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Article Excerpt
ABSTRACT
Resource-sharing and knowledge dissemination have been the driving forces behind late twentieth century preservation collaboration. But with the challenge of digital preservation that emerged at the turn of the twenty-first century, collaboration for the discovery of new ways of doing things took on increased importance. Collaborative projects tackled problems like developing new methodologies, establishing standards and best practices, and developing procedures and tools for areas such as emulation and data recovery. This article explains the different driving forces behind collaboration for preservation of electronic material (1) and situates them within recent U.S. preservation and library collaboration history. It then provides two case studies of collaborative electronic preservation projects that the author participated in. Finally, it uses the experiences of those studies to identify a modest set of predictors for success in such future projects.
BACKGROUND
The rise of automation and standards for libraries in the last third of the twentieth century enabled a variety of collaborative activities. The development of the MARC Standard in 1965 and the publication of the Anglo-American Cataloging Rules in 1967 (2) enabled the formation of the OCLC and BALLOTS systems for collaborative cataloging in the late 1960s, and led to their phenomenal growth over the following two decades. By the 1990s, few American libraries would have considered not belonging to a consortium that provided a variety of services based on collaborative contributions from many libraries, particularly shared cataloging services.
Though initially based upon copy cataloging (and often with business models that rewarded contributions of original cataloging), these "bibliographic utilities" morphed into more generalized services that pooled and leveraged the knowledge and resources of their members. BALLOTS became part of the Research Libraries Group (RLG) in the 1970s, and for approximately thirty years OCLC and RLG continued to separately build new services that relied on continued interactions among their respective members--with a variety of interlibrary loan services (extending into faxing and digital delivery of document copies), collaboration around cultural materials, union catalogs of digital images, etc. And it is safe to say that the 2006 merger of the two organizations holds the promise of further cross-institutional coordination and collaboration, as well as continuation of collaborative development of guidelines, standards, and best practices (such as the joint RLG/OCLC PREservation Metadata Implementation Strategies project--PREMIS) (OCLC, 2006).
In the last third of the twentieth century, librarians began to see collaboration as essential to large-scale preservation projects employing technology. In the 1960s, groups such as the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the Library of Congress (LC) endorsed a proposal to create a centralized national preservation repository, but they soon concluded that such a proposal was unworkable (Field, 2003, p. 60). In the 1970s ARL proposed that the goal of national preservation instead be realized by coordinating the efforts of individual research libraries. In 1983 the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) gave a grant to RLG for collaborative preservation microfilming, and in 1985 the Council on Library Resources issued a report showing the feasibility of a collaborative national microfilming project to preserve brittle books. In 1985 NEH established an Office of Preservation to support "a sustained and coherent attack on the preservation problem" (Field, 2003, pp. 60-61).
Since 1982, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has funded the highly successful United States Newspaper Program to create bibliographic records and do preservation microfilming in a coordinated effort involving institutions in all fifty states. And since 1989, NEH has run a highly successful cooperative preservation microfilming project. These and other NEH preservation projects involve coordination and collaboration among a large number of individual libraries. Each library is responsible for a small amount of the total effort, but all libraries share in the results of that effort. Electronic resources have played a key enabling role in these projects, from the planning stage (employing union catalogs that help in determining which works have not yet been preserved), to the preservation stage (using holdings listings that help locate replacements for damaged or missing pages), to the use stage (connecting users to preserved works).
Though enabled by technology, almost all of the various collaborative projects outlined thus far were driven by resource sharing. They came about because one library could realize cost savings by relying upon something contributed by another library--from copy cataloging (when original cataloging became too expensive for each library to do completely on its own) to interlibrary loan (where most libraries did not have the resources to expand their collections every time one of their users wanted material that the library did not own) to collaborative microfilming (where libraries found it difficult to justify the expense of microfilming a newspaper that another library had already filmed). In most cases, the primary motivation for collaboration has been to avoid duplication of effort, and therefore conserve resources. This is not uncommon. As observed in a recent issue of Library Trends:
Libraries and their partners traditionally work together for "selfish" but positive reasons: to leverage shrinking budgets, to learn from each other, to build better tools together and, most importantly, to serve their common users better by taking advantage of one another's collections. (Borek, Bell, Richardson, & Lewis, 2006, p. 456)
A key factor in library automation was the leveraging of decentralized resources from several libraries, joining them virtually to make them appear unified (as in the union catalogs of the bibliographic utilities), or creating an aggregate set of useful information from disparate libraries (for copy cataloging, ILL, or preservation microfilming). To achieve success, all of these new services...
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