It belongs in the library - libraries versus the Internet

Information Outlook, Feb, 1999 by Charles V. Phelps

People outside the unit, or outside the organization may come across a reference to the document and want to see it. Where is the first place they usually turn when they don't know where to find it? You know the answer - the library. The fact that a library is a library makes it a natural place for people to start their search when they don't know where else to look. Librarians do their best to keep track of where various types of information are kept, but if units just put their works up on their web pages without involving the library, it's not at all a sure thing that the librarians know about it and will be able to help people who inquire.

Making things findable is one of the main objectives of librarians, and in fact has been one of our paramount professional concerns since at least 1876, when Charles Cutter's Rules for a Dictionary Catalog was published. As much as possible, we try to unify the means of finding items by providing access to them via the catalog. In the case of some items or resources that, given their nature or the infrastructure in which the library operates, may not be practical to enter into the catalog, we still do our best to be sure they can be easily located, perhaps via a presentation of information resources on the library's web site.

Instantiable

Maybe you can find a document, but can you actually see it? This question is not to be taken lightly in the case of digital documents. There has been a growing awareness in this decade of the problems associated with the impermanence of many digital media, and the impermanence of the software needed to present the digital object in a readable format. In recent times, the latter problem has generally been the more pressing one, as software becomes obsolete much faster than the physical format deteriorates.

Librarians have been among the first to recognize the seriousness and pervasiveness of this problem, which threatens the whole gamut of digital information sources, from companies' internal records to documents of great historical value in the National Archives. Librarians have a long history of being attuned to the issue of preserving items in their collections, since paper manufactured since the latter part of the nineteenth century has contained acid, which causes it to deteriorate over time. Preservation of digital items follows naturally from this longstanding professional concern.

Obviously, librarians do not have a perfect solution, but the profession, via its professional organizations, has responded vigorously. The Council on Library and Information Resources' Commission on Preservation and Access has been actively studying the problem, as has the Association of Research Libraries, which recently published a report titled Issues and Innovations in Preserving Digital Information. The issue is a frequent topic of discussion at professional meetings. We may not be able to provide a quick fix to our organization's digital longevity problems, but the professional awareness and attitude with which we approach our work can go a long way toward seeing to it that items in the digital collection remain instantiable, using whatever techniques we have at our disposal. These techniques may include those of record-keeping, human management, and simply being the ones who make it their business to keep an eye on the situation and alert the appropriate parties and marshal the necessary resources when action (e.g., converting documents to a different format) is needed.