Re: [-empyre-] Who decides and what to preserve

[Luciana Duranti <luciana@interchange.ubc.ca>]

I have followed with fascination this discussion which has gone from 
technical to philosophical to moral to political to literary. Considering 
that as a Canadian I cannot do much about the political issues in the US 
other than sharing the grief, I would like to go back for a moment to the 
professional aspect of selection of what to preserve for future generations.

Archival science, as well as librarianship (I surmise, but I do not really 
know as I am an archivist), has developed an entire discipline of selection 
of materials on traditional media, including values to be considered, 
principles, criteria, methodologies, rules, etc. It is commonly agreed in 
archival literature that, with digital material, the value system and the 
methodology for assessing value does not change. The question is: what does 
change? InterPARES has established that the most important changes are:

1) selection of what should be preserved over the long term can no longer 
benefit from the perspective acquired with the passage of time, and has to 
occur at a time very close to creation of the material (in other words, if 
Bach lived today and used the digital medium, we could not wait for 
Mendelson to discover his work, because by that time it would be obsolete 
and unaccessible, especially considering that much of it was created for 
the daily mass, not to be used again, so nobody other than the people 
attending the mass would have known it). We need to appraise material for 
preservation while it is live and active...sometimes while it is in the making

2) selection must be carried out ion collaboration with the creator who 
should take pro-active action to ensure that the material identified for 
preservation will last and be preservable

3) selection must keep into account authenticity, which is often lost 
through transmission through time and space. Much of what ends up preserved 
in digital form is not the authentic output of the creator, and does not 
have identity and integrity

4) selection must keep into account feasibility of preservation by the 
preserving body both in terms of financial resources and in terms of 
technical capability

5) once identified the material to preserve, we must keep monitoring the 
changes of that material both as to technology and as to content and 
context to make sure that its transformation is not such that our 
assessment must change

6) once the acquisition moment arrives, the preserver must collaborate with 
the creator in putting the material in a format that serves preservation 
and accessibility needs while at the same time ensuring the accuracy and 
authenticity of what is preserved.

Before the digital medium, we did nothing of the above. The other thing we 
might have to do is to conduct a very generous selection and carry forward 
as much as possible of what promises to have value and then do the 
definitive selection ten years later. AS long as the selection process is 
to end at some preestablished time (for example, anything that has been 
kept for 20 years and still has value will be kept forever), we could keep 
selecting every five years among the material identified for preservation.

Luciana


Luciana Duranti
Chair and Professor, Archival Studies
Director, InterPARES Project
School of Library, Archival and Information Studies
The University of British Columbia
Suite 301 -  6190 Agronomy Road
Vancouver, B.C.V6T 1Z3 Canada
Tel. 604/822-2587
FAX 604/822-6006
www.interpares.org
www.slais.ubc.ca/people/faculty/