Lynne Brindley, Chief Executive, The British Library
Introduction
I would like to add my welcome today to this truly international conference here in York. It seems appropriate that we meet here in this historic city which has been subject over the past few weeks to flooding and continuous storm conditions causing devastation on a large scale a timely reminder to us all that preservation of our heritage be it through buildings, publications or digital objects is part of a fragile and unstable ecology.
I am delighted to have been asked to give this keynote speech for Preservation 2000. In particular I have been proud to watch and be a little involved in Cedars since its inception. You may know that the cedars of Lebanon were famed in the ancient world for their beauty, strength, and stateliness. They were hymned by the poets and sanctified by the images of the gods carved upon wooden blocks hewn from their timbers. They represented power, prosperity and longevity, (being derived from the Arabic kedr meaning worth or value, or kedrat meaning strong). Cedars were believed to last forever due to a mystic power that enabled them to forecast and prepare for the changes of the seasons. Let us hope that, as we share the findings of Cedars and share our learning from a range of other digital preservation efforts, we are taking an important step forward in our shared aspirations for long-term accessibility and preservation of the world’s memory, as it increasingly becomes manifest in digital form.
Why preserve?
But why preserve? Jeff Rothenberg put it succinctly:
The increasing use of digital technology to produce documents, databases, and publications of all kinds has led to an impending crisis, resulting from the absence of available techniques for ensuring that digital information will remain accessible, readable, and usable in the future. Deposit libraries as well as other libraries, archives, government agencies, and organisations must find ways to ensure the longevity of digital artefacts or risk the loss of vast amounts of information and human heritage.i
Large sums of money are becoming available for creating electronic images and for creating exciting, innovative ways of using images. For very sound, economic reasons, that investment, those digital assets need to be managed.
There is an array of new UK legislation, from the Freedom of Information Actii to Modernising Government, which is putting a legal onus on organisations to manage and archive their electronic documentation.
This conference has as its theme the preservation of digital materials. Cedars was established to tease out the issues; to bring to our attention the underlying complexities involved in long term access to digital resources; and to focus upon the institutional and collaborative decision making necessary now to ensure the longevity of those digital resources deemed worthy of preservation effort.
However central access is to all our activities, it remains the case that, as in our analogue world, there is no access without preservation. We simply do not have the luxury that our predecessors in their curation of printed materials enjoyed, of being able to rely on "benign neglect" as a plank of our digital preservation strategy. Action has to be taken at the outset to ensure viable and sustainable access to digital content. As responsible creators and commissioners of digital content and curators of the digital future we are about content creation for long term access: however long we determine that access period to be.
If material is to come to legal deposit libraries then there will be a presumption that access is in perpetuity; if it is created as short term teaching and learning materials then the presumption must be that it has not been created with perpetuity in mind. In essence, preservation decisions need to be integrated with the creation process that will determine the way in which the material is created, described and stored.
Selection criteria for digital materials will be need to be agreed according to the institutional mission. In order to ensure material outside of legal deposit but designated part of the written and documentary heritage guidelines for selection and responsibility for preservation will need to be developed in much the same way initially as shared collection development and management is currently being investigated in the UK for print materials. It is not an easy task but the ground is being well prepared for understanding the collaborative imperative.
There are in addition ethical considerations associated with authenticity of digital information: behind this concept lie assumptions about the meaning and significance of content, fixity, consistency of reference, provenance, and context, described so well in a CLIRiii document on this subject. The ability to manipulate the digital medium means that issues of authorial integrity must be addressed. And in deciding what is kept we must bear in mind that we are in effect deciding what record will be available in the future: a decision not to select a digital document means there is unlikely to be the serendipitous find in the future.
Yet I feel that I am at this conference, almost by definition preaching to the already converted. What really worries me is that digital preservation is quite clearly not attention grabbing enough or perhaps we have not so far made it so - to have yet brought seriously on board authors, publishers and other digital content creators, funding agencies, senior administrators, hardware and software manufacturers, and so on. Take a look at the conference attendance list if you do not believe me. Let me urge this conference to raise the stakes, to make concerted efforts to get digital preservation on the agenda of key decision-makers and funders, in terms that they will understand and find persuasive.
A tribute to progress achieved in the UK
I should like to take this opportunity to pay tribute to all those who have contributed to the achievements of the Cedars project. And indeed to all those who have been part of the international effort of getting digital preservation firmly on to our agenda, since I note that many distinguished overseas colleagues are here today either as fellow speakers or delegates. I believe that as a result of your efforts there is now a clear sense of ownership, globally, within the library and archives community of the need to take the issue of digital preservation seriously and to face up to the urgent challenge of ensuring long-term sustainable access to the ever-burgeoning array and magnitude of digital records. This is no mean achievement.
We must celebrate Cedars as a major collaborative project - principally between CURL members at Leeds, Cambridge and Oxford universities - but also in the willingness of others: to open their institutional practices to critical gaze, to give generously of their time and expertise, and to participate - through advisory and management boards - through thoughtful comments on papers and reports, both technical and managerial; or through demonstrator walk-through meetings aimed at identifying gaps in understanding and aids to implementing procedures. Much of this activity has been driven by the need to understand and integrate technical options with good information management practice.
It remains the case that the complexity of the detail is way over the head of many librarians, let alone administrators and policy-makers. Yet, I re-iterate, we need to argue cogently to these same administrators - who are our paymasters - of the imperative to preserve digital objects if we are to achieve institutional and financial support for our aim of ensuring wider access to digital resources on a sustainable basis. I shall return to this issue of funding later.
We should also celebrate the substantive progress that has been achieved in the UK in the five years or so since the UK research library community first started to square up to the challenge. In 1995, JISC, the Joint Information Systems Committee, together with the British Library, held a meeting at Warwick University under the aegis of the Electronic Libraries (eLib) Programme. The focus of that meeting was a draft copy of the seminal report on digital archivingv by the Research Libraries Group (RLG) and the Council for Preservation and Access (CPA), [now the Council for Library and Information Resources (CLIR)] in the USA. The final report was published in 1996 and will be familiar to you, focusing as it did, on technological, legal, economic, and organisational issues that needed resolution to enable institutions to take advantage of, and carry out their responsibilities for, digital materials in their collections.
In the wake of the first Warwick meeting, eLib and the National Preservation Office (NPO) established seven digital preservation research studies, funded by JISC, administered by the British Library’s Research and Innovation Centre and overseen by the Digital Archiving Working Group (DAWG). These preliminary studies undertaken through 1997-99 - which produced, for example, a framework of data types and formats for identifying the most appropriate method of preservation, a cost-based decision model and a strategic framework - are synthesised in the ‘little blue book’: Digital Culture: maximising the nation’s investmentvi which I know you have in your conference packs. I would commend this to you and your colleagues as a clear statement of the issues surrounding digital archiving in an easily digestible form.
1998 saw, of course, the beginning of the Cedars project under the direction of CURL and with funding from JISC/CEI through the eLib Programme. Also in 1998, a conference organised jointly by the Research Libraries Group and the NPO, took the agenda forward by directing an international focus on the practical implications of creating digital image content in a manner capable of longer-term access. (RLG has recently published Moving Theory into Practice: Digital Imaging for Libraries and Archivesvii that develops many of the themes identified at the 1998 conference. Written by two of the leading practitioners in this field - Anne Kenney and Oya Rieger - this handbook provides invaluable guidance to libraries and archives on how to create and manage digital image content responsibly).
The next signal step to be taken in the UK has been the recognition of the need for a "National Digital Preservation Coalition". The impetus for this arose from the ‘Warwick 2’ digital preservation workshop organised jointly by the BL, JISC, and NPO in March 1999. The message from participants representing a wide range of sectors, institutions and practitioners came loud and clear: the need to establish a successor body to the ad hoc Digital Archiving Working Group. A proposal for a Digital Preservation Coalition has emerged, to develop and pursue an UK digital preservation strategy, within an international context.
The principal activities identified for such a Digital Preservation Coalition were:
- to carry out the recommendations of the Warwick 2 Workshop
- to address the digital agenda of the NPO, working as it does on behalf of libraries and archives throughout the UK and Ireland
- to extend the general understanding of digital imperatives across all UK cultural and educational sectors through awareness raising and training
- to work towards new funding strategies for long term preservation of digital information and digitised national heritage materials, and
- to liase as appropriate with allied organisations within and outside the UK.
The JISC CEI has taken a most generous stance in recognising the overall need for such an initiative. Funds have been made available to support a post within the DNER dedicated to establish and promote a programme that Neil Beagrie will be outlining in Session VI of the conference.
Progress on the international stage
This Conference also will provide us with an excellent review of developments outside the UK.
Project NEDLIB, which aims to construct the basic infrastructure upon which a networked European deposit library can be built, and the PANDORA Project of the National Library of Australia both deserve particular mention and commendation for the open and collegial atmosphere in which they are being undertaken, an approach which encourages shared learning and debate.
This open atmosphere is informing the shared agenda being developed by the Royal Library in The Hague and the British Library as we move forward in the creation of the BL’s digital library store. I shall not dwell on this as Helen Shenton will be speaking on how the Library is managing this major undertaking. What I will say is that we are firmly committed - with our KB and IBM partners - to disseminating the lessons we learn in developing the preservation components of our system - for the benefit of the community at large. A significant part of that learning process is in understanding the management of the OAIS model to hook preservation to the model. I doubt many of us would have thought we would one day be engaging in a debate with NASA, and through Cedars, being listened to with respect.
NEDLIB has raised awareness in Europe of the work being carried out in the USA regarding emulation strategies. I do not propose here to debate the pros and cons of the migration versus emulation debate; rather to highlight it as an area of international significance for continuing research. And highly significant in this area is the joint research funding established in the UK by JISC with the National Science Foundation in the USA. The CAMiLEON project - Creative Archiving at Michigan and Leeds: Emulating the Old on the New - (apart from being one of the most creative acronyms) is, in my view, a paradigm for the way in which the international research agenda should be progressed.
The National Library of Australia with its PANDORA project has led the way in approaches to archiving the web and no doubt we shall hear more of Internet archiving from the presentation to be given by Colin Webb later in the conference. We also have much to learn from the work of the National Library of Canada which has developed clear digital collecting guidelines. In Europe, the Royal Library in Sweden has taken forward "harvesting the Web" with some success. On a recent visit to the Library of Congress I was excited to hear about that great institution’s commitment to a pilot project, working with Brewster Kale and the Internet Archive, to work through all aspects of archiving the Web in the area of political Web sites, and using as guidance the University of California at Berkeley’s Digital Library SunSITE Collection and Preservation Policy (http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/admin/collection.html) which provides several digital collecting levels. I have committed the British Library to tracking LC’s project, knowing that we, as the national library, must prepare to contribute to such efforts, working closely with our national and research library colleagues.
It is surely now time for us to orchestrate our efforts to collaboratively research and develop strategies for archiving significant web sites as a record of our digital inheritance?
(It would be appropriate at this point particularly since Winson Tabb is with us here today to take the opportunity to commend LC for the quality of LC21: a digital strategy for the Library of Congress and for sharing their report with us. LC’s comprehensive study has much to offer all of us in research libraries as we develop our own digital strategies).
Clearly in the short time available to me this review of projects and initiatives can scarcely do justice either to the progress that has been achieved in the UK and internationally. I hope nevertheless that the flavour that I have provided can enable us to take pride in what has been achieved in such a short space of time in understanding and influencing this Medusa-like agenda, while at the same time recognising that we are only in the foot-hills of our long and arduous journey.
Developments at the British Library
I wish for a moment to turn to developments at the British Library in terms of our experience and plans for the acquisition and creation of digital materials and the provision of access to them. I hope that this will provide a context for some important messages that I wish to convey to this conference.
We are currently focusing on new strategic directions and our emerging vision has the strap-line of:
"Making accessible the world’s intellectual, scientific and cultural heritage"
We seek to make the collections of the British Library (and other great collections) accessible on everyone’s ‘virtual bookshelf’, wherever this may be at work, at school, at college, at home.
This implies a larger focus on e-strategy, including digitisation and digital collecting; more emphasis on presentation of the Library’s collections in the context of other great collections and worthwhile resources world-wide; much more active use and development of navigational tools to assist users; and reaching out through the Web (directly and mediated through appropriate educational agencies and the public libraries) to a much wider public.
At the core of the British Library’s future relevance and mission, is the continuing effort going in to ensuring that the UK will have an adequate system of legal deposit for an electronic age. Our collaboration with the other legal deposit libraries is critical to defining the framework for this, and for devising a practical solution. Sadly, we are not going to get legislation time this side of an election, anticipated in the press for Spring 2001 somewhat surprisingly legal deposit is not seen as a vote-winner!
Meanwhile, a code of practice for voluntary deposit covering off-line electronic media has been agreed as an interim measure, endorsed by publishing trade bodies, the legal deposit libraries and our sponsoring government department, Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). This voluntary approach has a major advantage of ‘slow build-up’; a period in which the publishers and ourselves can develop greater understanding of all the issues involved in digital deposit from metadata collection through to preservation, and the resource implications of this work. We are working to develop a secure network that will enable us to demonstrate to publishers that, together with the other copyright libraries, we can meet their legitimate commercial concerns regarding authorised access. At the same time, an increasing proportion of the British Library’s acquisitions purchasing budget is now being directed towards digital materials, a spend of some £935k in FY1999/2000.
As I have already indicated, our digital infrastructure is being critically enhanced by the multi-million pound procurement deal that we have recently concluded with IBM, to provide a digital store to form the technical platform to support the Library’s acquisition and preservation of collection materials in digital form, together with digitised elements of our own historical collections. The DLS will be designed using the Open Archival Information System (OIAS) reference model and will build on the work of the CEDARS digital preservation project, within which the BL is acting as a test site. The Dutch national library, the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, has embarked simultaneously on a similar project with IBM, and we envisage working in close collaboration with KB as we move into uncharted digital territories. We will hope to contribute to, and share findings from, the international digital preservation research agenda, not least by providing an excellent test-bed for such work.
The Library is also pursuing new opportunities for digitisation of its collections. We were encouraged by a recent House of Commons Committee report that strongly supported the BL "in its endeavours to continue its digitalisation of internationally important books and manuscripts". The Culture, Media and Sport Committee considered this to be critical in making the BL a "library for the many not just the few" whilst noting that this expanded role should not be at the expense of our core statutory functions. [I have not quite squared the economics of this yet, but assume it is another version of the ‘more for less’ philosophy that pervades UK public sector thinking and funding].
The Library currently has two major (multi-£m) digitisation bids in progress for lottery funding of nationally significant heritage material under the New Opportunities Fund NOF Digitise initiative. We are leading a consortium of bidders on the theme of ‘a national sense of place’, focused on the location and appearance of places within the UK. The Library is also a partner in a bid led by the Public Records Office on the subject of ‘moving here’, with content based on immigration to England. We have plans also to create a digital picture library by digitising 100,000 images from the BL’s collection, one of its great hidden resources. And in addition our early photographic collections are being prepared for the web.
But whilst we wish to make a critical mass of digital material available, we see limited merit in digitisation without some coherence of purpose and integrity. With Cliff Lynch we believe that it is critical to ‘weave primary content with commentary, criticism, scholarship and instruction’. Materials digitised need to be described, related, contextualised, justified and scoped. These are complex tasks involving a range of new collaborations with scholars, teachers, educational publishers, and so on. The Electronic Beowulf and the International Dunhuang Project are just two examples that will be well known to you of collaborative digital initiatives involving partnership with the research community that have yielded new insights and advances in scholarship. A rather different example, is Fathom.com, a recently announced partnership involving a growing number of cultural and educational contributors of international standing. It is intended that Fathom.com through its Website will provide access to a range of e-course and related content, and will act as a quality knowledge space. The British Library is actively developing digital content and a range of ‘stories’ contributed by our curators, as ‘sticky’, freely accessible content. The proposed Hefce e-university initiative will give us further collaborative opportunities as will the RLG Cultural Materials Initiative, and the BL is, I believe, in a position to make a major contribution to these important developments.
We are also seeking to make appropriate contributions to the Government’s agenda for learners and its access and regional agendas through the creation of digital content. Increasingly we envisage that we shall be building upon our educational CD-ROMs and the Library’s education web-site by re-purposing digital materials for multiple learners. And we believe strongly that we need to develop partnerships with the public libraries in the UK as major agents in extending access, through, for example, the People’s Network (the wiring up of all public libraries), through learning centres, and through traditional public library channels. In a major speech last month to the Public Libraries Authorities I signalled a new partnership with them: for them to showcase the British Library’s collections and services (virtually and physically), and for us to play a part in their regional agendas of widening access, and integrated learning provision across, for example, large cities.
The BL’s agenda in respect to collaboration with HE is of course a high strategic priority for the British Library. For those of you who attended the SCONUL meeting at the British Library earlier this week, you may be relieved to learn that I do not propose to rehearse here the paper I gave on that occasion. Suffice to say I am delighted that the BL can and will be so integrally involved in the DNER, which I know is central to the digital strategies of many of you.
For those interested, both of these papers, together with this paper will be made available on the concord Web site, with links from the British Library’s own site at www.bl.uk/concord/
Discussion
My purpose in reviewing these digital developments at the British Library is to underline the fact that we are already necessarily "past the point of no return" in respect of many of the main stages in the life cycle of digital resources. (I would emphasise that I am in no way suggesting that the BL is a beacon or exemplar in respect of the extent to which it has embraced the new technological opportunities, merely that we are committed and now travelling down this route at increasing speed).
The BL’s contribution is in any case but part of an enormous and costly cross-sectoral (libraries) and cross domain (cultural and education) effort being put into the creation and acquisition of digital resources to meet an ever widening agenda at a pace that is hard to keep up with. I also have particular concerns about the new "born digital" record e.g. the volatility of material on the Web, referred to above and the implications of the new e-science genomics, climatology, bioinformatics, etc. in respect of the BL’s statutory responsibilities and the role of research libraries more generally in long-term curation of scientific data.
The challenge is perhaps most succinctly described in the "Problem statement" contained in the manifesto of the RLG/DLF Task Force on Policy and Practice for long-term Retention of Digital Materialsviii:
"In the 1998 survey of digital preservation needs and requirements among members of the Research Libraries Group, few institutions reported having policies or even codified practices for preserving "born-digital" and converted-to-digital materials but virtually all those surveyed expect such preservation to be part of their operations by 2001!"
Since digital preservation is fundamental to ensuring sustainable and viable access to these materials, a message I would wish to underline for this conference is the urgent need now to move beyond projects and to commit to developing digital preservation strategy at both national and international level a sustainable (i.e. sensible, affordable, achievable) strategy at the core of our respective missions and, through that strategy, operational plans in respect of our respective roles and responsibilities as defined in strategy.
Collaboration and partnership will be key to strategy at both the national and at the international level. Not only in terms of ensuring co-ordination of the institutional roles articulated within the chosen strategic digital archiving model. But also in terms of sharing experience and solutions from joint research and development which needs to bring together the best in computer science research with the best in information management and collection management.
Hence, in my view, the establishment of a UK Digital Preservation Coalition is a clear imperative. And I should like to take this opportunity to signal the British Library’s firm support for such an initiative, and our commitment to play a leading role in its important work.
My personal view is that to be effective the Coalition needs to comprise a high level strategic group of stakeholders each prepared to articulate and commit to a role, to take on an active role, and to deliver on that role. I also believe the Coalition would best be established as an independent entity, given the cross-sectoral and cross-domain stakeholder interests it needs to address. Re:source: The Council for Museums, Archives and Libraries which is achieving good progress in developing Stewardship Strategy - may well properly have a facilitation role to play here. I think we also need to be clear in our considerations of organisational models for the Coalition that preservation and digital preservation are not distinct activities that should bifurcate. Rather I see them as parts of an overall spectrum that need to be managed in an integrated way to ensure sustainable access to the digital and written and documentary record.
Finally, I believe we need to act in concert to make the argument for appropriate and adequate funding. The position (no doubt Treasury-driven) set out in the Government’s 1997 consultation paper Legal deposit of publications:
The Government expects that any additional costs to the repositories arising from the extension of legal deposit to non-print publication media will be absorbed by those repositories within existing levels of resources. The Government will not be providing additional public funds for this purpose".
is neither realistic nor sustainable. As some of you may know, the UK Funding Councils and the national libraries are currently moving towards setting up a new strategic advisory body, initially for research support provision, to take forward and hopefully provide a national framework within which our collaborative collecting, access and digital developments can become embedded. I am pleased to say that Sir Brian Follett has agreed to chair the group which, it is planned, should convene in early Spring 2001. I believe this Advisory Group has the potential effectively and powerfully to champion our case for funding a national digital archiving strategy to policy-makers and senior administrators.
Conclusions
And so, in conclusion I want to throw down a series of challenges to major stakeholders participating in this conference. We should not leave York without at least the essence of a national (and international) manifesto. Might I suggest that this should include the following eight commitments:
- Raise the public relations stakes and grab the headlines, in a concerted and co-ordinated effort to get digital preservation on the agenda of key decision-makers and funders in terms that they will understand and find persuasive
- Orchestrate our efforts to collaborate in research and development and implementation strategies for archiving significant Web sites as a global record of our digital inheritance, building on the experience of the NLA, L of C and others
- Commit to the development of a digital preservation strategy - perhaps strengthening and widening the role of the NPO in this new context - at the national level, and in an international context, spelling out stakeholder roles and responsibilities, for such bodies as CURL and its members, national and other legal deposit libraries, the Research Councils, the PRO, cultural institutions, JISC, Re:source, etc.
- Ensure that there are links with other similar international stakeholder groupings
- Commit to working internationally and collaboratively, in partnerships and with an unusual openness so that we can all learn as quickly as possible, from mistakes as well as successes
- Support the establishment of a UK and Ireland digital preservation coalition and define its shape as an independent and inclusive body
- Act in concert to make arguments for appropriate and adequate funding to ensure an enduring global digital memory
- Use the proposed strategic advisory group, led by Sir Brian Follett, as a powerful UK advocate for digital preservation
References
i. Rothenberg, Jeff. Using emulation to preserve digital documents. Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague, July 2000
ii. Freedom of Information Bill. [Currently making its way through Parliament]. http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/foi/index.htm
iii. Modernising Government White Paper March 1999. Cm 4310. The Stationery Office. 1999. http://www.official.documents.co.uk/document/cm83/4310/4310.htm
iv. Council on Library and Information Resources. Authenticity in a digital environment. CLIR, Washington, May 2000
v. Preserving digital information: Report of the Task Force on Archiving Digital Information. The Commission on Preservation and Access and The Research Libraries Group. California, 2000.
vi. Feeney, Mary, ed. Digital culture: maximising the nation's investments; a synthesis of JISC/NPO studies on the preservation of electronic materials. NPO, British Library Board, 1999
vii. Kenney, Anne R and Rieger, Oya Y. Moving theory into practice: digital imaging for libraries and archives. Research Libraries Group. California, 2000.
viii. RLG/Digital Library Federation Task Force, on, Policy and practice for long-term retention of digital materials. http://www.rlg.org/preserv/digrlgdlf99.html
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