Librarianship

Trusted Digital Repositories & Certification: An Early Map for Exploration

By sdellis ⋅ November 20, 2008 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

Most information professionals know that time moves quickly in the digital realm.  Even our most valuable digital heritage becomes more ephemeral every year.  In fact, some point to our current era as a potential dark age, unknown to future generations for a lack of artifacts about what we knew, who we were, and where we thought we were going (McDonough, 2008).  Anxiety over this prophecy is prevalent the library and archive communities.

Yet, digital preservation is still an evolving field.  We don’t have all the answers to the mountain of challenges before us.  Because of our uncertainty we can’t tell whether our remedial actions will be effective.  We may have to back track, endure false starts, develop original technologies, and in many ways restructure our organizations to ensure the longevity of our work.  All of this costs money, and due to the complexity of the problem even rough financial estimates are hard to predict.  It also takes people; people with skills that have not traditionally been taught to librarians and archivists in school.  Underutilized capital and staff are unheard of in most libraries, and making a shift toward trusted preservation calls for a team of large, authoritative bodies to handle most of the heavy lifting.

Unfortunately, at the moment we are mostly left to our own devices when it comes to developing preservation programs.  The current approach is like telling citizens to fight climate change by encouraging them to drive less or use wind power.  Despite valiant individual effort, people will simply not be able to change their daily practices without centralized infrastructure development in things like public transportation and alternative energy grids.  They can forgo that vacation, but they still need to drive to work.

This uncoordinated effort challenges even the largest institutions, stretching their resources to the gills.  Some may argue that we have excellent open source repository software at our disposal, namely Dspace, Fedora, and Greenstone.  These are no doubt great tools, but they barely scratch the surface of the problems, and a concerted effort is needed to expand and standardize our toolkit beyond simple object management.

So what are the problems that most libraries, museums, and archives cannot tackle themselves?  According to Trusted Digital Repositories, a critical component of any digital preservation program will be the ability to prove reliability and trustworthiness over time.  We cannot simply ask our patrons to trust us, we must prove it.  A third party must assess the reliability of a program based on a set of widely agreed-upon criteria for trustworthiness (CRL & OCLC, 2002).  Fortunately, some of the largest library organizations are working on this and just last year a document outlining the criteria was published (CRL & OCLC, 2007).

Initiatives such as the certification program provide a great road map and are a step in the right direction, but in my opinion further leadership is necessary.  The current process is simply too complex for individual libraries to navigate.  I actually disagree with the assertion that organizational will and way is the main impeding factor in the slow uptake of digital preservation programs (Cornell University Library, 2007).  I believe that a lack of adequate and standardized technology is the problem, and it only seems like a lack of will because libraries and museums have never been comfortable in the director’s chair of “Software Development: The Movie”.  The slow pace of progress in digital preservation is in fact an organizational problem, but not a problem of “will or way”; it is a problem of organizational structure.

Successful software development requires different organizational environments and leadership than libraries have been able to offer.  Young programmers need mentors and organizations that require a MLIS degree to advance will never be a good incubator for better programmers.  All programmers who are working for libraries should be encouraged to get a MLIS, but we should not throw the proverbial babies out with the bathwater by denying leadership positions to skilled staff in disciplines that are critical to the future of libraries as we know them.

Evidence of this problem lies in the fact that libraries have been using open source tools for many years now, but only a small number of individuals have contributed code back to the open source software community.  Furthermore, the legality of sharing code people write for their own institutions is fuzzy.  Organizations need to formalize the process of open source library software development and create a working group of librarians and developers who focus solely on open source software solutions to library goals such as digital preservation, open access, and the next generation ILS, without the day to day distractions of operations and more institution-specific tasks.  This working group must be informed by the common needs and goals of the greater community, and should be as transparent as possible.  Software cannot solve everything, but it can facilitate the automation of complex processes, and perform audits to make sure the system is functioning as it should.

One of the biggest challenges for such a working group would be to set standards for preserving living information objects.  “Born-digital” objects are never done.  Print, on the other hand, has a finite end date as the very medium is a fixed entity.  The document metaphor was only an entry point to the early days of the Web, and we strain to apply it to modern web sites that go way beyond a linked collection of “pages”.  Today web sites are living, evolving entities consisting of contributions from many authors and readers.

How does one preserve, in a fixed state, an information object that is in a constant flux?  One can take snapshots of change, but does every morsel of new information get its own full metadata record?  We certainly don’t want the redundant bloat of a full archive of the web site every time something changes.  The same problems arise for living datasets, collaborative research, government legislation, and so on.  Preservation software is currently built under the assumption that information objects are static, and we know that is not often the case.

The certification criteria is a map, but like the early days of global exploration, the maps can be inaccurate and the criteria for certification should not be taken for granted.  Anyone should be able to challenge the certification process in a public forum, such as an open access scholarly journal.  The certification board, or perhaps future working group I mentioned, should address these concerns and either provide a logically convincing counter-argument, or incorporate the suggestions appropriately.  The openness of the development processes to democratic legislation is a crucial component of the relevance of the certification.  While a centralized working group is the ship, the greater community makes up the constellations that will verify the soundness of the map.

REFERENCES

Cornell University Library (2007). Digital preservation management: Implementing short-term strategies for long-term problems. http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/dpm/index.html

CRL & OCLC (2002). Trusted digital repositories: attributes and responsibilities. http://www.oclc.org/programs/ourwork/past/trustedrep/repositories.pdf

CRL & OCLC (2007). Trustworthy repositories audit & certification: criteria and checklist (TRAC).
http://www.crl.edu/PDF/trac.pdf

McDonough, J.P. (2008). Digital “dark age” may doom some data. Physorg.com.  Retrieved Nov. 13, 2008 from
http://www.physorg.com/news144343006.html

Tags: digital_library, Librarianship, preservation