Cutting Edge E-Preservation

By Richard Huffine, U.S. Geological Survey

Photo by Liz Doyle, U.S. EPA Region 10 Library

One of the Government Information Division’s programs at the 2008 SLA Annual Conference was on “Cutting Edge E-Digitization.” The program was moderated by Cindy Cunningham, Director of Partner Programs at OCLC and included presentations from Dr. Stuart Weibel of OCLC and Marlys Rudeen from the Washington State Library. Dr. Weibels’ work with OCLC and the University of Washington is so cutting edge that the project isn’t even off the ground. Dr. Weibel is potentially the co-principal investigator on a $100 million (US) National Science Foundation grant to create a sustainable approach to managing access to scientific data long-term. The project is code-named DataNet and the award is expected sometime this summer. The DataNet initiative is an important contribution to the question on preserving digital information as it will look at sustainable models and it will focus on data, not on information, imagery, or other important components in the research process. The DataNet project, and UW’s approach sounds exciting because it hopes to build on past successes, create new partnerships (both nationally and internationally) and address not only preservation but future uses of scientific data.

Photo by Liz Doyle, U.S. EPA Region 10 Library

Marlys Rudeen’s presentation is also pretty cutting edge in that they are in the middle of their project and haven’t actually made their efforts operational just yet. Marlys started her presentation by describing an effort to change the laws of the State of Washington to require deposit of state electronic publications to the State Library, a modern corollary to existing law requiring deposit of printed state publications. The Washington state law was passed and the money was allocated to make the project happen. Both of these steps required a lot of work on behalf of many people in and around the state library including Friends groups, champions, and administrators.

The project as envisioned, builds on an existing digital archive for official records of the state. The effort requires some modifications to the current system as well as additional expertise in cataloging electronic publications. The project is committed to capturing three different editions of each e-publication: the original format (usually proprietary like Word files, etc.); an access format (probably PDF for most textual works); and an XML-format either of the document or of its’ metadata. Washington State has done a great thing is changing their laws but implementation is going to be a challenge. Contribution of documents will require education and training; decentralization of state government creates a lot of barriers to compliance; and the State Library will absorb this process into their budget and workflow after the initial 2-year investment in the technological issues and the foundation of sound metadata practices.

Both of these efforts presented an exciting look at how organizations see the current challenge of “born digital” information. They both look beyond all the current issues created by digitized texts and images that libraries have been addressing for several years already. Preserving the born-digital information – and making it accessible for years and decades to come – is something that we’ll all be facing in the coming years.