That is also why that audience, and this readership, has a special responsibility to cope with electronic preservation issues. The requirements of these technologies will change the way many librarians work in technical services as well as elsewhere in research libraries. And librarians -- especially special collections and technical services librarians -- are uniquely qualified to take up the technological challenge. If we do not, we will contribute to the stagnation of our own profession as well as fail in our responsibility to history.
Preservation until now has been a matter of preserving the artifact that has the work inherent in it, thereby preserving the work itself. Electronic documents, by contrast, force our preservation considerations to divide into two: the preservation of the objects, as before, but also the preservation of the information contained in those objects and which is now so easily separable from them.
Barry Neavill, a professor at the library school at the University of Alabama, wrote presciently on these topics almost ten years ago that no one had "addressed the issue of the long-term survival of information. . . . The survival of information in an electronic environment becomes an intellectual and technological problem in its own right."# *** If we want to assure permanence of the intellectual record that is published electronically, he said, then it will be necessary consciously to design and build the required mechanisms within electronic systems. We are still in need of those mechanisms.
To address this need, this paper is in three parts. First, it will briefly describe some of the issues associated with preservation of the objects containing electronic information: medium preservation. Second, it will discuss the challenge of intellectual preservation: the protection and authentication of information which exists in electronic form. Finally, it will make the point that the successful resolution of these issues will require librarianship to change itself or fail to survive as a vital profession.
Electronic information is commonly available in the marketplace and on the national electronic networks (though the printed book is nowhere near being superseded by electronic texts). On-line information services such as Dialog, and CD-ROM publications such as PsycLit and InfoTrac, have been around long enough to be called traditional. The Oxford English Dictionary is now available in some forms only electronically. There are about a dozen electronic journals with formal peer review processes, and at least several hundred informal electronic journals and newsletters of interest within the scholarly community.
The Thesaurus Linguae Graecae now provides complete electronic texts of the entire corpus of ancient Greek. Charles Chadwyck-Healey has made available for purchase the whole of Migne's Patrologia Latina; if we're really lucky we'll get the Greek as well. The Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities, located at Rutgers and Princeton, is helping scholars gain access to texts of the Library of America, the Oxford Text Archives, the archives maintained by Professor Antonio Zampolli in Pisa, and the Women's Writers Project.
Electronic books are now common. The Bible of course appeared on floppy disk in the early 1980s. In 1988 Professor Harvey Wheeler of USC published what he called an electronic textbook on a floppy disk; it was little more than the ASCII text of his book of about 8 chapters. In 1991 the Voyager Company took an interesting step forward by initiating their "Extended Book" series, including works such as Alice in Wonderland and Pride and Prejudice, in HyperCard format including word-searching, note-taking and place-marking capabilities; they are reportedly selling well. The new Modern Library series will be available on disks as well.
The next step is interactive electronic books. Victory Garden has just been published electronically for $34.95; it is an interactive novel that focuses on the Desert Storm war in Iraq.# *** Robert Coover recently wrote an extensive discussion of hypertext books created with programs such as Guide, HyperCard and StorySpace; some of the novels arise out of the writing course he teaches at Brown.# *** He provides a bibliography going back to 1987, when what he calls the "landmark" text by Michael Joyce was published, entitled Afternoon.# ***
These tips of the electronic iceberg are reminders of the increased frequency with which we come into contact with electronic materials. There may be technical services professionals who will never have to deal with an electronic text; but there are many others who should expect to be managing electronic collections of some kind by the end of the decade. Our concern in preserving materials in such a collection will be similar to today's concern with preserving books: we want to preserve undisturbed as much information as possible for future scholars.
B. The Book. In the case of books (and I use "books" as a shorthand reference for all printed material, and in many cases for manuscript material as well) it is desirable to preserve both the texts contained and the artifactual containers.# *** For some purposes they are inseparable. For example, the most authoritative bibliographic or textual criticism of seminal works requires working with the original publications or manuscripts, for reproductions and facsimiles inevitably introduce some small amount of error. And the resolution of textual problems is sometimes made possible only by examining the physical structures of the actual book, as has long been demonstrated by the study of Shakespeare's texts. It has become a truism that to perceive the earliest or most authoritative manifestation of the work, we must examine and handle artifacts.
But for some purposes of textual study we are able to separate study of the work, or text, from study of the artifact. It is practical to do some bibliographic and textual work, at least initially, with a fine facsimile or a good microfilm; in fact, many libraries now provide such surrogates to scholars to obviate unnecessary handling of unique originals. And scholarly editions of classics, to say nothing of popular reprints, make works more widely available than would otherwise be possible if only the original exemplars existed; the work is separated from the artifact for this purpose.
The book itself is sometimes an object of study independently of the text. The study of bindings is a mature field. Some readers will be familiar with the confluence of two other schools of study: British and American bibliography exemplified by the work of W. W. Greg and Fredson Bowers, and the French school of "l'histoire du livre" furthered by Lucien Febvre, Henri-Jean Martin and now Roger Chartier. The text is never very distant, but the focus in these modes of study may be on the artifact or on modes of readership rather than solely on the text.
C. The Electronic Medium. In the electronic environment it is unlikely that the focus of study will be upon the electronic medium itself. To begin with, there is nothing in an electronic text that necessarily indicates how it was created; and the ease with which electronic texts can be transferred from disk to disk, or networked from computer to computer, means that there is no necessary indication of the source medium or even if the information has been copied at all. We are not likely to see sale catalog references in the future, therefore, which remark on the fine quality of the floppy disk's exterior label, or which remark on the electronic text's provenance ("Moby Dick on the original Seagate drive; never reformatted, very fine").# ***
Tthe preservation of the information will still require the preservation of whatever medium it is contained on at any given time. This is mostly what has been meant when our profession has discussed electronic preservation. But it has not been enough noticed that there are two kinds of preservation required for information media: one is the preservation of the physical medium on which the information resides, and another is the preservation of the storage technology that makes use of that medium.# ***
The physical preservation of media do not need extensive address here, for at any given time the physical characteristics of the medium in use are well understood and the problems inherent in preserving it are simply financial and managerial: who should pay for the necessary equipment and for the properly designed and acclimatized space, how often should backups be made, and who keeps track of backups and sees that they happen.# *** These issues cause expenses for the electronic collection, but they raise only routine technological questions. We can look forward to the proceedings of the Wisconsin Preservation Program held on June 3-4, 1992 which will include discussions of data refreshing techniques and of longevity and preservation of magnetic tapes and CD-ROMs.# ***
The storage obsolescence problem is quite another matter. A brief sequence of storage media many of us have seen in our lifetimes would include:
Technologies are superseding each other at a rapid rate. There are already anecdotes of data lost because it can no longer be read by the machines that wrote it: the census data on early tapes, for example, that can only be read by a machine now in the Smithsonian and no longer functioning. We can be sure that authors and agencies are now storing long-term information on floppy disks of all sizes; but we don't know for how long we are going to be able to read them. No competent authorities in librarianship yet express confidence in the long-term storage capabilities or technological life of any present electronic storage media. CD-ROMs are an example. Their economical use in librarianship derives from their mass market use for entertainment; that mass market may be threatened by DVI (digital video interactive) technology or others now being actively promoted by entertainment vendors. If forms alternative to CDs win out in entertainment, the production of equipment for CDs and therefore CD-ROMs will be quickly curtailed.
There are perhaps three possible long-term solutions for preserving storage media in the face of obsolescence (as opposed to physical decay), and they vary in practicality: preserve the storage technology, migrate the information to newer technologies, or migrate the information to paper or other long-term eye-readable hard copy.
The prospect for the first option, preserving older technologies, is not bright: equipment ages and breaks, documentation disappears, vendor support vanishes, and the storage medium as well as the equipment deteriorates.
For the second option, migration, there is a lifeline of hope provided by a consistency that has so far remained through all these medium changes: the 8-bit byte and its multiples. Since the byte's serious introduction by IBM's System/360 series in April, 1964, other memory unit sizes have fallen into desuetude. There is now agreement, for the very basic characters of the English alphabet and numbers and some common signs, on the first 128 characters that can be described by the 8 bits. This agreement is codified as the character set we know as ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange). There are now extensions creating a two-byte character set for global language handling, for example for the Asian ideographic scripts such as Japanese and Chinese that Apple has recently announced; but the first 128 bit-combinations remain the ASCII standard.
What this means is that most character-based data could be preserved by migrating it from one storage medium to another as they become decrepit or obsolete. To do this requires a computer which can read in the old mode and write in the new; with present network capabilities, this is usually not difficult to arrange.
Whether this is practical for large quantities of information over long periods of time is another matter. The investment necessary to migrate files of data will involve skilled labor, complex record-keeping, physical piece management, checking for successful outcomes, space and equipment. The effort required for an orderly photocopying of books in the collection every ten years is at the right order of magnitude of data migration costs and complexities. And in any case, this migration solution would only work for ASCII text data. Migrating graphic, image, moving or sound data, or even formatted text, will only work as long as the software application can also be migrated to the next computing platform.
The third option -- practical but unexciting -- is to migrate information from high-technology electronic form to stable hard copy, either paper or microform. In the near term, for certain classes of high-value archival material, this is likely to be the permanent medium of choice. It offers known long life, eye readability and freedom from technological obsolescence. It also, of course, discards the flexibility in use and transport of information in electronic form.
Migration to hard copy is of no use for one new class of electronic information, the interactive document. Those familiar with hypertext applications -- for example, HyperCard on the Macintosh -- will understand that simply to print out the information contained in a hypertext file is to lose much of the point of having created the file in the first place. An example is Victory Garden, or the NewBook company's instructional document in ethics, Warsaw 1939 # ***. Using this program the reader chooses which character to be, and at various points must decide what option to choose that was then open to the character; for example, fleeing Warsaw or staying with one's family, turning over hostages to the SS or refusing to do so. The cumulative effect of these decisions determines outcomes which would be impossible to show on the printed page.
The presidential committee on preservation that she appointed reported its results in 1991. Unfortunately, while it noted in passing the need for document integrity, it focused on the medium when speaking of electronic preservation. (It did note and affirm the centrality of preservation to librarianship.)# ***
The need to focus on the two issues separately arises because the great asset of digital information is also its great liability: the ease with which an identical copy can be quickly and flawlessly made is paralleled by the ease with which a flawed copy may be undetectably made. Neavill wrote prophetically in 1984 of the "malleability" of electronic information, that is, its ability to be easily transformed and manipulated.# ***
The problem may be put in the form of several questions which confront the user of an electronic document, which may be a text or may be graphic, numeric or multimedia information; the problems are similar. How can I be sure that what I am reading is what I wanted to read? How do I know that the document I have found is the same one that you read and made reference to in your bibliography? How can I be sure that the document I am reading has not been changed since it was created, or since the last time I read it? To put it most generally: How can a reader be sure that the document being used is the one intended?
We properly take for granted the fixity of text in the print world: the printed journal article I examine because of the footnote you gave is beyond question the same text that you read. Therefore we have confidence that our discussion is based upon a common foundation. The present state of electronic texts is such that we no longer can have that confidence.
B. Taxonomy of Changes. There are three possibilities of change or damage that electronic texts can undergo that confront us with the need for intellectual preservation (note again that only modification is specifically addressed; complete loss or deletion present different problems):
1. Accidental change. A document can sometimes be damaged accidentally, perhaps by data loss during transfer or through inadvertent mistakes in manipulation. For example, data may be corrupted in being sent over a network or between a disks and memory on a computer; this happens seldom, but it is possible.# ***
More likely is the loss of sections of a document, or a whole version of a document, due to accidents in updating. For example, if a document exists in multiple versions, or drafts, version N might be lost leaving only version N - 1; many of us have had this experience. It is easy for the casual reader, or even the author, not to notice that text had been lost in this way.
Just as common in word-processing is the experience of incorrectly updating the original version that was supposed to be retained in pristine form. In such a case only version N - 1 (if it still exists) and N + 1 remain; again, a reader or author may not be aware of the difference. Note that in both cases backup mechanisms and the need for them are not the issue, but rather how we know what we have or don't have.
2. Intended change -- well-meaning. There are at least three possibilities for well-meaning change. The changes might result in a specific new version; they might be a structural update that is normal and expected; or they might be the normal outcome of an interactive document.
New versions and drafts are familiar to us from dealing with authorial texts, for example, or from working with legislative bills, or with revisions of working papers. It is desirable to keep track bibliographically of the distinction between one version and another. We are accustomed to drafts being numbered and edition statements being explicit; and original catalogers expend significant effort on descriptions in order to make the distinctions clear.
We are accustomed to visual cues to tell us when a version is different; in addition to explicit numbering we observe the page format, the typos, the producer's name, the binding, the paper itself. These cues are not dependable for distinguishing electronic versions, for many of them can vary for identical informational texts when produced in hard copies. It is for this reason that the Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines Project has called for indications of version change in electronic texts even if a single character has been changed.# ***
It is important to know the difference between versions so that our discussion is properly founded; I disagree with Harvey Wheeler, a professor at the University of Southern California, who is enthusiastic about what he calls a "dynamic document", continually reflecting the development of an author's thinking.# *** Scholars and readers need to know what the changes are and when they are made.
Structural updates, changes that are inherent in the document, also cause changes in information content. A dynamic data base by its nature is frequently updated: Books in Print, for example, or a University directory ("White Pages"). Boilerplate such as a funding proposal might also be updated often by various authors. In each of these cases it is appropriate and expected for the information to change constantly.# *** Yet it is also appropriate for the information to be shared and analyzed at a given point in time. In print form, for example, BIP gives us a historical record of printing in the United States; the directory tells us who was a member of the university in a given year. In electronic form there is no historical record unless a snapshot is taken at a given point in time. How do we identify that snapshot and authenticate it at a later time? # ***
Another form of well-meaning change occurs in interactive documents. I have already mentioned the interactive capabilities of Warsaw 1939, the note-taking capabilities of the Voyager Extended Books, and the interactive HyperCard novels described by Coover. We can expect someone to want snapshots of these documents, inadequate though they may be. We need an authoritative way to distinguish one snapshot from another.
3. Intended change -- fraud. The third kind of change that can occur is intentional change for fraudulent reasons. The change might be of one's own work, to cover one's tracks or change evidence for a variety of reasons, or it might be damage to the work of another. In an electronic future the opportunities for a Stalinist revision of history will be multiplied. An unscrupulous researcher could change experimental data without a trace. A financial dealer might wish to cover tracks to hide improper business, or a political figure might wish to hide or modify inconvenient earlier views. Imagine that the only evidence of the Iran-Contra scandal was in electronic mail, or that the only record of Bill Clinton's draft correspondence was in email. Consider the political benefit that might derive if each of the parties could modify their own past correspondence without detection. Then consider the case if each of them could modify the other's correspondence without detection. We need a defense against both cases.
C. Solutions. The solution is to fix a text or document in some way so that a user can be sure of the original text when it is needed. This solution is called authentication, which is very important in the business, political and espionage communities; once again, libraries can take advantage of technology developed for other purposes. There are three important electronic techniques used for authentication: cryptography, hashing and time-stamping.
1. Encryption. The two best-known forms of cryptography are DES and RSA. DES is the Data Encryption Standard, first established about 1975 and adopted by many business and government agencies. RSA is an encryption process developed by three mathematicians from MIT (Rivest, Shamir and Adleman) at about the same time, and marketed privately; it is regarded by many as superior to the DES.# ***
Encryption depends upon mathematical transformation of a document. The transformation uses a standard process, a computation algorithm, that establishes a particular number as the basis of the computation. This number, or key, is also required to decode the resulting encrypted text; the key is typically many digits long, perhaps 100 or more. Modern encryption depends upon the process being so complex that decoding by chance or merely human effort is impossible. It also depends upon the difficulty of decoding by brute-force computational trial-and-error methods; these would take unreasonably long periods of time, perhaps hundreds or thousands of years even using modern supercomputers.
Therefore the key is crucial to encryption. It is also the problem; for passing the key to authorized persons turns out to be the Achilles heel of the process. How is the key to someone sent -- on paper in the mail? By messenger? These introduce the usual vulnerabilities dramatized in thriller literature. Do you send the key electronically? Sending it as plain text doesn't seem like a good idea, and sending it in encrypted form -- well, you see the problem. This is a recognized flaw in the widely-used DES encryption method.
The RSA encryption technique is called public key cryptography: it uses a public key and a private key. The computational algorithm used for encrypting depends upon a specific pair of numbers; data encoded by one number can not be decoded using the same number but can only be decoded by the other number; and vice versa (see fig. 1). A user, let's say Rita, keeps one of the pair of numbers secret as a private key and makes the other number available as a public key. The public key can be used by anyone, for example her friend Art, for coding messages which he sends to Rita; only Rita can decode them, because only she has the other number of the pair. She sends an encrypted message back to Art using not her private key, but Art's public key, and only he can decode it, mutatis mutandum.
Alternatively, Rita can code a simple message using her private key; anyone can decode it using her public key. This functions as a digital signature, allowing her messages to be authenticated, since only she is able to create such messages. The usefulness is evident in financial transfers, for example, or in authenticating email or electronic purchase orders.
Encryption in either form, however, is not likely to be an authentication system desirable for library use. Encryption offers the possibility of authenticating a text but only if the text has not been changed and re-encrypted. Encryption also has several drawbacks. No matter which method is used, encryption requires keys specific to the reader and writer. If the keys are generally available, as they would need to be for wide document access, then authentication is not possible, for the document could easily be modified and re-encrypted using the same keys. In addition, one of our library concerns is authentication over long periods of time, even longer than a normal human lifetime. Secret keys may be lost over such periods of time, making encrypted documents useless.
2. Hashing. Another technique is called hashing; it is a shorthand means by which we can establish the uniqueness of a document. Hashing depends upon the assignment of arbitrary values to each portion of the document, and thence upon the resulting computation of specific but contentless values called "hash totals" or "hashes". It is "contentless" because the specific computed hash total has no value other than itself; in particular, it is impossible or infeasible to compute backward from the hash to the original document. The hash may be a number of a hundred digits or so, but it is much shorter than the document it was computed from. Thus a hash has several virtues: it is much smaller than the original document; it preserves the privacy of the original document; and it uniquely describes the original document.
Fig. 2 allows a simplified description of how a hash is created. If each letter is assigned a value from 1 to 26, then a word will have a numeric total if its letters are summed. In the first example, EAT has the value of 26. The problem is, the word TEA (composed of the same letters) has the same value in this scheme. The scheme can be made more complicated, as shown in the second pair of examples, if the letter-values are also multiplied by a place value. In this scheme, the two words of the same letters end up with different totals. For the sake of illustration, the numbers at the right are shown as summed to the value 52 at the bottom; in fact the total is 152, but the leftmost digit can be discarded without materially affecting the fact that a specific hash total has been found: contentless, private, and (in this simple example) reasonably distinctive of the particular words in the "document."
This is a very simplistic description of a process that can be made excessively complicated for human computation. It remains easy for current computing technology to compute quite complex hashes for any kind of document; paradoxically, these hashes are beyond the reach of supercomputers to phony up or break for the perceived future. Hashing as a means of authentication is a topic of interest to the business and governmental communities and there have been several recent mathematical papers on it, including descriptions of recent patents.
How might libraries use hashing as an authentication technique? First of all, we would have to come to an agreement on a hashing algorithm (a computational method) that we trust. Second, the algorithm must be widely distributable in a useful form, probably as a menu or hot-key command on a microcomputer. The selected algorithm is likely to be commercially licensed. Fortunately, those talking about creating such an authentication tool want it to be so cheap that it is easy to hash documents at will; thus the likelihood is for the algorithm of choice to be inexpensive or even cost-free. It is typical for a document to be mundane at the time of its creation; it is only later that a document becomes important. Therefore an authentication mechanism is needed that is so cheap and easy that documents can be authenticated as a matter of routine.
In this scheme, each time a document or a draft is created or saved the hash is created, saved with it and is separately retrievable. If the document is electronically published, it should be published with its hash; and if the document is cited, the hash should be part of the citation. If a reader using the document then wishes to know if she has the right one, she computes the hash easily on her own computer using the standard algorithm and compares it with the published hash. If they are the same, she has confidence she has the correct, untampered version of the document before her.
3. Time-stamping. Electronic time-stamping takes the process a step further. Time-stamping is a means not only of authenticating a document, but its existence at a specific time. It is analogous to the rubber-stamping of incoming mail with the date and time it was received. An electronic technique has been developed by two researchers at Bellcore in New Jersey, Stuart Haber and Scott Stornetta.# *** Their efforts initially were prompted by charges of intellectual fraud made against a biologist, and they became interested in how to demonstrate that electronic evidence had not been tampered with. In addition, they are aware that their technique is useful as a means for determining priority of thought, for example in the patenting process, so that electronic claims for intellectual priority could be unambiguously made.
Their technique depends on a mathematical procedure involving the entire specific contents of the document, which means they have provided a tool for determining change as well as for fixing the date of the document. A great advantage of their procedure is that it is entirely public, except (if desired) for the contents of the document itself. Thus it is very useful for the library community, which wishes to keep documents available rather than hide them, and which needs to do so over periods of time beyond those it can immediately control.
The time-stamping process envisioned by Haber and Stornetta depends upon hashing as the first step. Assume, in fig. 3, that Author A creates Document A and wishes to establish it as of a certain time. First he creates a hash for the Document A using a standard, publicly-available program. He then sends this hash over the network to a time-stamping server. Note that he has thus preserved the privacy of his document for as long as he wishes as it is only the hash that is sent to the server. The time-stamping server uses standard, publicly-available software to combine this hash with two other numbers: a hash from the just-previous document that it has authenticated, and a hash derived from the current time and date. The resulting number is called a certificate, and the server returns this certificate to Author A. The author now preserves this certificate, a number, and transmits it with Document A and uses it when referring to Document A (e.g. in a bibliography) in order to distinguish it from other versions of the document.
The time-stamping server does one other important function: it combines the certificate hash with others for that week into a number which, once a week, is now published in the personals column of The New York Times ("Commercial and Public Notices"), as in fig. 4. The public nature of this number assures that it cannot be tampered with.
The privacy of the document been preserved for as long as Author A wishes; there is also no other secrecy in this process. All steps are taken in public using available programs and procedures. Note too that no other document will result in the same certificate, for Document A's certificate is dependent not only upon the algorithms and upon the document's hash total, but upon the hash of the particular and unpredictable document that was immediately previous. Once Document A has been authenticated, it becomes itself the previous document for the authentication of document B.
Now let us consider Reader C, who wishes to determine the authenticity of the electronic document before her. Perhaps it is an electronic press release from a senatorial campaign or an electronic funds transfer, or perhaps it is the year 2092 and the document is an electronic text of Author A. Reader C has available the certificate for document A. If she can validate that number from the document she can be sure she has the authenticated contents. Using the standard software she recreates the hash for the document and sends the hash over the network, with the certificate, to the time-stamping server. The server reports back on the validity of the certificate for that document.
But let us suppose that it is the year 2092 and the server is nowhere to be found. Reader C then searches out the microfilm of The New York Times for the putative date of the document in question and determines the published hash number; using that number and the standard software she tests the authenticity of her document just as the server would.
What I have described are simplified forms of methods for identifying a unique document, and for authenticating a document as created at a specific point in time with a specific content. Whether the specific tools of hashing or time-stamping are those the library community will use in future is open to question. It is however the first time librarians have been offered electronic authentication tools that provide generality, flexibility, ease of use, openness, low cost, and functionality over long periods of time on the human scale. Using such tools (or similar ones yet to be developed) a user can have confidence that the document being read is the one desired or intended, and that it has not been altered without the reader being aware of it.
It is the preservation imperative that is particularly important for readers of this volume. In research libraries, and not only in special collections, the consideration of long periods of time is more important than in other library fields. It is our particular responsibility to see that library materials are preserved and organized for use not only by our generation but by succeeding generations of scholars and students. No one else has this specific responsibility; it is what we do. If we do not do it, no one else will do it.
Pessimistically speaking, it is possible that the job cannot be done. We may be swimming against the tide. Sociologically, our society is obsessed with the present and uncaring of the past and therefore of its records. Technologically refined tools are now available which not only allow but encourage the quick and easy modification of text, of pictures, and of sounds. It is becoming routine to produce ad hoc versions of performances, and to produce technical reports in tailored versions on demand. The technology that allows us to interact with information is itself inhibiting us from preserving our interaction.
However, there is cause for optimism. In our house there are many mansions; there will continue to be people who want history, who care about the human record, and who will support our efforts to serve them. Some aspects of electronic preservation are already being dealt with by other communities. The financial and business community, for example, has a stake in authentication of electronic communication. The business and computing communities in general are interested in protecting against the undesired loss of data in the short term. The governmental and business communities have an interest in the security of systems.
But there is no other professional group dealing with the combination of all these issues -- authentication, security and protection -- as complicated by the length of time in centuries that research librarians contemplate, and by the need to provide organized access to what is preserved.
Some librarians may draw back from the apparent complexity of the technologies that support electronic information. But these technologies should present no difficulty to minds that can easily deal with corporate authorship and with the acquisition of monographic continuations. The capacity for creating and using the MARC record is adequate to the task of setting up standards for electronic preservation. Providing valid electronic authentication techniques is no more intractable than the problem of providing holdings statements for works in multiple formats. Technical services in its traditional form is becoming stale, and is in danger of becoming a personnel backwater as what it does becomes more and more routinized. There is difficulty already in finding technical services staff, especially catalogers, who have the skills, judgment and management ability needed. I have written elsewhere that one of the ways the technical services function within librarianship will re-invigorate itself is by taking on the technological challenges.# *** The skills formerly devoted to the cataloging code and to authority control are ideally suited to working with technologically very complex material. Technical services librarians, like special collections librarians, are used to dealing professionally with the "knotty problems", the ones invisible to patrons but which require solution to support their needs: the tough issues that require analysis, intellectual clarity, marshaling of allies, and persuasive energetic leadership. Understanding and implementing electronic access and preservation will lead to increasing sophistication within our staffs about systems, hardware and software, technologies, networking and data transfer. It will also lead to increasing sophistication about legal issues, technology transfer, intellectual property and information provision. These knotty problems will actually aid us in attracting the staff we need, and keeping the ones we have: they will want to rise to the new challenges.
Many librarians in technical services are working with the new technologies already. The terminology of DOS, 486, PageMaker, FTP and thin-wire ethernet is part of library language. Those of us (most of us) working with email, newsgroups, listservs and gophers are very aware of the technology and increasingly aware of how we need to manage it.
And it is managing that is necessary. There are technical people aplenty who can grapple with the bits and bytes of these issues if librarians give them proper direction. The need is for someone to articulate the requirements for the electronic preservation of the human record and to lead our profession in making it happen. That is the professional requirement, and it is the people reading this -- you -- who are the most capable of assuring that it does happen. There is a kind of back-to-basics quality to our now confronting the electronic environment: to grapple with the ephemerality of electronic information is to answer the abstract question of why we are librarians. Most of us know that we like books; readers of this volume are likely to appreciate books as physical objects and to enjoy reading. Technical services and collection development librarians often handle particularly attractive books and important texts (sometimes they are even the same). But back to basics. Our social value as librarians comes from our provision of information -- our locating it, organizing it, and preserving it. Libraries, and technical services, will change. The change will be affected by how well we stick to our last, that is, by how we propose to carry on professional activities. If we continue to emphasize only the physical objects we know as books, important as they are, then a museum role becomes increasingly likely as we become marginalized from the real scholarly communication now going on.
Alternatively, we can continue to emphasize our professional obligation to preserve and make available the human record, regardless of its form. Then we can lay claim to being a part of the very current affairs of our society and of our universities. We can then lay very effective claim to the resources we need to carry out this obligation; and finding ways to do that is also our professional requirement.
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