Greetings from Arizona! This exchange between Derek and Stevan illustrates the difficult tension archivists feel these days between preservation and access. The scholarly research community has profound opportunities to improve the speed and availability of very current research results through electronic publishing and self-archiving. These things benefit the scientific community in very direct and immediate ways...
On the other hand there's the back end of research replication, criticism and revision, citation tracking/analysis and the history of science. Archivists think about this stuff quite a bit, perhaps more than the scientific community does at this time since perhaps they have not experienced significant/relevant loss so far. We used to think about catastrophic loss events, we know now that loss is likely to be more subtle - the gentle corruption of over time from software incompatibilities, character set incompatibilities, loss of formatting, addressing failures (its out there but in a place you can't find), linkage failures (between digital images and their metadata for example), hidden viruses. Clifford Lynch has noted that our tools for detecting corruption are very blunt. The subtlety of loss makes preservation advocacy very difficult because loss is not catastrophic until it reaches a critical mass. One of the things I've been trying to pay attention to in this environment is: "What advice should we be giving to document creators to help them minimize the potential for loss?" Can we influence the process of document creation to maximize the potential for *real* archiving without slowing the dissemination of research? The OAIS reference model is very helpful in thinking about these things, specifically in terms of submission of one or two or several forms and formats of the content (the archival information package, the distribution information package, etc...) Simply uploading files will not suffice if long term preservation is desired. The thread about "toll-access" content vs. self archived content is an important piece. Stevan places a great deal of trust in the commercial publishing industry for long term preservation of the "toll-access" content, and yet publishers seem unlikely to make the timely and continuing preservation actions necessary to retain electronic content unless there is sufficient market revenue to support the preservation costs. I can still hear Kevin Guthrie of JSTOR asking the group at CNI in December, "Which of your institutions is willing to help fund the public good?" (paraphrased regarding who will pay the cost of preservation?) Another perspective on this thread is that there may be significant differences between the self-archived version and the commercially published version that demonstrate the influence of reviewers, new research by others, etc. Both versions may indeed be archival! In the end its pretty clear that unless the scientific community values preservation of their work at some level close to the value they place in fast dissemination, the archival perspective will be very difficult to sell. We'll need to make preservation as seamless as possible if we're going to expect the scientific community to participate in saving their own memory. Retrospective repair is a fool's game no one can afford. Rob Spindler University Archivist Arizona State University Libraries [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
