Lessons from the past require preservation

Information Outlook, Nov, 2004 by Stephen Abram

So there I was in Buenos Aires at IFLA and I picked up the local English language newspaper and, to my surprise, found two great cautionary tales about library preservation projects!

Cautionary Tale #1

During the Qing Dynasty in China (1644-1911 CE), there was a powerful emperor, Qianlong. He was very interesting--a real Renaissance guy. He reigned for almost 60 years, from 1736 to 1795, ruled 300 million people, and achieved a number of great intellectual and cultural achievements. In addition to being a musician and calligrapher, he wrote over 44,000 poems and thousands of essays.

He was also intimately interested in the workings of government and documenting decisions and culture. He sponsored, hundreds of years ago, a massive project to have all surviving Chinese written works from time immemorial acquired, copied, and preserved. Reportedly, it took 300 scholars and 3,600 scribes about 10 years to finish the project. In the end, the resulting archive contained 4.2 million pages. Although this doesn't seem large through the filter of Internet-weary eyes, it was quite an accomplishment in its time.

Then again, it might have been even more powerful if Qianlong hadn't personally reviewed all of China's literary history and either edited it or destroyed the thousands of items he determined were "anti-imperialist." Hmmm ... (Source: Buenos Aires Herald, p. 12, August 29, 2004)

Cautionary Tale #2

The Conquistadores' influence on the history of South America is probably unparalleled in human history. From the genocide of millions of native people (possibly the largest in world history) to the destruction of cultures vibrant and diverse, it is clearly unimaginable what was lost.

When the conquerors arrived, there was a vibrant continental mosaic of cultures--advanced and literate. Within decades, the destruction was ordered of all of their books and libraries. Since the conquerors could not read the native books, they deemed them heresy. They were diligent in their haste and accuracy to destroy all of the written word of these cultures. Today, it is reported that only four books remain from the libraries of the indigenous South American cultures. Hmmm ... (Source: Buenos Aires Herald, p. 13, August 29, 2004)

Today we are immersed in a debate about cultural properties, sustainability, and virtual access to historical records, along with standards for long-term access. The two tales above highlight one of the great contradictions of librarianship. We must select the best content, sometimes discard "irrelevant" materials, and organize access. Then again, we strive for comprehensiveness and completeness in the context of nonpartisan and unbiased collections.

Questions We Need To Ask

Neil Beagrie, JISC and British Library Partnership Manager, says that as the volumes, heterogeneity, and complexity of digital information grow, the issue of digital preservation becomes urgent, because a serious and widening gap has developed between our ability to create digital information and our infrastructure and capacity to manage and preserve it over time.

The future, at worst, could become a "digital dark ages," unless that dismal prospect is averted by attention to organizational issues such as data policies and implementation, collaboration within and between organizations, and the development of greater international collaboration and greater political will in addressing the problem." ("Digital Information will never survive by accident, Aug 11, 2004--http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=news_digital) Mr. Beagrie is a wise man. So we need to ask ourselves a few questions:

1. How can we avoid bias in selection of materials for preservation? Are we biased toward our own culture and our own Western philosophies? If so, on a global scale does this risk the intellectual and cultural diversity needed for future generations?

2. Is it time to throw out our selection and collection development ideas, principles, and procedures and think again? Has technology reached the point where we should consider bulk-loading massive archives of historical items to protect them from destruction and war? It seems that most wars result in the destruction of that civilization's libraries--the record of its culture. War doesn't seem to be going away. Let's learn from history and the sad destruction of libraries in Cleopatra's Alexandria, 1812's Toronto and Washington, D.C., Kosovo in the 1990s, and today's Iraq and Afghanistan.

3. Is it time to really prefer post-coordinate indexing and display over pre-coordinate indexing. If the choice is between human-created metadata and converting more content--shouldn't we prefer to convert more? We can always index later. Some tools, like Convera and Northern Light, offer elegant solutions to search and discovery that are quickly implemented. There is a conflict between doing it right and getting more done. Let's not take our eye off the big prize: more content available to more people and preserved forever.

4. We often talk about "enduring value" as one of our great filters to make choices about collection development and preservation. We use this filter to select indexable items, books for collections, and articles for databases. Who are we to decide? How many of us have noticed the simple leaps from newspaper articles that were indexed selectively, to full text databases that only removed syndicated content and ads and were free text-searchable, to full-image data-bases that covered everything but used shallow indexing. Frankly, I have found the archival databases to be a god-send with the removal of editorial choices of the indexer.