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Preservation and persistence

Issues set out in this section are, in effect, a subset of the issues outlined above in content management. How will content be preserved, archived and represented to users now and in the future? Issues related to persistence and preservation of content are perhaps thornier than the broader issues related to content selection, description and management because even in the older world of exclusively print collections much talk resulted in little activity. As one interviewee said so succinctly: “There is no more substance behind ‘digital preservation’ than there was behind ‘print preservation.’ All talk about how important it is and we don’t do either. Besides, there’s no money for preservation of any type.” As is evident from the points made by interviewees, there is perhaps even less agreement about the nature of the challenges inherent in archiving and preservation than there is in other areas.

Here are some key points about preservation and persistence made by people OCLC interviewed:

• Digital preservation has to be a national issue—it will never work on an institution-by-institution basis.
• Preservation of institutional content is the responsibility now of the parent institution—it’s a huge burden.
• We haven’t a clue how to approach digitization. Thematically? Chronologically? Cataloging does not help with such decisions.
• Digitization is for dissemination, not preservation.
• Digitization is basically a cottage industry, institutionally driven and based on no standards.
• We haven’t preserved print so why the big concern about digital preservation?
• There is a chaos of creation out there—everybody’s creating digital content—we desperately need some system of archival value assessment.
• It is not cost-effective for each library to digitize—it must be a national effort.
• Why preserve something if it was not durable in the first place?
• Preservation is more about social relationships than formats and technical issues.
• There are no standards and no national strategy for preserving cultural heritage.
• Access licenses have effectively taken the discussion of preservation out of the realm of the possible—we don’t own the content and we can’t archive it.
• Access is a form of sustainability—content that can be accessed is valued and is more likely to be sustained by the community.
• We’re all saving the same stuff—we need a national last copy and preservation program.
• Paper content is being moved off-site to make room for things like cafàs and information commons, but what stays and what goes? We do not have good tools for these decisions.
• The technology infrastructure isn’t a big deal anymore—technology happens. But Digital Rights Management (DRM) and identity management are big deals.
• There is an overwhelming tension between the DRM community and the open access community and it’s getting worse.
• DRM is hugely complex to manage and coordinate—we need standardization!

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