The Boston Globe had a wonderful little article in their Ideas section today, "How Digital Art Decays." Simon Waxman describes how a graduate student, Matthew Epler, at Interactive Telecommunications Program in New York stumbled on the archives full of digital art projects dating back to the 1970's. Digital art from that period would have been programmed on punch cards, using programs and operating systems that are no longer in use. Epler asked Rhizome, a New York organization dedicated to creation and preservation of art based in technology for help. Together, they created a crowd-source project to bring these archived art projects into the current digital technology, and preserve them. The project is called the Recode Project.

The Globe article goes on to explain examples of the problems faced by curators of digital art. Librarians are all familiar with the problems of software moving on, leaving materials "beached" in the older formats. But art conservators have multi-dimensional issues beyond simply getting the programs to run.

How would the program run without its original operating system, which couldn’t easily be emulated on modern hardware? Could the code be preserved while eliminating bugs that caused the original system to crash? How much original equipment needed to be used? The artists felt that the new exhibit ran too fast to accurately re-create the original experience, so it had to be slowed down. On the other hand, they were willing to replace the original touchscreen with an up-to-date equivalent. In short, the dilemmas involved in re-creating “The Erl King” forced conservators to decide what was art and what was expendable. [Ben] Fino-Radin [digital conservator at Rhizome] sums up the metaphysical predicament: “When you have a sculpture or painting, it’s very clear what the work actually is,” he says. But when you’re dealing with digital media, “separating what is the actual artwork from the technology that supports it can be a challenging thing.”

I was fascinated by the issues that the art conservators faced with this project. It was a fun read and very interesting. It makes the problems of dealing with out-moded CD-Roms and discs seem much simpler and more mundane.

The image decorating this post is Mandarin Ducks I, by Matsuko Sasaki, one of the many striking works that can be found at the Recode Project.

Withdrawing Print Titles

Ithaka has issued a new report entitled What to Withdraw? Print Collections Management in the Wake of Digitization. Its goal is to help libraries that want to recapture the space made available when digitized journals are discarded. To quote from the executive summary, "this report addresses two key questions: which types of print journals can libraries withdraw responsibly today, and how can that set of materials be expanded to allow libraries the maximum possible flexibility?" For journals with reliable digital access, retaining the print serves primarily a preservation function. There are other reasons for retaining print: "the need to fix scanning errors; insufficient reliabilty of the digital provider; inadequate preservation of the digitized versions; the presence of significant quantities of important non-textual material that may be poorly represented in digital form; and campus political considerations." The situation will be different in each library, but it is safe to say that "many of the rationales for retaining print are likely to decline over the course of time." The report concludes that most journals do not meet the criteria for withdrawal at this time, but that several strategies should be put in place to increase the number of journals that do:

First, organizations pursuing digitization projects should [be] more transparent about their standards and practices. Second, when digitization quality is low, it should be upgraded over the course of time. Finally, the library community should aggregate the work of exisiting mechanisms for print storage, de-duplication, and preservation, so that print repositories can more effectively contribute to a system-wide withdrawals strategy.

We have moved all but the last ten years of our periodicals to offsite storage (still on our campus, however) in order to free up shelf space in our main building. It was HeinOnline that enabled us to do this. HeinOnline is a reliable provider of high-quality digital access to periodicals, and thus addresses most of the concerns about retaining print set out above. Nonetheless, I have not yet made the decision to withdraw any periodicals permanently from the collection based on the availability of HeinOnline, but that day will probably come sooner rather than later. We are making decisions about which new law reviews to purchase based on their availability on HeinOnline, LexisNexis, and/or Westlaw. The cost is not our main concern, as academic law reviews are cheap; our main concern is space, which is a problem of long standing at our library.

Preserving Guatanamo's Records

A dedicated law professor, librarian, and attorney are working together to create the Guatanamo Bay Detention Center archive, which will be a "repository of the records and first-person accounts of hundreds of defense lawyers who have worked on detainee cases." The story is reported in the July 10 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education. The individuals involved are Mark P. Denbeaux, a professor at Seton Hall University School of Law and director of its Center for Policy and Research, which put out an important series of reports on Guatanamo; Michael Nash, director of New York University's Tamiment Library, known for its collections on labor, politics, and public policy; and Jonathan Hafetz, who is a staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union's National Security Project and an adjunct professor at Seton Hall. Both Denbeaux and Hafetz have represented Guatanamo detainees. The archive will be housed at Seton Hall and at the Tamiment Library, according to a recent press release. The project is the brain child of Denbeaux, who marched at Selma in 1965 and now regrets the "'million details' that went unrecorded." He wants to make sure the same thing does not happen with Guatanamo. Because all of the detainees will probably not have public trials, "the archive may turn out to be one of the few public sources of information about what really happened at Guatanamo."

As a librarian interested in the preservation of digital information, I was interested to learn that the Guatanamo archive is likely to be "one of the first collections to make its debut under a digital-archiving project called Web-at-Risk: Preserving Our National's Cultural Heritage," which is fully described here. The Chronicle article describes librarians' role in digital preservation projects, and concludes that good institutional partners are a must if a large-scale project like the Guatanamo archive is to be done successfully.