Let’s get Digital! – Or should we?
Previous blogs talked about the ever-changing archive sector and no change has had a more dramatic impact than the development of technology and the establishment of digital archive work. Digital Preservation very quickly became another millstone around the neck of archivists along with the acquisition, appraisal, cataloguing, conservation, access, promotion, advocacy, research and any tasks as appropriate work we were already doing. But should this be the case? Has it got to the point that digital preservation (and maybe other aspects of digital work) has become so large that specific roles should be created to carry out this work? Should digital preservation be its own sector completely? That’s the topic of the musings in this blog.
The unofficial start of the digital preservation sector can be traced to a conference on metadata in 2000. Even then, the scale of the problem was well known. Digital records are created at a far faster pace than physical records due to ease of use. But as archivists, our role is to preserve, so we turned ourselves to the challenge, only to find preserving digital records was not the same as physical records and a far higher degree of technical knowledge was needed than was taught. The context in which digital preservation takes place was also far more complex than in the physical world and knowledge was required of anti-virus, cyber security, software systems, file formats and a raft of other topics before digital preservation could even be thought about.
It is definitely true that many archivists have risen to this challenge. Many have moved into digital archivist roles and completed the training to specialise in preserving digital records. However, many have struggled with turning their hand to the digital world. In particular those in lone archivist roles with responsibility for both physical and digital records have struggled as it’s physical impossible to do all the work involved in preserving an organisations entire record estate on your own, and that’s before you factor in the training element involved in keeping your skillset up to date.
It becomes clear that the roles are quite different in scope when comparing the competency frameworks of the sector organisations. The Digital Preservation Coalition created a fully comprehensive framework of digital preservation skills linked to role definitions which helps track skill building and career progression in the digital field. The Archive and Records Association have included digital preservation in their framework but it is as an add on optional skill that archivists can choose to ignore or develop as they see fit.
It is this problem that makes me think that the roles should be separated, and digital preservation should be given a place as its own sector with it’s own roles, pay scales and tasks. This is not to say that digital archivists shouldn’t exist, but in my mind their role should be far more defined than is currently the case. Taking the example of larger, well-funded organisations with good staff resource, many of them employ digital preservation specialists, as well as digital archivists. In some cases, software engineers are also employed as the technical requirements are far outside the scope of an archivist role. This makes the role of the archivist easier as they can focus on the preservation aspect of the role that they were hired to do with confidence that the technical side of the role is being covered by a specialist.
Preservation is complex no matter what the medium, and in the physical record world we have conservators who carry out the specialist technical work to ensure records are repaired as needed and conserved in order to last for generations. Why should this be any different in the digital world? Archivists have a strong specific skillset, which, although not complicated, took time and effort to build, and while continued professional development is important, it shouldn’t mean having to learn an entirely new role that we weren’t prepared for and didn’t really want to do in the first place. There is a huge market for digital preservation skills across the heritage sector, but do they need to come from archivists, who already do so much with their day?
The Un-Accessioned Archivist 
As a currently-training professional I have to scream OH MY GOODNESS NO! For several reasons:
Firstly, my training and current workload (doing both side-by-side) would suggest that while it is possible to work without a care for the digital world, that is a privilege not long for this market. If anyone reading this has managed to avoid gaining digital skills and remained employed – congratulations, your sucessors won’t have done.
My second reason is fundamental and much more important: there is no difference in the aim of these practises and that is to collect, preserve and catalogue important records and information for future use. It is therefore completely undesirable that these activities should be cut off from one another and treated as separate. If they are, it is likely that the differences between them will only grow. Having a distinct “digital preservation” sector grow up outside of the norms of traditional archiving will make collaboration harder when it is inevitably needed; also the digital preservation sector would have to re-learn all the hard-won knowledge acquired by records managers and archivists over the past 100 years. Can you imagine the appraisal arguments all over again?
While I understand that many are struggling to keep up with the developments of the digital world, there’s no need to stick our heads in the sand and pretend that it is not happening. Poring over old handwritten documents will not persuade modern actors – whether currently recognised as significant or not – to undertake their business in hardcopy not over email and text. Significant communications now take place in digital media, this cannot be avoided, hard as it is to capture.
My final point is this: no one has the digital skills and resources to do this well. This is the hardline that we have to accept we are fighting against. Software development is clearly outside of the scope for many individuals and institutions, perhaps so is paying for it from an external source. And yet, we cannot render digital materials usable without appropriate software solutions. This is as true of comtemporary digital documents as it is of older digital documents, it is simply that it is in the favour of software companies to make freely available versions of their software that deal with their contemporary file format (think Word Online by Microsoft which allows anyone with access to a web-browser to open a word document).
I propose the conversation we should be having: how do we effectively, reponsibly, and permenantly reclaim the information stored in digital formats so that they might be retained into the future in a way that reduces our reliance on commerical outfits. How can an archive claim to have preserved anything that they could not show to a user without the continued existance of an IT-company and the safety of its storage servers. We need the experience of archivists to have even a chance of doing this well. Don’t leave us to it, we will fail alone.
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Hi Toucan,
Thanks for your comment. I definitely don’t think the sectors should be split and I don’t think that archivists shouldn’t bother with digital skills, or stick their heads in the sand. What I was trying to get at (maybe not very well) is that resources are needed to hire a preservationist as well as a digital archivist, much in the same way that we have conservators for physical records. Expecting one person to be responsible sets us up for failure, especially when preservation in many cases requires a totally different skillset to what archivists are trained to do. Collaboration is essential to making this work and archivists should definitely be working with digital records, but perhaps not preserving them.
An archivist would never attempt to rebind a rare book or fix a paper tear in a poster, so why then are we running checksums and researching file formats.
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I think digital preservators are a very good idea! The reason (to my mind) we do not have one yet is that we understand how we want physical documents to be preserved – as similar to the original as possible – but no idea when it comes to digital documents. Being able to display a digital document to a user requires both that file and an interfacing piece of technology that can both read the file and display it in a manner similar to when it was in use (or at the bare minimum, display all the information it contained). Therein lies the problem, we are already faced by either: storing obsolete tech so we can view obselete files on them (and hoping they stay functional/repairable/powerable), or updating files constantly so that they might be read by the new machines. The second option seems to be roughly what we might consider the potential role of a ‘digital preservator’, but we also know that this modification of file format comes with its own issues – the record kept is no longer the original, there are evidences of it being modified, and/or sometimes no way to reliably record modifications that have been made. What would we aim to ‘preserve’ exactly?
If we were to assume that we did in fact wish to employ someone to do this task, would they do it for all digital media acquired by the institution in perpetuity? If current tech changes are anything to go by, this could mean overhauling systems every decade at least. Or would we seek a world in which each institution runs its own bespoke computing array that they ingest digital materials into and seek simply to keep updating this system to ensure that all it contains is still accessible? And what happens if one day someone melts it (literally or figuratively)?
Love the opportunity to discuss this, I feel like we never really do at work because it is too scary to consider or no one wants to alarm the budget-holder. I gather from your original post that that is the hope of this blog, so assume you will take my arguments as the intellectual jabs they are intended to be and smack me right back!
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Hi Toucan,
Yes of course, getting people talking was the aim, with hopefully good change to follow!
Lot’s of places have a digital preservation specialist. Most of them are very well resourced so it wasn’t a choice between that or an archivist which I think is a really important point to make.
The technology does exist to make sure that authenticity is provable even though the format has changed. You could argue that a book with a new binding isn’t the original either but the content remains the same and so in most cases it’s irrelevant. I think we are too hung up on the theory we’re taught which is in some cases over a hundred years old. We need to update our theory and our practice to remain relevant. The world is changing rapidly and we will get left behind if we stay rigid and don’t adapt.
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