Collection Care in Libraries Today

Text as transcribed from her presentation

Introduction
I should like to begin by thanking Meg Bellinger, President Preservation Resources, and OCLC for inviting me to speak to this gathering. Since taking up my position as Director of the National Preservation Office (NPO) for the United Kingdom and Ireland in September 1996, I have always found it a particular pleasure to meet my American preservation colleagues, whether at the American Library Association meetings, or when you are visiting the UK. You will always be assured of a warm welcome from the NPO.

Let me begin by giving a brief outline of this paper: I shall introduce the work of the National Preservation Office, making particular reference to digital preservation activities. I want to move on then, to interpret digital preservation activities as an integral part of preservation activity in general and pose the question - does the digital necessarily mean different? Finally, I will give a flavour of digital preservation activity at the British Library.

The National Preservation Office
The British Library Board established the National Preservation Office in 1984, following the publication of a report into the state of written preservation policies and conservation in UK libraries, commissioned by the British Library. The researchers found that few libraries, at that time, had written policies and that conservation provision was limited. Preservation management is rarely taught in UK library schools. Where it is, it is neither a compulsory, nor an examined subject. In addition, the report found that individuals, charged with preservation management responsibilities for their institution, had no formal training and often felt isolated and found themselves with nowhere to turn for basic advice and information.

Since 1996 the Office has received additional funds from a number of organisations, although the British Library remains the largest contributor to the Office. The Office is supported by the national libraries of Scotland, Wales and Ireland; the Bodleian Library, Oxford and Cambridge University Library; Trinity College Library Dublin and the Consortium of National and University Libraries in Ireland; and the Consortium of University Research Libraries (CURL). Archives have always been an integral part of the Office and that is now formally recognised through additional funding from the Public Record Office, and the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland. The NPO works on behalf of all libraries and archives throughout the UK and Ireland whether or not they make a financial contribution.

The Office was set up to provide a focal point for preservation information and to raise awareness of preservation issues at all levels of management. Through conferences, training seminars, videos and basic information leaflets, and now the NPO Journal, the work of raising awareness continues. Together with other organisations, like OCLC and RLG, and many other partners, we offer 'best practice' guidance across a wide range of preservation activities: from good handling techniques and writing disaster preparedness plans to managing digital projects. We do not, however, involve ourselves in conservation treatment advice, for this we rely on our colleagues in the British Library conservation studios.

Since 1997, the NPO has formally included digital preservation awareness raising in its activities. Like everyone else meeting this topic for the first time we have learnt from the experience of others and worked collaboratively wherever possible. For example, the first seminar we held was a joint effort between ourselves, the Public Record Office and the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), a higher education funding body in the UK. In July 1997 we held a seminar to discuss and explore the subject - 'Digital Archiving: Emerging Practice'. This was by no means the first venture by the NPO into raising the preservation issues associated with new media. In July 1988 the NPO annual conference took the subject Preservation and Technology; remember the Office itself had only been founded in 1984. Since then we have held a number of very successful conferences, including in 1996: Preservation and Digitisation - principles, practice and policies; in 1998, jointly with RLG: Guidelines for Digital Imaging; and most recently a two day international conference with OCLC in April 2001: Issues in Digital Librarianship - accessing the future. Two of our most demanded publications are Digital Culture: maximising the nation's investment, and Changing Trains at Wigan: Digital Preservation and the Future of Scholarship. The first is a synthesis of JISC/NPO studies on the preservation of electronic materials, and the second is a thoughtful and thought provoking examination of the issues we need to resolve in accessing research materials created in digital formats. Please look at our website < http://www.bl.uk/npo/ > for details of available publications.

In 1997, the NPO set up the Digital Archiving Working Group (DAWG) to guide our efforts and to oversee the JISC-funded digital preservation studies. DAWG recommended a conference be held to review activities that had taken place since 1995 in the UK with a view to recommending further action. A meeting was held at the University of Warwick in 1999, commonly referred to as 'Warwick II'. ('Warwick I' had been held in 1995 and had led to the studies mentioned above.) Again, the theme of collaboration prevailed; the meeting was jointly hosted and managed by the JISC, the British Library and the NPO. Two main action points emerged: the need for a national focal point to take initiatives forward, and the need for an appointment to be made to service this. Accordingly, in June 1999, the NPO Management Committee together with the CURL Board put a request for funds to the JISC Committee on Electronic Information. In June 2000, Neil Beagrie, formerly with the Arts and Humanities Data Service, was appointed, and in January 2001, a summit was held to inaugurate the concept of a UK Digital Preservation Coalition. The aim of the Coalition is to foster not only cross-domain co-operation within the UK, but to work in an international context, initially to raise digital preservation awareness and to undertake research.

Preservation Management Today - does the digital necessarily mean different?
Increasingly in the UK, the agenda is a cross-domain one, i.e. libraries, archives and museums working together. Preservation management, and in particular the preservation of digital objects, is particularly fertile ground for co-operation. However, a word of caution, we must ensure that we recognise and celebrate the specific strengths - of libraries and librarians; archives and archivists; and museums and museum professionals - one size does not necessarily fit all. Language here can be a barrier but what we can all recognise is the importance of caring for collections now, whether physical or digital, for the benefit of current and future users.

Collection care is essentially about resource management, whether they are financial, human, or time limited. What these all have in common is that they are scarce, and must be used to best advantage. We must manage the object resource in such a way that recognises the demands of increasing access but balances this with the legitimate needs of the fragile and non-renewable nature of much of our written and documentary cultural heritage. The best way to manage these tensions is through a planned approach to preservation. This begins with a written preservation policy that takes into account the purpose of the institution. In order to support the best use of resources an institution will assess and prioritise the preservation needs of its collections. This would cover not only the condition of the objects themselves, but the use and importance of the collections. It would include questions about the physical environment in which the collections are housed. This approach is very familiar to us in the physical world. It applies equally to the digital. For example, the hardware and the software in a digital store require similar attention be paid to environmental care. The same 'good housekeeping' approach with which we are familiar in the physical world should be applied to the digital. Libraries and archives are filled with collections. Whether they comprise books and paper, papyrus and parchment, microfilm and video, or hand held or on-line digital objects, the skills we have built up as librarians, as archivists, as curators, as conservators, in managing preservation objectives remain central to identifying, retrieving and preserving access to digital objects. I think by now we are all aware that there is one major difference between managing our physical collections and managing our digital collections: time. The decision of whether or not to preserve a digital object in the longer term must be taken at the outset, i.e. when the decision to create a digital object is taken whether that is through a surrogacy programme or created only in electronic form. The means of preservation may be different: metadata taking the place of wheat starch paste perhaps. Our partnerships will need to be different: with computer scientists rather than paper scientists. Our language, as preservation managers, is undergoing yet another transformation, but we have coped with air conditioning terminology alongside environmental monitoring systems. What we, as preservation managers, need now is to add-on those specific skills needed to meet the digital preservation challenge.

For all of us, perhaps the biggest difficulty we are grappling with in the electronic environment is the speed at which change is taking place. In this digital world it is not only rapidity with which change is taking place, but the vastness of the scale given, for example, the exponential expansion of the world-wide-web. Librarians and archivists are not necessarily resistant to change, rather that by the very nature of the responsibility we carry for preserving the past for the future, we prefer change to take place in a measured and safe manner. We like to debate, to test out solutions, and to make sure the actions we take meet 100% of the need. Perhaps we do not always fully understand the technology and therefore find it difficult to trust the technological solutions we are offered. This is where I believe the greatest gains are to be made: in partnerships between preservation managers and technologists. We need to renew our efforts, on a daily basis, to understand and trust each other for the common good. It is as likely that systems specialists have at least as much trouble understanding our jargon as we do theirs. Ask questions. Don't be afraid to say, 'could you explain that please'. I have found very often that I am not the only person at a meeting who needs a non-technical explanation. Similarly, I have found that technologists, when challenged, achieve a greater understanding of the perservation imperative through the very act of having to explain in lay terms.

There are many more aspects of the change in culture we need to undergo that I could mention but I want to touch on two in particular that I find interesting. Firstly, it is the question of what to preserve for the longer term. In the UK a large amount of money is available for content creation, whether it is for life-long learning, scholarly research, or teaching and learning materials. The web has opened up huge possibilities for each of us to become our own publisher. What of all this should librarians and archivists select for future generations? What should funding bodies, whether from the public purse or through private benefaction, support? There are no easy answers to be found. What is certain is that we cannot preserve all of the 'national' electronic output. The relative cost of storing the 'bits and bytes' might be reducing year-on-year, but the costs of storing it in a meaningful way, i.e. the cost of creating the metadata necessary to recover the information, the human cost of curatorship one might say, does not. If large sums of public money is to be spent on content creation then making that information accessible over time is vitally important if we are not to be accused in the future of waste. How we move the agenda from small-scale projects, to large-scale programmes, particularly with respect to the less spectacular parts of our collections currently unavailable to a wider audience is another major question we need to address.

Secondly, I want to touch on the question of the skills-base, and the retention of those skills, particularly within publicly funded institutions. Report after report in the UK warns of skill shortages with respect to the digital revolution. The UK Government sees cultural heritage institutions, particularly libraries, at the heart of UK-online and the creation of an informed citizenry. Preservation specialists need to acquire IT and digital skills to support access expectations. These are expensive and time consuming to acquire. Institutions need to carry out skills audits and set these alongside skills requirements. We need to introduce training programmes and re-training programmes to ensure we maintain the right mix of skill sets to manage the digital challenge - no easy task. Incidentally this question applies to traditional conservation every bit as much. In the UK we simply do not have sufficient skills in book conservation and photographic conservation to meet even our most basic needs across the country in these areas. However, training opportunities abound. This meeting being one of them!

The British Library and the digital challenge
The Library has adopted a very open approach to dealing with the digital challenge it faces. By this I mean open in sharing many aspects of the work in order to benefit from collaboration around the world. We are, for example, developing strategic relationships with the Library of Congress and the National Library of Australia. We are developing a very deep relationship with the Royal Library in The Hague. Both our organisations are developing digital library solutions with IBM. (IBM are building the BL's Digital Library System, with at the heart the digital store using the OAIS reference model.) We are exploring metadata systems, particularly for preservation, by comparing the work carried out by RLG, OCLC, NLAus, and in the UK the CEDARS project (CURL Exemplars in Digital Archives), rather than attempting to create a BL-specific system.

We need to develop internal guidelines for digital projects at every stage, and to build in robust decision making procedures where conservation and digital surrogacy meet. The Digitisation Policy Group, of which I am a member, is developing project management guidelines, a register of digitisation projects, and format standards, amongst other topics, which will relieve some of the burden of decision making, and at the same time ensure there is a corporate approach to digitisation. In this way those scarce resources I mentioned previously can be utilised more cost-effectively.

The Library has placed a great deal of emphasis on raising the awareness of digital issues and the programmes the library is involved in amongst library staff across the board. We have organised e-fairs where the projects have been displayed and a number of one-day seminars. One aspect of these events that has been particularly appreciated is the opportunity to meet with colleagues managing similar projects in different parts of the library. In this way artificial internal boundaries can be broken down within an organisation. Again, this allows more efficient and creative use of people's knowledge and enthusiasm.

Conclusion
Although I was asked initially to include an overview of international activities other panel members, I know, have included details in their presentations. What I hope I have given you is an idea of the range of activities the NPO and British Library are engaging in and the context in which that activity is taking place.

I would urge you to maintain as up-to-date knowledge bank as you can manage. Do not to discard traditional library, archive, curatorial, and conservation skills. Rather add to them the necessary IT and digital skills to take these professions forward into the future with confidence. This confidence should enable preservation professionals to engage with the institution-wide debate, difficult though it sometimes maybe, but without which, managing the long-term future of digital assets will remain a costly and out of control chimera.