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Article Excerpt
ABSTRACT
This two-part article considers how digital culture has influenced ideas about permanence. It examines the change in collecting practices in one legal deposit library. The author considers how the idea of permanence, understood in cultural heritage terms, influences digital culture, and, thus, digital technology. The first part of the article addresses the concepts associated with permanence, digital culture, digital technology, social change, and cultural institutions, in relation to collecting digital cultural material. The second part focuses on changing collecting practices of the Alexander Turnbull Library at the National Library of New Zealand for electronically published material with the benefit of legal deposit.
OUTLINE
The first part of this article considers the concepts associated with permanence, digital culture, digital technology, social change, and cultural institutions, in relation to collecting digital cultural material. This is intended to place the change in collecting practices, outlined in the second part of the article, in the context of an evolving understanding of how these concepts might be interpreted and are being applied. The second part focuses on the change in collecting practices of the Alexander Turnbull Library (Turnbull Library) as it develops its heritage collection of electronically published material with the benefit of legal deposit, (1) with particular attention to the change in practice to include the collection of online publications.
CONCEPTS
This Library Trends issue presents preservation in cultural heritage as its broad theme, and this section questions specifically the influence of digital culture on ideas of permanence. Implicit in the question "How has digital culture influenced our ideas about permanence?" is the assumption that digital culture has had, or is having, an influence upon ideas of permanence. But, is that true? Answering this would require exploration in greater depth than is possible in this article, but it is possible to offer up institutional practice as a means of responding to the question. Another question needs to be asked: how is the idea of permanence, understood in cultural heritage terms, influencing digital culture and, thus, digital technology? (2)
Digital culture is expressed through social, cultural, political, and economic activities that are undertaken using digital technologies. The presence of digital technology and the centrality of its use distinguish these practices and activities from practices and activities that are undertaken using analog technologies or no technologies at all. Ideas of retaining and restoring culture, authenticity, and the regular reexamination and reinterpretation of culture are heavily threaded through cultural heritage discourse, heritage legislation, and institutional policy. People continue to want cultural material collected, looked after and made accessible, whether it is analog or digital. Research interest in digitized heritage material and increased institutional commitment to digitize analog material reflects a link between the demands of digital culture for online access to digital heritage material, and the force of continuing interest in the past-clearly seen in the rise in online (and remote) genealogical research at most cultural institutions. But the nature of digital culture, the material difference of digital cultural heritage, the increasing volumes of digital material produced, and expectations of access and online availability have an impact on notions of collecting: notions such as collecting everything; keeping everything in the manner in which material has been kept before; digital material as original, untransformed and complete; methods and technologies used for acquiring and preserving digital material; and modes and technologies used to access digital material.
Digital technologies have an attendant hype of panaceas or apocalypses. They offer faster computing power, faster rates of update or change, different types of interactive and immersive experiences to that of analog technologies, and they stimulate an interest in what is new, or what is possible, rather than what was. They engender a pressure to respond to intensified rates of change and higher levels of attrition or loss of digital material, and a need to ascertain where or how human oversight and intervention is most feasibly applied to capture what was, and to prepare for what is new and what is possible when collecting digital material.
Digital technologies enable continual change and improvement to processes and outputs, through the deployment of novelty. (3) The impelling nature of technological innovation creates two significant complexities from the perspectives of digital acquisition and preservation. The first is the organizational resources and processes that are required to anticipate and respond to the rate of change. Technological innovation per se is unpredictable and volatile, and, in itself, poses feasibility issues for collecting organizations and their fitness to respond proactively to develop the means to acquire and preserve digital material. The second is the opportunity and the right to grapple with the technical implications of change. Proprietary technological innovation tends to develop proprietary formats and applications, posing legal and efficiency issues for collecting organizations, and reducing their ability to openly examine file formats and applications and, thereby, to develop stable collection and preservation strategies. The debate over opening up the documentation of RAW digital image format and the challenge to digital camera producers informs this issue. (4)
The digital technology development industry provides the means to go forward, as the dynamic of digital technology and digital culture demands. The cultural heritage sector issues an equally forceful challenge, driven by continued public interest in cultural material, for technology to be developed that enables people to go forward and backward easily, and to retain the same access to digital content and the experience of accessing it "as it was." Flexibility that enables digital collecting and preservation to progress in such a volatile environment needs to be built into digital technology. The spiral development referred to by Mackenzie Smith (2005) for the digital archive at MIT emphasizes this point; stability, too, needs to be built into digital technology to permit long-term collection, preservation and access and, thereby, to enable long-term research using digital cultural heritage material. (5) The development industry has yet to take up the challenge of providing the means and flexibility to go backward--a requirement common to collecting institutions and to consumers.
The idea of permanence, as it is understood in the cultural heritage field, is asserting itself upon digital culture and technological development, just as much as digital culture and technology is asserting its requirement for greater flexibility in cultural heritage practice. People have a continuing need to go backwards with ease and "mark the spot," or experience accessing material in its "time" digitally (e.g., to cite a journal article in an academic paper by linking through a permanent identifier to an online journal, or to play a computer game developed to run on Windows 3.1 in that operating environment, or in one that emulates it). Research and cultural interest in historical cultural content (digital and analog) has not waned; it is evident in the development of permanent identifiers and of emulation technologies. Recent research at the National Library of Australia indicates that the Web sites mostly frequently used in its PANDORA archive are usually those that are no longer available on the Internet (Crook, 2006). Metadata standards, such as those for recordkeeping metadata for Australian government archives (National Archives of Australia, 1999) and preservation metadata outlined by the PREMIS Working...
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