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Article Excerpt
ABSTRACT
Preservation has value to society over and above the value of the content that is preserved. It is important to articulate this value in order to argue compellingly for the creation of public policies and economic models that adequately support preservation of culturally significant content. This article explores the societal value of preservation, discussing why questions about societal value arise in the context of the explosive growth of digital information and why they are qualitatively different questions from the ones that arose when the world knew only analog communication technologies. It assesses various ways to think about the value that inheres in content, particularly the distinctive attributes of cultural content that have societal value. It identifies benefits that preservation as such brings to society, over and above the sum of the value of the content preserved. It also examines the range of public policy issues that arise in light of the social values identified, virtually none of which are currently protected by law or regulation. In light of these societal values, it argues that the preservation community needs to collaborate with other sectors crucially dependent on long-term access to significant content to develop strategies that: make it easier and cheaper to preserve content; provide incentives and rewards for individuals and organizations to preserve; and protect the public interest in privately held content.
INTRODUCTION
As a society, we in the United States value access to information. In our roles both as citizens and as consumers, we prize our national tradition of public libraries, government archives, free press, and now, seemingly unhindered access to online information via the World Wide Web. Current public policy debates surrounding access to information are concerned primarily with ensuring an equitable and just allocation of the costs and benefits of access. However, most people--even those leading the debates about copyright, licensing, and open access--are thinking about access today. They are not aware of the economic costs, or societal benefits, of providing access to cultural content over an extended period of time. This lack of understanding on the part of the general public and many public policy advocates has proven to be a significant stumbling block in securing adequate resources to preserve our analog collections. It has emerged as potentially an even bigger impediment in our endeavors to retool our preservation infrastructures to assure long-term access to digital content, including digital cultural heritage. In recent years preservation professionals have taken to characterizing their work as provision of "persistent access," "life-cycle management of information assets," "sustainability," or "stewardship" in the hope of underscoring the societal value of preservation. Is anyone listening? Does the public care? Will they be willing to pay the price for preservation, however we call it, in the twenty-first century?
While the scope and quantity of resources necessary for analog-based content preservation are not known in vivid quantitative detail by professionals, there has emerged in the past half century a common understanding about what primary analog preservation cost factors are, how to build economies of scale into their provision, and how to restructure organizations and create inter-institutional collaborations to afford them. (1) The widespread adoption of digital technology for creation of and access to culturally significant content is scarcely a decade old, if one takes online sharing of digital resources as the tipping point for adoption. There are nonetheless a number of efforts vigorously underway to understand the economic impacts of managing digital content for long-term access. How much we can afford to collect and preserve; how much we can afford to lose; and how much all of this will cost in human and financial terms--answers to these questions are critical for making the preservation case to funders. They are also crucially important, largely ignored, public policy matters.
Many professionals suspect that preservation of digital content is even more resource-intensive than that of analog, if only because there is more content, used by more people, to capture and preserve (Lyman & Varian, 2003). How high the cost will be a shock, no matter what kinds of value we may point to as the result of public investment to ensure that the digital record of today be available next week, next year, for the next generation and the next after them. Without clarifying to the public why it is important to society in general and to individuals in particular to make long-term commitments of resources to the collection and preservation of cultural content, it is unlikely to happen. And without such an understanding, we will not be able to make judicious and equitable decisions about how those costs should be allocated among the various private and public sector constituencies.
This essay is intended to frame the question of the societal value of preservation within the context of contemporary U.S. society and public policy. A salient feature of our culture is the degree to which we extend analog and digital communication technologies into all aspects of civic and private life and have become, for all intents and purposes, critically dependent on these technologies to live safe, productive, and meaningful lives. Failure to nurture a stable and reliable information environment will put a good deal of our well-being and safety at risk. I wish to foreground here the priority claimed by preserved cultural content, that which has embedded in it historical experience and meaning that are constitutive elements of that stability and reliability. The integrity and historical continuity of cultural content are a matter of the highest priority to our society, for reasons I shall argue below. Moreover, the preservation of that cultural content rightly should be viewed as a matter of public trust, something that transcends individual or particular interests or ownership and that demands public resources and public policies to protect it. I shall use the term cultural content in a completely non-technical way, in the hope that it will be understood in an inclusive sense whose full detonations will become clear as we proceed. Culture can be understood as "the totality of socially transmitted behavior patterns, arts, beliefs, institutions, and all other products," more specifically "intellectual and artistic activity and the works produced by it" (American Heritage Dictionary, 2000, p. 442). I shall refer to the recorded works produced by culture as content. (2)
I shall begin by discussing why questions about societal value arise in the context of the explosive growth of digital information and why they are qualitatively different questions from the ones that arose when the world knew only analog communication technologies. Then I will assess various ways to think about the value that inheres in content, particularly the distinctive attributes of cultural content that have societal value. I will identify benefits that preservation as such brings to society, over and above the sum of the value of the content preserved. I will close by suggesting the range of public policy issues that arise in light of the social values identified, virtually none of which are currently protected by law or regulation--a curious position for a public trust. While begging the ultimate question of cost allocations--who should pay--I will argue for why we, as a society, should be willing to pay.
WHAT'S THE PROBLEM?
Why does the exponentially expanding scale of digital content creation present a novel challenge to society's willingness to pay for preservation? After all, information explosions are nothing new. They are an inevitable consequence of any innovation in recording media. Looking back only 150 years, we see the production of inexpensive wood pulp paper, the development of audio and visual recording media, the invention of magnetic tape--all these engineering and manufacturing feats resulted in a boom in content production and a subsequent boom in content consumption following along within decades. Each in turn challenged traditional practices of stewardship, both technically and conceptually. Following this historic pattern, digital communication technologies have certainly accelerated the demand for access to information. They have given rise to an explosion of professional, amateur, and "pro/am" audiences for and auteurs of content of all kinds, including digital representations of and information about cultural content. Content owners and distributors have expanding audiences for vintage recorded sound and moving image, from Duke Ellington and Glenn Gould reissues to early Alfred Hitchcock films and the original Twilight Zone. Collecting institutions of all stripes, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Hermitage Museum to the Library of Congress and the "Google Five" (now Six) research libraries have invested significant resources to extend the reach of their artifactual collections through digitization. (3) Content distribution companies and memory institutions conspire to feed--and in turn create--a seemingly insatiable appetite for cultural heritage both virtual and artifactual. Logic would tell us that increased demand for content would naturally increase demand for preservation of that content.
But logic would be wrong. Paradoxically, the proliferation of digital content, in high demand today, can make it harder to argue compellingly for preservation. Its sheer abundance and ubiquity makes digital content appear perdurable. And mirabile dictu, the Web provides masses of good-enough information to users without extracting a transaction fee. It is hard to see why we would need to start a public conversation about how to configure fair and equitable allocations of costs and benefits to ensuring long-term access to preserved content among societal sectors: whenever we go looking for information on a...
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