Preservation Is Not a Place

The Digital Preservation Program of the California Digital Library (CDL) is engaged in a process of reinvention involving significant transformations of its outlook, effort, and infrastructure. This includes a re-articulation of its mission in terms of digital curation, rather than preservation; encouraging a programmatic, rather than a project-oriented approach to curation activities; and a renewed emphasis on services, rather than systems. This last shift was motivated by a desire to deprecate the centrality of the repository as place. Having the repository as the locus for curation activity has resulted in the deployment of a somewhat cumbersome monolithic system that falls short of desired goals for responsiveness to rapidly changing user needs and operational and administrative sustainability. The Program is pursuing a path towards a new curation environment based on the principle of devolving curation function to a set of small, simple, loosely coupled services. In considering this new infrastructure, the Program is relying upon a highly deliberative process starting from first principles drawn from library and archival science. This is followed by a stagewise progression of identifying core preservable values, devising strategies promoting those values, defining abstract services embodying those strategies, and, finally, developing systems that instantiate those services. This paper presents a snapshot of the Program’s transformative efforts in its early phase. The International Journal of Digital Curation is an international journal committed to scholarly excellence and dedicated to the advancement of digital curation across a wide range of sectors. ISSN: 1746-8256 The IJDC is published by UKOLN at the University of Bath and is a publication of the Digital Curation Centre. Preservation Is Not a Place 9 Introduction Information technology has become integral to the pedagogic mission of modern universities. The scholarly community routinely produces and utilizes a wide variety of digital assets in the course of teaching, learning, and research. These assets represent the intellectual capital of their institutions; they have inherent and enduring value and need to be preserved for use by future scholars. The Digital Preservation Program of the California Digital Library (CDL) has a broad mandate to ensure the long-term usability of digital assets within the 10-campus University of California (UC) system. To better position itself to meet this task, the Program is engaged in a process of reinvention involving significant transformations of its outlook, effort, and infrastructure. Firstly, the Program now defines its mission in broader terms of digital curation, rather than preservation. While preservation and access were previously considered disparate functions, they are now properly seen as complementary: preservation aimed at providing access over time, while access depends upon preservation at a point in time. Curation better expresses the new programmatic emphasis on activities over the full digital lifecycle (Higgins, 2008). Secondly, the Program’s developmental focus is now on content services rather than systems. Technical systems are inherently ephemeral, their useful lifespan being constantly encroached upon by disruptive technological change. Rather than pursuing the somewhat illusory goal of long-lived systems, curation goals are better served by concentrating on long-lived content, sustained by an evolving repertoire of nimble, commodified services. This change in emphasis is best exemplified by deprecating the centrality of the curation repository as place. Rather than relying on a conceptually monolithic system as a locus, curation outcomes will be the product of loosely coupled, independent, distributed services. To maximize the flexible applicability of these services throughout the digital lifecycle, and especially in the early, upstream stages, these services should be capable of operating on content in situ – a field research station, a laboratory workbench, a desktop workstation – without a necessary precondition of being transferred to a central locus for curation processing. In effecting these transformations, the Program has engaged in a thorough review of its University stakeholders, progammatic policies, strategies, practices, and infrastructure. One important consideration of the new approach is the deferral of technical decision making until curation intentions and objectives are clearly understood and unambiguously defined. During the planning process for the new curation environment it has been useful to start from first principles drawn from library and archival science to ensure a sound conceptual basis for the work. This paper presents a snapshot of the Program’s transformative efforts at an early phase. Foundational Principles Library and archival science have a deep, rich history. Their historically established principles still have currency when applied to the digital realm. Consider, for example, Ranganathan’s five laws of library science (Ranganathan, 1931). The first three laws (“Books are for use”; “Every reader his book”; “Every book his reader”) are fundamentally concerned with use. By loose analogy we initially assert that digital assets are preserved in order to be used. Furthermore, use entails that these assets be The International Journal of Digital Curation Issue 1, Volume 4 | 2009 10 Stephen Abrams et al both discoverable and utile, that is, users can find assets of interest and the information content encapsulated into those assets are meaningfully exposed to their users. The fourth law (“Save the time of the user”) is fundamentally concerned with service. All digital assets inherently require technological intermediation in order to be useful. Again by analogy, we assert that user services for curated assets must be available, responsive, and comprehensive, that is, they can be used at the time and place of user’s choosing and they conform, moreover, to the user’s expectations in terms of performance and functionality. The fifth law (“The library is a growing organism”) is fundamentally concerned with change. Due to the nature of intermediation, digital assets are inherently fragile with respect to technological change. Again by analogy, we assert that curation services must evolve over time in a sustainable manner in order to continue to provide value and mitigate threats to that value. The concept of archival diplomatics stresses the importance of provenance, the understanding of an asset’s source and relationship to the information content it encapsulates (Pearce-Moses, 2005; Ross, 2007). One of the distinguishing characteristics of digital content over analog forms is its ease of undetectable mutability. By analogy we finally assert that curated assets must not only be accesible and usable, but also authentic, that is, they are what they purport to be. These assertions form the basis for the Program’s curation imperative: providing highly available, responsive, comprehensive, and sustainable services for access to use, reuse, and enrichment of, authentic digital assets over time. Or more succinctly, “maintaining and adding value to a trusted body of digital information for current and future use” (Digital Curation Centre [DCC], 2007). It is important to note that these goals merely restate a set of stewardship responsibilities and activities that scientific and cultural memory institutions have aways carried out as their core mission Curation Objects The primary unit of curation management is the digital object, an encapsulation in digital form of an abstract intellectual or aesthetic work. The fundamantal components of a digital object with regard to curation considerations are content and description (see Figure 1). 1 Content is the primary intrinsic value carried and transmitted by the object and possesses abstract semantic meaning that is exposed through pragmatic behavior operating on tangible syntactic form. Description is extrinsic information about the object and expresses its significant syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic characteristics, and the evolution of these characteristics over time. This tripartite definition of object content (meaning, behavior, form) follows from a semiotic conceptualization of preservation activity. Semiotics explains the transference of meaning across time and space in terms of signs, or meaning-bearing symbols. As 1 Note that the object decomposition model (content, description) is a reasonable analogue to the OAIS information package model ISO 14721:2003 (International Organization for Standardization [ISO], 2003): OAISObjectInformation objectContentData objectDescriptionRepresentation information 2 The use of the terms description and descriptive in a metadata context is often intended to indicate a purely intellectual description as opposed to a technical, structural, behavioral one, and so on. This is not the sense of the term here. We use description in its most generic sense: any extrinsic information > about something, in this case, a digital object. The International Journal of Digital Curation Issue 1, Volume 4 | 2009 Preservation Is Not a Place 11 formulated by Morris, syntax is the relationship between signs; semantics is the relationship between signs and the things they represent or signify; and pragmatics is the relationship between signs and their interpreters (Morris, 1938; Rochberg-Halton, & McMurtrey, 1983). 3 The semiotic perspective highlights the importance of behavioral considerations in curation activities. The use of digital assets presupposes their rendering, that is, conversion into human-sensible analog form, whether visual, aural, tactile, etc. Thus the preservation of behavior is an essential component of effective curation. While behavior is implied in the concept of representation information, that information generally stresses structural and semantic description.