Re: ALCTS/PARS Physical Quality and Treatment Discussion Group for ALA Mid-Winter, New Orleans

[gary frost <dryfrio@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Don,

I still owe you $3...next time.

Gary


Comments on meetings at ALA Mid Winter, New Orleans
1/14/98: Gary Frost

I went to (1) Preservation Administration DG, (2) ALCTS/PARS Cooperative
Preservation Programs DG, (3) RBMS Curator/Conservator DG, (4) CMDS/PARS
DG, (5) PARS Preservation  Education and Outreach DG, (6) PARS Small &
Midsize Libraries DG and (7) PARS DG. Here are some comments on these
meetings.

(1) NEH/CLIR offeredviews on the sea-change to digital preservation with
reference to a DreamWorks/Disney model of ?asset management? and control
of magnetic/film analog source material. I liked the Richard Peak report
on use based selection projects. His perspective here is that work in
the brittle book filming backlog actually does fill in holes in project
based filming. Another interpretation is that a ?collection? project is
created by use based selection and that the preservation holding tank of
the filming backlog does represent a legitimate user community...readers
that encounter inaccessibility. George Farr did address this
transformation, explaining why the NEH must confine itself to collection
based work...but he also suggested that the precepts of National benefit
from Regional projects may now be shifting. Nationalism is dissolving in
the genre of digital library services as indicated by the foreshortening
of the (National) Digital Library Federation and the complete change of
the (National) Institute for Conservation names.

[Just as keywords take on strategic consequence, organization names are
an important indication of direction. Wasn?t it the Commission on
Preservation, before Preservation and Access? Isn?t the preservation
role further subsumed by CLIR? When I started, the field was all
preservation and no access. Is it now all access and no preservation?] 

(2) In this meeting the NEH/CLIR activities reports were overshadowed by
the new Institute of Museum and Library  Services programing. They are
in a hurry to spend much more money than the NEH. The total IMLS
library  program is 146 million with 5.5 to the specific ?Leadership?
grants with categories in (1) education/training for library and
information science, (2) research/demonstration projects in library and
information science, (3) digitization/preservation of library materials
and (4) cooperative library/museum projects.

(3) The RBMS Curator/Conservator DG was well attended with about 35
participants. Charlotte Brown did a good job of review of developments
and informations sources on digital capture stations, security/marking
and preservation survey/selection. With the demise of the LC ink,
marking has regressed to new arcanna/cabal which is not clarified at all
by the new micro and computer assisted technologies for item
identification. There is an ongoing exploration of the role of
conservation/condition documentation in inter and inner net like
environments. This topic is beginning to take form for both contingents.
On the one hand the conservators are given to lengthy documentation with
no audience while the curators are interested in any documentation for
real readership as well as copy specific documentation that will assist
in theft recoveries. Here the digital communications and systems of
on-line bibliographics may provide a critical path for development
although most conservation documentation [including Getty] is committed
to paper. 

There was concern that the proposed MARC 583 field matrix is too
complicated and too burdensome. There was also some desperation about
the decommissioning of the RLG Conspectus system for collection
valuation which has provided clear directions for collection
preservation work.

(4) The CMDS/PARS meeting is always my favorite. Nowhere are the grey
zones of convergence more apparent and nowhere are the flights of
imagination more provoked. Ross Atkinson with the depiction of inner and
outer and anti-collections and Carla Montori with the integration of
digital conversion into the routine of preservation reformatting, (it is
visionary to consider the transition to a routine status!). ?We are
simply going to trust ourselves to migrate forward...just as we have
done in the past.? 

?Our catalog records don?t tell the reader how to read a book, but they
will (need to provide systems information) in the future.? ?Students,
right now, think that everything in the library is on the Internet.? ?By
2050 90% of all publication will be on-line. The remaining 10%...as
allocated to physical libraries, will be material that can not be
captured, for economic or other reasons.  But, think about this; 10% is
a great cut. At the present increasing rate of publication it could
easily imply a huge growth in traditional libraries!?.

?We have cataloged WebSites that disappeared four months later.? [Janet
Gertz; ?We have cataloged books that were stolen within four months.?]
The transience and fluidity of the new environment of  collection
development was very evident. ?Modern literature and poetry is a
collaboration with software?. Likewise it is time for preservation to
give up its function of stasis. ?We should consider  seconds of
preservation ...during the critical moments between capture and
transmission.?

(5) This PEODG meeting revealed a critical issue that was reinforced in
the PARS DG. This is that the library preservation community does not
know how to effectively allocate communication to various reading modes.
This is rather disturbing...aren?t librarians supposed to be expert at
that kind of thing?

Here the topic was how to unconfuse the relation between the two PARS
education and outreach DG?s (one for course instructors, the other for
educational organizations). It was obvious that both should be merged
with separate on-line and off-line [live-conference] work flows. Live
discussion is important, but so is on-line productivity, compilation and
review. The most chaos can be created by flip-floping these functions;
i.e. collecting and assembling course syllabi in a live discussion or,
on the other hand, doing on-line ?distance learning? of book repair [as
was actually projected in this meeting]. While the ALA looks to economy
of joint DG meetings at separate tables of a single room, it should
actually look to displacing some DG activity to cyberspace. A methodical
shift in this direction would only increase the excitement and
productivity of the live meetings.

(6) The small & midsize DG group was very engaging with excellent
stories and excellent things to do in the early stages of program
development. My favorite was attaching a box of rubber bands to the book
drops with a note to use them to protect the returning books. This
triggers a miraculous interruption that suddenly shifts attention to
care of library materials. (and the rubber bands are used, in spite of
initial objections including a concern that they would cause squirrels
to choke). There was a great preservation folk tale told by the person
who started the program at Tulane. This story had all the incremental
development of a lonely heroic type who must begin with nothing when all
around have no commitment. Then each small material step must also breed
heroic commitment in others.

(7) the PARS DG reviewing the state of publications also [like (5)]
evoked the need to effectively allocate communication to various reading
modes. Certainly there are literary genres and certainly there are
specific publications...but the need to better utilize the scope of
reading modes was apparent. Not just the fringe notion of migrating all
material to the on-line environment or the arbitrary notion of reserving
LRTS or CLIR news to paper, but evolving different streams of
publication that accommodate different types of discourse. 

Another reason to consider the allocation of reading modes to the
busines of PARS, if not ALA, is not only to exploit the new
possibilities of electronic communication, but also to exploit the
unused resources of print. Like wise with the discussion group function,
where experiment in on-line discussion may prove an important method of
enhancing the live, meeting discussion. 

EndNote: A good illustration of the potential of a tradtional
communcation mode in a changing environment is the St. Charles car line
and its interface with the St. Charles Tavern. All three nights Craig
and I rode the street car to the Tavern and each night we had dinner
among the locals. This antiquated, habituated circuit lent support to
our disussion and prompted estimations of the future of the library
preservation function. We are not sure how this works. Innovation tends
to spring from tradition in book work, but Craig suggested that it was
the ozone from the traction motors.

The preservation cannot impose stasis. It cannot freeze dynamic files or
capture webpublication that is simultaneously growing and disappearing.
In the library setting, preservation can not even manage the taxonomy of
the kalidiscope of media currently in the collections or document the
software systems that are the components of classical bibliographic
citation and retrieval. So we must be talking about the application of
the preservation function to the dynamic of readership modes.
Preservation must support the source-to-copy transaction, even if that
occurs in seconds. Preservation should assure the accuracy and quality
of transactions.  The ?confrontation with the object?, as Abby Smith of
CLIR, puts it, is now only an aspect of only some delivery pathways.

That there are still car lines that still go to taverns that you can
still use everyday is comforting, but these systems must be used in a
different way. In fact mechanisums, such as the source original
collections of books, that stay the same may be most shifted in their
meaning.