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Training professionals to preserve digital heritage: the school for scanning
Library Trends, Summer, 2007 by Ann Russell
ABSTRACT
From 1995 to 2005, the Northeast Document Conservation Center (NEDCC) presented its School for Scanning conference eleven times in cities across the United States, serving a total of nearly four thousand professionals. The program addressed a seemingly insatiable need for training on building, managing, and preserving digital collections. Because the conference was presented by an organization whose mission is preservation, the emphasis was on standards, quality, and assuring long-term access to digital collections.
Since 1995 the content of the conference has evolved as institutional digitization programs have matured and as standards and best practices have developed. The succession of conference agendas provides a series of snapshots of the effort that has gone into bringing digital programs into being. This article, originally written as a paper for the 2006 Congress of the International Federation of Library Associations [IFLA] in Seoul, Korea, looks at how the needs of the audience changed over the decade. It evaluates the factors that have contributed to the school's ongoing success and at current challenges to this continuing education program as the experience level of professions in the field advances rapidly.
MIRRORING THE GROWTH OF DIGITAL PROGRAMS
On April 13, 1995, NEDCC presented the first School for Scanning as a one-day conference at the John E Kennedy Library in Boston (see Appendix 1). The program grew out of an ongoing series of preservation microfilm workshops sponsored by NEDCC. A growing number of attendees were requesting additional training on digitization because, they reported, within their institutions, they were the ones expected to staff new scanning operations. The title was a takeoff on Richard Sheridan's 1777 play, School for Scandal and the name stuck. The pilot conference drew more than three hundred people, an enormous response that took the organizers by surprise. Speakers representing the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Commission on Preservation and Access reported on their organizations' support for digital efforts.
The agenda spotlighted two early NEH-funded research projects that explored the conversion of existing microfilms to digital files and vice versa, presented by Paul Conway, then at Yale University, and Anne Kenhey, at Cornell University. The major focus was on the technical aspects of scanning, with much discussion about recommended resolution levels, and whether it was preferable to scan first or microfilm first. With hindsight, the emphasis on the technology for image capture appears not to have been the most important issue after all. Parenthetically, neither Yale nor Cornell ultimately delivered content from those experimental projects to the Web.
Most of the audience members at the 1995 conference had no firsthand experience with digitizing collections materials. Their concerns were about how to get started, and their most pressing question was whether they should or should not digitize. Many said they felt pressure from institution directors or trustees who thought the answer to their collection storage problem was to "just scan it." Little was understood about the complexity and cost of building digital collections, or the long-term sustainability issues.
The electricity generated by this first conference was palpable. There was tremendous interest in expanding the agenda to include other aspects of building digital collections and in bringing the conference to other locations. The School for Scanning's long and successful afterlife as a road show began through a partnership with the National Park Service. NPS' enterprising archivist, Diane Vogt-O'Connor, obtained a grant through an internal educational fund to expand the program to a three-day event and present it at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington in September 1996. The Getty Center also joined the partnership, contributing copies of its publication, Introduction to Imaging (1995), by Howard Besser and Jennifer Trant, as a free handout.
NEDCC's energetic Field Service Director, Steve Dalton, worked with the National Park Service staff to develop the curriculum for the first three-day conference. New topics that were added included selection, copyright, Web access, and media longevity. Digital preservation was a topic that could only be talked about in the future tense, and hence discussions were abstract. The agenda included a presentation by Steve Puglia, at the National Archives, entitled, "Digital Preservation: Fact or Fiction?" and a wrap-up analysis by Howard Besser, then at the University of California at Berkeley, entitled, "What Have We Learned? What Must We Learn?" The presentation of the expanded version of School for Scanning filled the largest hall that could be found at the Smithsonian Institution and generated a long waiting list.
Based on the success of the Washington presentation, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation provided start-up support to take the School for Scanning conference to four other locations including Berkeley, New York, New Orleans, and Chicago. The success of the program in the late 1990s was largely due to the work of a curriculum committee of digital experts who evaluated each conference, based on a post-conference questionnaire, and updated the agenda for the next presentation. The curriculum committee saw a need to look more broadly at management issues. They sought to incorporate new model programs and evolving standards in an ongoing quest to achieve the right balance of topics and speakers.
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