Comments on Time & Bits Conference Background Paper

See www.gii.getty.edu/timeandbits

This prompt for the agenda of a conference on the persistent value of digital communication also suggests new value for the preservation function. A wider interest in the preservation function at the same moment that accelerating change and transient meaning are dominating debate, indicates that perhaps a new balance is emerging.

Various organizations, linked by an interest in culture change and the persistence of intellectual property, are working together to generate this conference. These include at the Long Now Foundation and the Getty Conservation Institute and the Getty Information Institute. The Long Now Foundation which is a consortium of influential creative and scientific personalities has already mapped out some directions for cultural change. The Dead Media Project proposal and the Clock/Library proposal exemplify the Long Now Foundation's interest in the direction of cultural change.

A central theme here is that cultural change is not a short term phenomena and that a general perception that we entering a time of unprecedented, sudden and self-referencial change is distorted. A weekend impeachment of the President or a papal visit that suddenly inverts all ideological positions are typical perceptions distorted by a lack of historical context. What is suggested is a rebalance of short term and long term evaluation of culture change.

That such a broad discussion could pivot on the narrow practice of library and archive preservation is astounding. But this is exactly what is occurring. The preservation function as it has been applied to paper based collections is about to be used as a technical, practical and academic template for the evaluation and redirection of broad culture change. In essence the Long Now Foundation is saying that the perceived, frantic rate of cultural change is not merely a result of accelerating technical development into the future. The Long Now Foundation suggests that sudden change is an illusion resulting partly from our amputation of the view backward.

Posing the library and archives preservation function in the center of wide cultural debate should be interesting. To start with, preservation practitioners are no less victims of the social, technical and academic trends than anyone else. Now our strategies (compensate effects of acid in paper, anticipate media obsolescence, produce surrogate originals), our solutions (deacidification, automation, microfilming) and any cultural bias (blur original and copies, follow short term funding agendas, separate or combine blue collar and white collar work), will all be emulated.

The Time & Bits conference background paper states; "in sum, the long-term preservation of information in digital form requires not only technical solutions and new organizational strategies, but also the building of a new culture which enables the persistence of bits over time." This strange presumption that a "new culture" is needed is, of course, countered by the "old culture" of the preservation worker. Even in this context of long term planning, the preservation field may have to bring the debate back to earth and to an underlying knowledge that sealed and buried early codices in ceramic jars or to Jefferson's insight that redundancy and distribution is the first preservation strategy.

The preservation field can also offer innovation and responsive behavior. In stead of projecting a non-negotiable goal of stasis, the field should look to intrude the preservation function incrementally and seek roles even in short-term transactions. In fact the preservation function in the context of digital signals may itself be transient, confined to seconds between image capture and delivery transmission. A further shift suggested by the conference background paper is that preservation strategy "often becomes apparent at the end of the information life cycle when there is relatively little economic incentive or organized social interest to solve it." Here the preservation field may be able, in its own special way, to alert others to the Long Now perspective.

Historians work in library and archival collections to illuminate dark zones that, after long research, remain undocumented. Paul Saenger's book The Space Between Words, The Origins of Silent Reading, Stanford University Press, 1997, is an example of such wonderful effort. We are now faced with unprecedented opportunities both to record or to lose the vernacular exchange and behavior of our time. Even the data of daily recreation and routine now pass through a digital existence. But we now need to bring forward the collecting and documentation incentive, closer to the point of the creation of the object.

In lapses between creation and retrieval, in an unused and unvalued state, is where the object is lost. Libraries and archives and their preservation programs bridge these lapses. They await unposed questions and their access systems relate to undelivered content. Meanwhile the object moves through cycles of veneration and neglect, which themselves accumulate while the full meaning of the object exists nowhere. This is an old story that is well known to the preservation worker.

Efforts of preservation are very cultural acts. With this background paper and the conference to come the Long Now Foundation invites an evaluation of the wider role of preservation, beyond its technical focus. The incentive for the field is not a trade off to new economic and technical agendas but a public opportunity to define the default position of preservation. We should illustrate how a specialized practice assures the continuing role of source collections in a context of rapidly expanding and contracting reading modes. This illustration should include the fact that this service is a cultural achievement.