‘Mind the Gap’ and Archive-it – on web archiving (iPRES2011, 9)

At a reception the other day, I heard a rumour. Because preserving web sites is so difficult, the Internet Archive was rumoured to consider printing all of its content. I will not disclose the informant’s name – he would not have a future in the digital library where he works (OK, it was a guy, a young guy, and he works for a Dutch library.) Needless to say, it could not even be done if the Internet Archive wanted to do it. Lori Donovan told the iPRES audience that a single snapshot of the www nowadays results in 3 billion pages [for the Dutch: 3 miljard pagina’s].

Mind-boggling numbers, especially if you think of the Internet Archive’s shoestring budget.

Anyway, iPRES2011 is over, but I still have some worthwhile stories waiting to be told. One of the issues tabled at iPRES was whether we can (and/or should) safely leave web archiving to the Internet Archive and national libraries.

Logistics put the Internet panel members much further apart than their viewpoints would warrant: they agreed that web archiving is important, not just for national libraries. From the left: Geoff Harder, University of Alberta, Tessa Fellon, University of Columbia, and Lori Donovan, the Internet Archive.

No, said Geoff Harder of the University of Alberta and Tessa Fellon of the University of Columbia. There are compelling reasons for research libraries to get involved as well. Harder: “This is just another tool in collection building; we should not treat it any differently. You begin with a collection policy and an expanded view of what constitutes a research collection: build on existing collections; find collections where research is happening or will happen.”

I would say that perhaps there are even more compelling reasons to collect web content than, e.g., printed books, because web content is extremely fleeting. Harder told his audience: “Too much online (western) Canadian is disappearing; this creates a research gap for future scholars and a hole in our collective memory.” He encouraged research libraries to: “Mind the Gap – Own the Problem”.

The University of Alberta’s involvement in web archiving started with a rescue operation: a non-profit foundation which created some 80+ websites, including the Alberta Online Encyclopedia, went out of business. This was extremely valuable content, and it needed to be rescued fast.

When a time bomb is ticking …

The University of Alberta decided to use Archive-It, a service developed by the Internet Archive. It is a light-weight tool that is easy to get up and running immediately. Plus, said Harder, there is a well-established tool-kit including dashboard and workflows, you become part of an instant community of users and your collection becomes part of a larger, global web archive. Because that is a precondition for working with Archive-It: by default, everything that is harvested becomes publicly available globally. Harder: ‘It is an economical tool for saving orphaned and at-risk web content … where we know a time bomb is ticking.”

Have a look at the collections built with Archive-It, I would say to research libraries’ subject specialists. You can include anything that is interesting in your field, such as important blogs, for as long as they are relevant.

Yunhyong Kim of HATII, Glasgow, takes blogging very serious and is doing research into the dynamics of the blogosphere.

Q&A

Is Archive-It durable enough? asked Yunhyong Kim of Glasgow (HATII). Donovan appeared confident that Internet Archive would be able to continue developing the tool. And I would repeat Harder: when a time bomb is ticking, you have got to go with what is available.

What about preventing redundancy, was another question. Should we not keep a register somewhere of what is being archived? Fellon thought that was a good idea, but perhaps it was too early for that. 'There are many different reasons for web archiving, different frequencies.” Sorting out what overlaps exactly and what does not is perhaps more work than just accepting some “collateral damage”.

If you want to know more about Archive-It, you can sign up for one of their live online demos. There’s one scheduled for November 29 and one for December 6. See the website

Archive-It Singapore-style

Setting priorities: value shift from printed to digital … and vice versa (LIBER 4)

‘Digital and print is an and and proposition for libraries’, said Graham Jefcoate during the special collections session. But the budgets have not increased. So how should we allocate resources? How should we prioritize?

The Dutch KB has been working on a model that takes an integral view at printed and digital collections. The model can help decide what to spend our money on. At LIBER it was presented by Sophie Ham (photo left) and Tanja de Boer. As it has not been published yet, I gladly offer it here with some detail, because I think it can really help libraries make tough decisions (slides courtesy of Sophie Ham).

The model rates the value of (parts of) collections to determine which ones should be conserved or preserved with priority. Here are the rating criteria:

Primary criteria:

Secondary criteria:

 

And this is how the process works:

Multiplying primary and secondary criteria might look like this (just an example):

Sophie gave two extreme examples of how such a value assessment can turn out. This example concerns printed versions. Obviously, newspapers score higher on informational value and medieval manuscripts score higher on uniqueness and historic value.

	Newspapers	Medieval manuscripts
Informational value	8	5
Aesthetic value	2	9
Historic value	3	9
Use	8	3
Uniqueness	4	10
Condition	2	8
TOTAL	27	44

What happens when these collections are digitized? Some values are transferred to the digital copy (e.g., much of the use and informational value for newspapers), but other values cannot be transferred (e.g., the uniqueness of a medieval manuscript). As Claudia Fabian of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek demonstrated, the use value of a physical object may even increase when it is digitized, because more people become aware of its existence and become interested.

And here is the end result of this (extreme) example:

 

As you can see, the value of the physical medieval manuscript has remained unchanged, whereas some of the value of the printed newspaper collection has been transferred to the digital copy, especially the use value; the KB’s online newspaper database is in great demand by users of all kinds in the Netherlands.

 Discussing the KB model, from the left: Sophie Ham, Claudia Fabian and workshop chair Graham Jefcoate.

So, if push comes to shove, and painful decisions have to be made about whether to build new stacks for physical newspapers or invest in expanding the e-Depot that holds the digital newspapers, this (limited) analysis clearly points in the direction of investing in the e-Depot and perhaps deciding to keep only representative selections of printed newspapers.

Obviously, lots of questions remain. At what granularity should one assess collections? How can one make the assessments as objective as possible?, etc. But it is a promising beginning. If you want to know more or contribute to developing the model, please get in touch with sophie.ham@kb.nl.

 KB colleagues at Sophie’s presentation: from the left, Els van Eijck van Heslinga, Lotte Wilms, Lieke Ploeger,  Victor-Jan Vos.

Value shift: cool conference bag being put to alternative use. Those with short legs thank the sponsors for the abundance of printed promotional material.

 

More (digital) wake-up calls for academic libraries (LIBER 2)

Today it was Rick Luce (Emory University, US) who had the (questionable) honour of issuing a wake-up  call to research libraries. This time the topic was not cultural heritage (see yesterday’s post), but the core business of academic libraries: serving researchers and the scientific research process. Check out his slides when they become available on the LIBER website. It is a dazzling summary of all the changes taking place in the sciences: zetabytes of data; dynamic, complex data objects that require management; communities and data flows becoming much more important than static library collections, etc. etc. Luce’s warning: somebody will develop the services the new researcher needs. If the library does not develop those, there is no future for the research library. Luce called for a fundamental transformation process that will affect every aspect of the ‘library’ business.

In this vision, the role of the ‘library’ is to deliver a layer of middleware between the scientific process and IT infrastructure.

Luce’s advice for libraries on how to bring all this about: ‘Radical Cooperation’:

Such change, of course, does not come easy. Disruption of set patterns makes people nervous – but instability also contributes to disruptive innovation:

Luce warned that ‘Culture will have strategy for breakfast every time.’ It takes years to turn the culture of an organization around.

At the end of this inspiring session, Kurt de Belder of Leiden University asked a crucial question: ‘Are libraries in fact the type of organizations that can make such drastic changes?’ In his response, Luce implied that some will make the change successfully – those who do not will be out of business by 2020. One of those libraries might be that of the librarian who asked how to make researchers deliver the metadata that the library needs during a data workshop this morning. Or was the wake-up call clear enough?

Norbert Lossau of Gottingen asked for advice on how to convince the University Board and staff of all this. Luce’s advice: ‘Look for small victories; do it step by step; work with early adopters within your staff.’

Will research libraries have enough time to get all that done by 2020?

Neelie Kroes of the European Commission addressing the conference by video. Her agenda: a) open access; b) open data (all public-sector information); c) digital culture (‘By 2025 all European cultural heritage should be digitized and available through Europeana’)

Tomorrow will be too late – (born) digital in library special collections (LIBER 1)

“Heritage collections in the digital future” was the revealing title of the first workshop I attended at the annual conference of LIBER, the Association of European Research Libraries, in Barcelona. The title was immediately attacked by Marco de Niet of Digital Heritage Netherlands: ‘Digital Future? Come on! The digital reality is today.’

Was it really necessary for De Niet to talk in terms of ‘Shame on you!’, I wondered when he started his presentation? Have we not reached the stage now where we all know about the digital present and are making plans for it even if we cannot act upon them immediately?

Unfortunately, the answer must be no. Starting with Ivan Boserup’s summary of the findings of a recent poll amongst LIBER libraries, followed by statistics gathered by De Niet himself  (from projects such as Enumerate), and on through Jackie Dooley’s summary of recent OCLC research (Taking Our Pulse: the OCLC Research Survey of Special Collections and Archives) – the evidence is overwhelming that (research) libraries are still pretty much functioning within an analogue paradigm. This is not to say that they are all still about lending physical books. Of course not, quite a few libraries have digitized collections and provide online access. But their digitization efforts mostly lack strategic planning, access is still mostly provided in a controlled way (for a limited group of users), preservation issues are still not being addressed adequately, and born-digital material (including audiovisual content) is blatently missing from collections and collection plans.

‘Shocking’, De Niet called these findings, and I second that. De Niet summarized the changing value propositions as follows:

 

Most libraries are still in their comfort zone, that of digital in a controlled network. According to De Niet, libraries cannot afford to stay there. If they do, their role in the information business become insignificant. The key factor is still the libraries’ desire to be in control, according to De Niet. ‘Libraries have to let go.’

De Niet sees opportunities for libraries, but not if they stick to their traditional values.

During the Q&A a library director remarked that he did not find this presentation particularly helpful. He thought it was rather confusing …… Quod erat demonstrandum?

 Spain is suffering from a heat wave; fortunately the conference pack includes a sponsored fan – Jasmine Honculada of WIPO was one of the first to discover how that funny plastic object could be put to excellent use.

(There is more to tell about this session – more to follow soon.)