Volume 42, Issue 1

Information technology has had a profound effect on the preservation landscape at the beginning of the twenty-first century, blurring the traditional boundaries separating cultural heritage institutions and demanding new skills and approaches to the management of cultural assets, whether digital or analog. Concepts around which the core principles of preservation were built have been challenged and are shifting to accommodate new practices and standards. Changes in our approach to longevity, choice, quality, integrity, and access are being driven by digital technologies. A new set of principles, applicable to all materials, whether digital or not, are proposed. In the context and aims of preservation as we understand it today, these principles are a framework for the management of our cultural heritage collections.

Large-scale digitization efforts by third-party firms are the subject of no small amount of controversy and criticism, as is especially the case with Google Books. This article reports some of the findings and important implications of a rigorous multi-year quantitative and qualitative assessment of the images representing a sizable proportion of the digital surrogates created by Google and deposited in the HathiTrust, which is one of the most important large-scale preservation initiatives to emerge in higher education in the past fifty years. The population of study described here consists of Englishlanguage books and serials published before 1923 that were scanned and processed by Google between 2004 and 2010. At the time the data for the study were gathered (2011), this population consisted of approximately 1.25 million volumes or roughly 12 percent of the HathiTrust corpus. The findings suggest that the imperfection of digital surrogates is an obvious and nearly ubiquitous feature of Google Books and that such imperfection has become and will remain firmly ensconced in collaborative preservation repositories.

With the ubiquity of digital phones and cameras, our memory institutions will need to ingest an increasingly large number of born-digital media, much of it coming from personal archives. The high volume of this material will force collections to find smart ways to automate appraisal/selection, metadata assignment, and standardization of formats, or to convince contributors to do so. This article reports on ideas and methods developed by the group Activist Archivists to automate selection, metadata collection, and standardization of the born-digital media documenting the Occupy movement. Techniques include employing automatic time/date/location stamping, analyzing social media sites, producing guidelines for contributors, and asking for community involvement in selecting the material perceived as having the most enduring value.