Volume 31, Issue 2

On 14 March 2002, at the Arkansas Museum Association annual meeting, I spoke on the choices we made and the lessons we learned during the Stage One Digitization (SOD) grant project at the Arkansas History Commission (AHC). As SOD included three elements: evaluate digital technology, conduct a test digitization of up to 13,000 of AHC historical images, and create a comprehensive digitization plan for AHC primary source materials, the meeting theme, ‘So Much To Do … So Little Time or Money,’ was a perfect introduction. As I told attendees, in our case time equaled two years, money equaled most of our budget of $255,976.

Indeed! It may be on the web today, but is there a plan in place to ensure that it will be there in twenty or more years? Probably not. In the haste to make information available electronically there are few agreed-upon plans for the preservation of digital information and much has already been lost. The particular concern of preserving electronic state government documents recently became an issue for our State Documents Interest Group of the Documents Association of New Jersey (DANJ) when we recognized not only that fewer documents are produced in print format but also that there is not a state plan to preserve the electronic documents being produced. For several years the Division of Elections in New Jersey eliminated the webpage that gave the previous year's election lists and results. Fortunately, the concern from those using the information prompted the Division of Elections to begin to retain this information. But the earlier information is gone. Recently, Public Utilities created a new webpage and eliminated virtually all of the documents that had existed on the earlier page. At least one agency replaces its old annual report with the new one. The predicament in New Jersey is not an isolated one. Our response was to research the issue of digital preservation and to present a report of recommendations to the State Librarian. The report, edited by Sue Lyons (2001, available at the DANJ website www.danj.org/DANJ), provides a thoughtful overview of the concerns and problems of digital archiving, offering recommendations for a cooperative process and plan by the state. In the report, Lyons cites several examples of lost digital information, including data from the Viking mission to Mars and all computerized data from a New York study mapping land use and environmental data throughout the state.

Libraries, archives and museums must find strategies to preserve the digital materials (objects) that they acquire or create. Traditional preservation measures, such as providing good storage and access conditions for paper-based materials, are not viable in the long term for digital materials that are subject to inoperability because of rapid hardware and software obsolescence.

The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) is the premiere standards-issuing body for libraries, archives, and publishers (or for any entity producing, publishing, storing, or preserving information). NISO, jointly with American National Standards Institute (ANSI), is responsible for all Z39.xx standards, including such favorites as Z39.50 (Information Retrieval: Application Service Definition & Protocol Specification), Z39.66 (Durable Hardcover Binding for Books), and Z39.48 (Permanence of Paper for Publications and Documents in Libraries and Archives); recently they've produced such destined-to-become-classics as Z39.77 (Guidelines for Information About Preservation Products), Z39.85 (Dublin Core Metadata Element Set), and Z39.86 (Specifications for the Digital Talking Book). In addition to issuing formal standards, NISO also produces valuable technical reports (e.g., William K. Wilson's Environmental Guidelines for the Storage of Paper Records) and white papers (e.g., Clifford Lynch's The Case for New Economic Models to Support Standardization Efforts).