Managing Digital Preservation - A Leadership Challenge

When I was a master's student in the earlier part of this decade, digital preservation was something that we could barely conceptualize. Learning about preparing collections for large scale microfilming wasn't a useless pursuit, but the vision we were handed for librarianship didn't include figuring out how to fit new concerns and huge new projects into our institutions.

Last week, Mark sent me this article, "The Fifth Blackbird: Some Thoughts on Economically Sustainable Digital Preservation" from the Spring issue of DLIB. Written by OCLC's Brian Lavoie, it's a followup of sorts to his and Lorcan Dempsey's 2004 article, Thirteen Ways of Looking at...Digital Preservation.

While the earlier piece was about conceptualizing the role digital preservation can and should play in the library community (economic feasibility being the "fifth blackbird" in that article), this newer dispatch tackles this challenge specifically . It's an introduction of sorts to the Blue Ribbon Task Force that was announced earlier in the year. Lavoie defines the problem as such:

"...(W)e still lack a systematic analysis of digital preservation as an economic activity, and how it can be adequately provisioned with resources over the long-term to ensure that preservation objectives are met in a wide variety of contexts and circumstances. A lack of economically sustainable models for digital preservation activities represents just as real a threat to the long-term persistence of digital materials as the more traditional scourges of media decay and technological obsolescence."

In other words, not having figured out how to do Digital Preservation in libraries threatens the future of our collections.

Lavoie makes several suggestions, most significant is one that we move from "Lakes" of funding preservation to "Rivers", that is, instead of establishing digital preservation for single projects and individual institutions, we create pathways between institutions for "flows" of resources and collections.

This makes digital preservation a challenge of both resources and management- both doing new work, and having that work get done in new ways. Library managers have to think of this in terms of "economic strategy", and not just funding:

"It is unrealistic to assume that all, or even most institutions with a stake in the long-term persistence of digital collections will be able to install and maintain local digital preservation capacity to achieve their preservation objectives. In these circumstances, it is likely that a network of preservation repositories will emerge (and indeed in some cases have emerged) that will carry out preservation activities on behalf of other organizations, either as part of a collaborative effort, or in the form of a service offered through traditional market mechanisms. Developing economic strategies that ensure a sustained flow of resources from those who require or benefit from digital preservation services, to those who are willing to perform digital preservation services, is an essential aspect of economical sustainability."

This means that being able to develop such strategy is an important, necessary management skill.

For the current crop of new librarians, do you feel like you've learned this? In your master's program or elsewhere? Are you learning it on the job?