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From RLG Focus Issue 39, August 1999

RLG Forum at Emory University Looks at Digital Preservation and Archiving Issues

Librarians generally agree that research materials require preservation in a form that offers maximum access to users. Initially, electronic formats were seen as the great hope of the future, but preservation of materials in those formats has brought with it a whole new set of problems, issues, and questions. As these formats evolve, how will librarians address unstable digital media, format obsolescence, universal access to materials, and changing preservation requirements? An RLG Forum titled Aspects of Digital Preservation and Archiving, hosted by the Emory University Libraries, was held on May 20-21 to provide an opportunity for 75 participants to learn how institutions are addressing these issues.

Joan Gotwals, Vice Provost and Director of Libraries, Emory University, welcomed the participants. Billy E. Frye, Emory University Chancellor highlighted the historical aspects and significance of the preservation and archiving activities of Emory, RLG, and the Council on Library and Information Resources.

Robin Dale, RLG, reviewed the results and broader implications of the RLG-sponsored report, Digital Preservation Needs and Requirements in RLG Member Institutions (see www.rlg.org/preserv/digpres.html). Dale said that technical obsolescence, insufficient resources, and inadequate planning are perceived as the major threats to digital holdings. As a result, institutions are looking for authoritative guidance to help develop policies, create funding models, engage participation by creators and managers of digital holdings, and develop best practices. Dale noted that the report points out that while two-thirds of the institutions interviewed accept responsibility for digital preservation needs, few have official institutional policies to support this responsibility.

The University of Florida's Smathers Libraries have produced a preservation policy for digital materials. Erich Kesse, University of Florida, discussed how they developed the policy and revised it after testing it in real-life situations. He encouraged institutions to establish written policies for storing, inspecting, maintaining, refreshing, and migrating digital objects. The Smathers policy, he said, promotes creating relatively uniform digital objects to ensure efficient treatment in future migrations. Adopting formats based on standards vetted through American and international standards organizations makes this uniformity easier. Carefully documenting the history of treatments, he added, is critical to successful management and future migrations.

As curator of one of the largest public archives of broadcasting materials in the United States, Linda Tadic, University of Georgia, initiates and supervises media preservation and access projects. The two major preservation issues with videotapes, she said, are visual deterioration and technological obsolescence. Although she did not recommend digital tape as a video preservation medium, she weighed its pros and cons.

The session titled "The Special Challenges of Managing Large Projects in Electronic Text and Digital Centers," provided a panel discussion moderated by Janice Mohlhenrich, Emory University. Three panelists described their centers and shared some of their experiences.

Naomi Nelson, Emory University, described the Selected Archives at Georgia Tech and Emory (SAGE) Project, a three-year collaborative effort between the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University. The project built a foundation for digital archives at the two universities by digitizing selected text, photographs, and audio/video recordings from: The Sam Nunn Archive, The Witness to the Holocaust Project files, The Ralph McGill papers, and The Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) of Greater Atlanta.

The collaboration between the two libraries resulted in two separate and different-looking Web sites, but with the same metadata at their foundation. (See http://sage.library.emory.edu/ and http://gtel.gatech.edu/projects/holocaust/.) Archives include finding aids, watermarked photographs, and exhibits. Digital voice recognition software is being used to index audio and video recordings. Three multimedia interactive CD-ROMs of the materials will be produced for use in public schools.

"Cybernetic archaeology," is how Martin Halbert, Emory University, labeled the process of trying to figure out how the information technology group that preceded yours designed the legacy system you inherit in order to redesign it for a new incarnation. Using examples of his early experiences with systems migrations, Halbert described the development strategy used in creating the SAGE project at Emory. He said that they hope to give their infrastructure away to other regional partner institutions to create alliances by using interoperable systems. In constructing their system, they:

"Remember that a bug always exists in the software," said Patrick Moriarty, Emory University, warning of the challenges of preserving numeric data to be used for research. The digital distribution format can vary through the Internet, online databases, electronic archives and CD-ROMs, and with no version control or hard copy. He pointed out that there are no established standards—data collection is done in multiple stages with ever-changing software. With no established groups saying how to do it, many different approaches to preservation are taken. The use of proprietary software creates code that can't be adapted or supported. Documentation is always too small, too big, too broad, too specific, or just right, but only in digital format. Moriarty advised keeping numeric data available in ASCII text, resisting the seduction of the Internet, following the standards set by the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research and the National Science Foundation, and using good documentation to provide a map for the future.

The American Theological Library Association's Serials: Fifty Years of Fifty Journals (ATLAS) project is the first major digital full-text project sponsored by the organization. Jimmy Adair, ATLA Center for Electronic Texts in Religion, plans and oversees the project, which will digitize 50 essential journals in all theological disciplines. It will provide entire runs of the journals, accessible through the Internet and on CD/DVD-ROM. The ATLA Religion database will provide the front end for searching the fully encoded XML texts. To enhance search results, Adair will incorporate international standards in ATLAS, such as USMARC, Dublin Core, and the Electronic Standards for Biblical Text. Funding was secured through a three-year grant from the Lilly Endowment. Work on the project will start in the Fall with an initial staff of six, one of whom will be a systems person.

All agreed that the forum was a great success. The speakers were judged dynamic, informed, and informative, and participants shared valuable information. Emory Libraries were terrific hosts and saw to it that the forum was excellent from start to finish.

Sue Marsh, Member Programs and Initiatives

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