By: Dot Porter

Dot Porter — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 01:20:03 +0000

Thanks for the post, Gabby. I agree with you that there is pressure for libraries to cut back on accessions and digitize their holdings, but I don’t agree that institutional digitization necessarily equals long-term preservation. Unlike books (which can sit on a shelf for years, and assuming the environment is okay they’ll be just fine), digital content requires constant curation. And I’m afraid that a lot of libraries are jumping on the digitization bandwagon without thinking through the long-term consequences of that decision. (I hope I’m wrong) I still believe that digitization is, in fact, the way of the future (heck, it’s the way of the present) but we must ensure that digitized library content (and the born-digital research projects that many of us who read the Stoa are engaged in building) remains available for the long-term. We can do this by publishing our work under open access licenses and encouraging others to reuse our data (and to make their own work available under open access licenses) [something that, unfortunately, many libraries, at least those digitizing medieval manuscripts, are not wont to do], by taking advantage of long-term repository storage offered by our own institutions (if we’re lucky enough to have that option), and by storing our work in other publicly available repositories (I’m thinking here of the Oxford Text Archive (http://ota.ox.ac.uk/) and the Scaife Digital Library, currently under development). Multiple copies of data, located in several different repositories (very similar to the model of brink & mortar libraries, really) are more likely to survive over the long term. I think it’s likely that content being digitized today can be available in 10, 50, 100 years – but it is going to take a lot of work. Open standards and Digital Object Identifiers are only the start.

Comments on: In defence of biblioclasm

By: Dot Porter