RE: ALA Panel on Perpetual Access - seeking input

[richards1000@comcast.net]

One more comment:

The new ARL/Ithaka "New Models" report,
http://www.arl.org/sc/models/model-pubs/pubstudy/index.shtml, and
the trend toward permitting junior faculty to include new media
publications in their tenure portfolios, suggest a need to
provide perpetual access to selected content (that of lasting
scholarly value) of new media, particularly blogs,
never-published preprints, and data sets.  This raises a host of
questions.

One is: which profession is responsible for long-term access?
Much of this material falls on the boundary between "published"
and "unpublished" material.  Traditionally, librarians take
responsibility for preserving published material, and archivists
for unpublished material.  Whose responsibility is it to preserve
semipublished, but important, new media materials, such as blog
postings, preprints that are never ultimately published in a
journal but nonetheless have an impact, and data sets?

Second, who does the selection, and using what criteria?
Traditionally, librarians preserve nearly comprehensively with
relatively little weeding, while archivists preserve selectively,
and then weed their collections regularly using retention
schedules.  Scholarly expertise may be needed to supply selection
criteria for new media, but the trend in academic librarianship
is away from subject specialization, so that faculty themselves
(who have little time to spare) may often have to select the
materials to be preserved.  The selection process will have to be
coordinated to ensure that important materials are not lost,
while faculty are not overburdened.

Third, what institutional model will be used?  These new media
are tricky to administer in part because their locations are
dispersed: an academic blog may be located on a professor's
university Website (so that university computing controls it), or
on another university's Website (requiring negotiation with that
university's computing department), or on a publisher's Website
for an academic journal (requiring negotiation with the
publisher, possibly bringing the blog into Portico if the
publisher participates), or on the Website of a privately
published newspaper (think of Professor Krugman's blog at the New
York Times), or on the Website of a non-publisher commercial
entity, such as an Internet Service Provider (requiring
negotiation with a business that may be entirely unfamiliar with
scholarly publishing).

The only one of these arrangements that might be easily
streamlined is the blog on the journal publisher's Website,
because a mediator such as Portico might be able to negotiate
with the publisher to bring the blog systematically into the
mediator's archive.  The others have to be dealt with ad hoc.
Institutional repositories may play a very substantial role, but
it's important that metadata describing the archived material be
made available to mainstream databases such as national and
regional union catalogs and major search engines to enable
retrieval.  Metadata may also pose challenges.  Some metadata may
be extractable automatically, but some will require manual
intervention, and where manual intervention is required,
decisions will need to be made as to the level of access
(collection versus document level).  Moreover, some new media may
not easily fit into present metadata models. (For example, what's
the appropriate way to describe a blog exchange involving
multiple postings plus reader comments, where the entire exchange
is of long-term scholarly value?)

Fourth, a variety of preservation standards must be used, since
much new media consists of nontextual material.  Because
librarians may be less familiar with archival standards for
non-textual materials than with textual preservation standards,
librarians will need to cooperate with experts in preservation of
nontextual media in administering these arrangements.

Robert C. Richards, Jr., J.D.*, M.A., M.S.L.I.S.
Philadelphia, PA
E-mail: richards1000@comcast.net
* Member, New York Bar, Retired Status