I didn't mean to fall behind...

My poor, neglected blog. Well, assuming that a late posting is better than none, here are my reading notes for the Preservation of Digital Materials unit.

Preservation in the Age of Large-Scale Digitization -- A White Paper by Oya Y. Rieger

I appreciated the wide scope and long-term perspective of this paper. Given the pace at which technologies change, it's essential to ask questions such as "who will ensure that digital content remains accessible over time?".

The article points out the difference between digital backups (to ensure against destruction of physical texts) and a bona fide digital library (searchable, indexed, copyright-cleared, etc.). It's a reminder of considerations to keep in mind when transitioning a "backup" repository into a digital library.

The paper gives a rundown of some of the key players in digitization, including OCLC, the OCA, Google, Microsoft, and the Million Book Project. I appreciated Table 1, which lays out the essential aspects of various initiatives (their distinguishing features & goals) -- personally I'm most interested in Google Book Search, simply because of its hugely ambitious intentions; I'll continue to follow news about it.

As a side note, I was interested to hear the figure that (at least in Cornell's study) about 10% of library books accounted for about 90% of circulation. While this may make digitization priorities a bit easier, on another level it makes me a bit sad; I'd like to think of a majority of people reading more different things!

I agree with criticisms (mentioned in the article) of the Google Book project over uploading scans with poor image quality, missing text, or other defects. For example, when I recently looked up a Chaucer poem on Google Books, the copy that came up was covered in extensive handwritten notes; it seemed odd to me that this adulterated text was selected as the copy to be scanned. Surely they could have easily found a cleaner copy? (Or at least digitally removed the margin notes?) I know Chaucer's words won't ever be lost, but as for lesser-known texts, I do fear -- as the article mentioned -- that once digital copies are uploaded, some originals will be discarded, even if their contents were not always properly preserved.

The article details some storage and retrieval concerns, as well as some security and environmental considerations. Throughout the article, I was aware of how today's decisions will affect tomorrow's library conditions; it's worth making careful quality assessments while we're at this crucial point of transition into digitized formats.

Finally, all of the registry and copyright concerns that were mentioned here dovetail interestingly with the other class that I'm taking this semester, Legal Issues and Copyright. I've become increasingly aware of the ways in which legal concerns can curtail a library's practices, and I hope to find ways to circumvent perceived restrictions and allow access of library texts as widely as is legally feasible.

Research Challenges in Digital Archiving and Long-term Preservation by Margaret Hedstrom

This article starts with an interesting point, that "many of the digital resources we are creating today will be re-purposed and re-used for reasons that we cannot imagine today" -- while at the same time, evolving technologies make traditional paradigms obsolete. Just as preservation of library materials has always focused on the very long term, digital preservation should be enacted with an eye to long-term feasibility, including the adaptability of metadata, ease of restructuring, and sustainability of infrastructure.

Actualized Preservation Threats -- Practical Lessons from Chronicling America by Justin Littman

Chronicling America is an initiative to digitize several historical American newspapers and provide public access. This article focused on several of the things that can go wrong in digital preservation efforts, such as software errors, operator errors, hardware failure, and problems with media drives and file corruptions. At best, such issues slow down a data transfer process, and at worst, data is lost. But this article led me to believe that even the worst cases of data loss are remediable as long as operators are paying close intention to issues of data integrity.