Re: a preservation experience

["Anthony Watkinson" <anthony.watkinson@btopenworld.com>]

I would strongly recommend the CLIR site as a starting point for serious
considerations of these issues in the US context. I was speaking from a
British perspective. In particular:
<http://www.clir.org/activities/details/national_multi.html> may be
useful.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Eileen Fenton" <egfenton@jstor.org>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, October 29, 2003 12:33 AM
Subject: RE: a preservation experience

> I read with interest the recent thread pertaining to the long-term
> preservation of electronic content.  Jim O'Donnell's story of discovery
> had a happy ending, but I take from his "gob smacked" response that he
> felt lucky that it did.  I can not help but wonder if the story will have
> the same happy ending 10 years from now?  In order for it do so, we need
> broad recognition of an important point that I have not yet seen raised in
> this discussion:  the long-term preservation of electronic scholarly
> resources will require deliberate, careful, and sustained effort that
> extends beyond the harvesting of web pages or reliance upon any single
> organization.
>
> As a community, we are obviously still wrestling with how to preserve our
> growing number of important electronic resources.  We are still working to
> imagine what shape reliable archives of these materials might take.  The
> Wayback Machine offers one example; LOCKSS, national libraries, and
> institutional repositories offer other models.  The critical question now
> is how will we assess the viability of any particular approach?  What
> elements are necessary to ensure the long-term preservation of and access
> to electronic scholarly materials? If we are to effectively preserve these
> resources for the long term - to "archive" them - then as a community we
> must have a broad-based and thorough understanding of the characteristics
> of a trusted, credible archive.
>
> There are several components which must be present in any trustworthy
> archive.  The 1996 Report of the Task Force on Archiving of Digital
> Information <http://www.rlg.org/ArchTF/> and the 2002 report Trusted
> Digital Repositories: Attributes and Responsibilities
> <http://www.rlg.org/longterm/repositories.pdf> offer clear and useful
> descriptions of these elements.  My experience at JSTOR, where staff have
> been creating an organizational context to support long-term preservation
> of digital scholarly content since the inception of JSTOR, leads me to add
> to this existing documentation and to present the following framework your
> consideration.  I offer it not to promote any particular implementation,
> but to encourage us all to think about what might make an archive
> trustworthy.
>
> In our experience, the long-term preservation of and ongoing access to
> digital materials requires at a minimum 5 organizational components
> specifically dedicated to or consistent with the archival objective:
> mission; business model; technological infrastructure; relationships with
> libraries; and relationships with publishers.  Without at least these
> five, the future of an electronic resource cannot be assured. There may be
> other important components as well, but these offer a necessary
> foundation.
>
> 1)  Organizational mission - This component is absolutely critical because
> it drives the resource allocation, decision-making, and routine priorities
> and activities of the organization.  When an organization's mission is to
> be an archive it will by necessity dedicate its available resources to
> this core activity, avoiding the all too frequent competition between
> preservation needs and other priorities.  Similarly, when long-term
> preservation is mission critical, preservation values and concerns will
> necessarily inform the shape of an organization's routine procedures and
> processes.
>
> 2) Business model - An archive must generate a diverse revenue stream
> sufficient to fund the archive, including both the considerable cost of
> developing the archive's basic infrastructure and the ongoing operation of
> the archive over the long term.  A single source of funding - a single
> donor, a government agency, or a foundation - should be evaluated
> carefully for its ability to support the longevity of the archive.  We
> have all seen noble efforts come and go with the shifting priorities of
> those who pull the purse strings.
>
> 3) Technological infrastructure:  This infrastructure must support content
> ingest, verification, delivery, and multiple format migrations in
> accordance with accepted models such as OAIS and best preservation
> practices.  It must include and support the automated and manual quality
> control processes necessary to protect the ongoing integrity of the
> materials and to protect against format or hardware obsolescence.
>
> 4) Relationships with libraries:  The archive must meet the needs of the
> library community, and it must find a way to balance these needs with
> those of other participants in the scholarly communication process taking
> into account, for example, what content should be preserved for the long
> term.
>
> 5) Relationships with content producers:  The archive must establish
> agreements for the secure, timely, and reliable deposit of content, and
> it must work with publishers and other content producers to secure the
> rights necessary to archive the material entrusted to its care.
>
> These components could be implemented in any number of organizational
> models.  Indeed, the community will be best served by having multiple
> organizations serving as trusted archives.  But if we are to develop a
> network of trusted archives - and we have much work to do to reach this
> point - we must first find a way to evaluate the efficacy and reliability
> of proposed archiving models.  Doing so is an essential step toward an
> important goal:  a trusted, reliable, and long-lived record of
> scholarship.
>
> Eileen Fenton
> Executive Director
> Electronic-Archiving Initiative
> www.jstor.org/about/earchive.html
> 609/258-8355 or egfenton@jstor.org