Archives and the Digital Library

Citation

Frenger, C. (2009), "Archives and the Digital Library", Library Review, Vol. 58 No. 2, pp. 134-136. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242530910936952

According to editors William E. Landis and Robin L. Chandler, the intention of Archives and the Digital Library, a collection of essays, is “to serve as a clear and understandable overview of a wide variety of standards, technologies, and open issues that face the digital library world writ large, and archivists engaged therein, in 2006 (5)”. On the whole, I am inclined to agree with this assertion, but many of the articles contain an overwhelming amount of technical jargon that make the clarity and understandability of their messages harder to grasp than the authors may have intended.

Consisting of an introduction and 11 articles, the books' three sections focus on the themes of developing non‐licensed content, usability issues and options for the end user, and technology, preservation and management issues. In the introduction, Landis and Chandler lay out what the collection's purposes are and what readers can expect in each section. However, the middle of the essay is rife with terminology that a non‐digital technology‐savvy person would find exclusionary or, at the very least, confusing. It is this type of presumed knowledge that limits the type of audience this volume might immediately appeal to. Thankfully, the value of the collection's contents far outweighs the presumed technological knowledge of its readers, and assists in the editors' goal of the collection – “to function as a snapshot in time, situating archival depositories, professional archivists and archival perspectives and issues in the current digital library landscape (2)”.

“Developing non‐licensed content” (section 1) contains articles intended to argue “that archivists are poised to be champions for inclusion of unique content in a stepped‐up mass‐digitization effort (3)”. Adrian L. Turner's piece, “Committing to memory: a project to publish and preserve California local history digital resources”, discusses a California multi‐year Library Services and Technology Act grant‐funded project that “seeks to explore a model for aggregating, preserving, and providing persistent public access to local history digital collections throughout the state (12)”.

Among this article's strengths are the author's detailed explanation of how this digitization project works, the series of steps each cultural institution takes to digitize their local historical materials and how the collaborative relationship among the projects' participants all coalesce into a finished project that provides a lasting multi‐faceted digital resource of California history. In a collection of scholarly articles, editors can run the risk of presenting only theoretical musings on a particular subject. However, in the case of Adrian Turner's essay, the practical takes the place of a purely theoretical essay, replete with suggestions for potential future projects within this broad digital endeavor. The only drawback with Turner's contribution lies in the observation that, while it serves as an example of how Articles and the Digital Library's articles are motivating and informative, occasionally it can be exclusionary of less tech‐savvy readers in their use of technical language without much explanation.

Section 2 articles focus on “Usability issues and options for the end user”, addressing “important issues for archivists to consider, especially as [they] move increasingly towards integrating access to electronic records and other born‐digital archival materials with [their] traditional collections (4)”. An excellent example of how solutions to these issues are being explored is Maureen A. Burns' essay “From horse‐drawn to hot rod: the University of California's digital image service experience”. Burns writes on a proposed plan of action modeled on the University of California's developed “reciprocal partnership with a digital library (111)”, the U.C. Image Service.

As with Adrian Turner's article in the preservation section, Burns' piece documents the image service's background, creation and future potential, yet another example of practicality being the preferred article focus over the theoretical. Another similarity Burns' article shares with Turner's is an assumption that readers of these articles are professional insiders who will have a pre‐existing knowledge of the arcane terminology of digital library technology, making it yet another article that may hinder the reader's ability to get the full benefit of the collection's intended purpose.

Scholarly writings centered around the themes of “Technology, preservation and management issues”, make up section 3 of the book, and “explore issues that may not resonate immediately with many archivists who have little familiarity with current work in digital library settings, but nonetheless are of critical importance to archivists, especially because they represent areas where our profession is likely to need to integrate our expertise, needs, and concerns with the broader information management community (4)”.

In keeping with the practical aspects of archives and the digital library, Joanne Kaczmarek's article, “The complexities of digital resources: collection boundaries and management responsibilities”, examines the definition of what digital collections contain, who should be responsible for developing and maintaining these collections, and what management practices might be employed to successfully oversee these collections and take them into the future. Kaczmarek addresses a key area of current and future concern in the digital library world, that of custodial responsibility for the solely digital materials that are being created and made available online daily that have no hardcopy alternative format. The article serves as a roadmap for how libraries and archives can work together with other information professionals to make digital collections readily available to their patrons and to ensure that information would not be lost once its creators decide to replace it with updated or altogether new digital content.

Aside from the concern I have over the extent of the presumed digital technology terminology knowledge the collection's authors expect their readers to possess, I would recommend Archives and the Digital Library to all libraries and archives as a way to gain insight into how digital content needs to be preserved, what library and archive patrons' expectations are for accessing this content and how to start planning today for its future use and maintenance.