emanating from the recordkeeping profession. A more traditional view is based on a clear distinction between the activities of records managers and the work of archivists. Records managers select records for retention based on ‘risk avoid- ance, market opportunities, or desires to avoid embarrassment or accountability’
but this approach ‘inevitably will privilege the needs of business or government in terms of the issues that get addressed, the allocation of resources, and the long-term survival of records’ (Cook, 2000, p.8). The records that survive into 1111
2 3 4 51 6 7 8 9 10 1 2 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 211 3 4 5 6 71 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 44 45 46 47 48 49 50111
Selection for preservation, cultural heritage, and professional practice 55
the future will reflect the concerns of administrators, rather than the full range of human experience. Recordkeepers, suggests Cook,
need as a profession to remind [themselves] continually of the fate of records left to White House presidents and Soviet commissars, South African apartheid police forces and Canadian peacekeepers in Somalia, rogue Queensland politicians and the American Internal Revenue Service (Cook, 2000, p.8).
However, in the need to select, the selectors must inevitably bring to their deci- sions their own beliefs and values. They move from a strictly objective custodial role to ‘becoming themselves creators of social memory through the active formation of the archival heritage’ (Cook, 2000, p.5). Responsible selection prac- tice in preservation must aim to minimize bias in the value judgments that are inevitably contained in the decisions about what to select for preservation.
Selection disenfranchises some groups, as our experiences with non-digital collections have shown; an example is that history has moved from being that of significant individuals (usually men) to a wider view based on the records of other groups such as women, the poor, and indigenous cultures. Brabazon has argued that digitization ‘is actually and actively reinforcing the social exclu- sions of the analogue world’ because of the digital divide between the information rich, information poor (Brabazon, 2000, p.154) and that even more of the memory of socially excluded groups will dissipate in ‘the ephemeral winds of cyberspace’ (Brabazon, 2000, p.155).
Should we save everything? Current thinking is that we cannot, because we lack sufficient resources. But there are other reasons why the answer to this question is no. Burrows provides the example of academic libraries, whose collections are, he maintains, ‘a product of the rational and scientific “master narrative” of the Enlightenment’. This has been challenged by ‘the new human- ities and social sciences’ which increasingly demand that libraries collect more of ‘what used to be dismissed as ephemeral and “popular”’. Added to this is
‘our pervasive faith in the power of technology to solve every problem’ which leads us to believe that everything could – and should – be preserved (Burrows, 2000, p.146).
Whether or not this view is realistic and technologically feasible, the current state of development of digital preservation is that we still have to pose the question of what really matters. Burrows points to our current predicament:
We face a real danger of being caught between two contradictory imper- atives: the universalist, Alexandrian demands of cultural relativism, and the limitations imposed by technology, cost and organizational struc- tures. Cultural relativism and postmodernism make it increasingly difficult to reach any consensus on defining ‘what really matter’, while insufficient funding and inadequate technology make it very difficult to achieve the goal of archiving everything (Burrows, 2000, p.148).
He suggests four selection scenarios. The first is ‘picking the low-hanging fruit’, that is preserving what is easiest to preserve (this metaphor is used in UNESCO, 2003, p.79). This may be unsatisfactory because what is easiest to preserve is unlikely to be what is of particular value. The second is to let the marketplace
56 Selection for Preservation – The Critical Decision
decide. In this approach, the definition of value is likely to be linked to commer- cial considerations rather than to long-term societal value. The third is to base selection decisions on the type of material, but Burrows suggests that this scenario raises more questions than it answers: ‘are websites more important to preserve than Usenet postings?’ The fourth is to select on the basis of the most endangered material (Burrows, 2000, p.148). None of these are, however, completely satisfactory as a basis for making realistic decisions that are profes- sionally responsible, although some of them have been applied to digital materials on a small-scale basis, so that we can develop expertise and scalable strategies and practices for digital preservation.
Where might we look for guidance on these issues? This chapter suggests that selection criteria based on library practice and applied to non-digital materials are insufficient, and that more appropriate guidance is to be found in appraisal theory and practice derived from the recordkeeping discipline. Archivists, notes Burrows, ‘have already done considerable work in rethinking selection criteria for the retention of records in a digital environment’ (Burrows, 2000, p.149).
However, all matrices of selection criteria, regardless of their disciplinary origins, share common problems. One problem is the difficulty of determining value.
Current assessments of value are not always a useful indicator of future value:
the UNESCO Guidelines for the Preservation of Digital Heritage (UNESCO, 2003, pp.75–76) provide the example of remote sensing data from earlier decades, which is now being used to assess environmental damage. Another problem is determining how much to preserve. There is a growing perception that we need to keep more, rather than less, of the digital environment, partly because we have the technology to do so (such as that used by the Internet Archive) and partly because our abilities to interrogate and get new meanings from digital data are increasing as new tools such as data visualization and data mining software are developed (Kerry, 2001, p.11, quoting Ross, 2000, p.12). There is also an increasing perception that generalized selection criteria are not appro- priate, and that sectoral differences should be further investigated and selection decisions made on this basis (Kerry, 2001, p.16).