Abstract
Access to digital content is fragile, while print, if left alone, will preserve itself under many circumstances. Online resources are disappearing every day and inaction will not preserve them. Key aspects of ensuring perpetual access to online resources were discussed including how digital preservation is being done, who pays for it, and envisioning the future costs. Audience participation resulted in a dialog about current concerns with a number of insightful questions and comments.
WHO IS RESPONSIBLE FOR PRESERVING DIGITAL CONTENT?
There are multiple views on who should be responsible for preservation. Some librarians feel that publishers should take responsibility because they are the ones producing the content. Other librarians feel that the library is the party responsible for preservation and that they have already been doing this with print, so why should this change because the content is in a different format?
The degree to which libraries participate will vary with the library's mission; libraries of record have traditionally been the repository for print scholarly content. Interlibrary loan (ILL) has been the mechanism for sharing that content. In the electronic publishing world, libraries of record tend to be more concerned with perpetual access, archiving, and retaining ILL rights, as compared to libraries that traditionally could not afford to and were not designed to archive print. In the digital environment, future access requires a conscious decision and commitment to archiving; it will not happen as a by-product of subscribing and simply not weeding the collection. It has to be a deliberate act.
Publishers have not traditionally archived their own materials and this is a new cost center for them. In the digital environment libraries need to examine the previous methods of archiving or achieving continuing access, which will probably involve publishers, libraries of record, libraries that are not Association of Research Libraries members, and third parties.
SHARING THE COSTS
Publishers are just as wary as librarians are about what it means to promise content in perpetuity. The long-term costs of digital preservation and access are unclear and unpredictable when considering new technologies that have yet to be developed. While publishers may have the best of intentions, it is difficult to make promises based on predictions of future costs and technologies. Many publishers have outsourced hosting and the associated costs while others are managing ongoing hosting costs. Determining and budgeting a reasonable fee for archiving, especially for small society and university press publishers, is a challenge.
Given the current state of budgets, libraries are accelerating their transition from owning print materials to leasing access to the electronic versions. With print content, libraries have physical possession of the material; they keep what they buy and access does not depend on continued payment to a third-party service provider or the publisher. With leased electronic content, the content almost always resides on a server outside of the library and access can depend upon an annual fee for hosting, which could be problematic long term for libraries. There is some concern for access if the library does not support ongoing fees.
Because it costs more to produce and service two formats, both print and electronic, it would be ideal if the electronic format were to become an acceptable format to archive and preserve. However, the library community is not quite ready to throw away all print materials for which there is an electronic version for many reasons including cost, platform host, user preference in selected disciplines, and stability of the publisher, among other issues. Yet librarians and publishers agree that action needs to be taken, especially at a time when many librarians are feeling pressured to discard print and to explore the possibility of a world without print.
HOW WILL CONTENT BE PRESERVED?
Print once looked like the only solution but even when there is a commitment to preserving print, print is less and less an adequate format for current research strategies and needs. In recent years, libraries and publishers have mutually agreed to share the responsibility of archiving and preservation with the help of third-party vendors that offer near-term and long-term access.
Perpetual access infers ownership and provides the library with continued local access to the years to which they have subscribed to a serial if they cancel. Archiving provides for continued access to content based on a defined trigger event that invokes access when the content is no longer available from any publisher.
Two different models are available today, distributed and centralized. LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) and CLOCKSS (Controlled LOCKSS) are distributed models where libraries that participate have custody of the content. The LOCKSS Program is a library-centric model that provides perpetual access locally. The CLOCKSS Archive is a dark archive stored in designated nodes that makes content freely available on the Web when it is no longer available from any publisher, which constitutes a trigger event. By contrast, Portico offers a centralized database where content is ingested in a standard way, replicated in different locations and made available to its members. Perpetual access is managed for libraries that can obtain post-cancellation access for content to which they subscribed. The archive makes content freely available to all participating libraries based on a trigger event. While there may be other approaches to preservation, such as publisher's arrangements through deposit at a national library, these options have the most visibility and promise to provide long-term access.
WHAT WILL BE PRESERVED?
A preservation gap could exist with e-journal or e-book backfiles, many of which were digitized before participation in preservation initiatives was finalized and which, for financial reasons, might never be deposited by publishers. Traditionally, the backups for this archival content were the numerous geographically dispersed print archives that remained publicly available. Now, with physical library space under pressure, there is a growing call for preserving these backfiles so that print copies can be recycled. Given unlimited budgets and the technical feasibility to deposit such huge amounts of content, publishers would undoubtedly be happy to do so. However, in the current economic climate, choices must be made.
Some librarians that have already paid for the “print archives” are reluctant to pay again for online access to digital archives of the same content. Publishers who undertake the cost of digitizing their backfiles usually need to recover those costs and are unlikely to give them away. Other publishers may be reluctant to invest in digitization of their backfiles that would make a complete archival migration possible. Perhaps there is an opportunity for some type of partnership to preserve backfile content access?
The expectation of what should be preserved has expanded tremendously. In addition to the types of content preserved, there is the future question of format migration. Content needs to be preserved and must remain accessible for the long-term future access.
WHAT TYPE OF CONTENT IS AT RISK?
Given the progress made with the current digital preservation initiatives, the content produced by larger publishers, some of whom participate in preservation programs, is not the content most at risk. Smaller publishers who lack financial resources or the technical capacity necessary to support digital preservation of their content are in the most danger. Humanities and social science publishers that typically see less demand for their content online, at least in comparison to science and medical publishers, may feel less pressured to preserve their content.
In particular, journals published only online or publications that are available as open-access content could disappear from the scholarly record. This panel was unsuccessful in engaging an open-access publisher to join the discussion. Some of the publishers who were contacted expressed surprise when hearing about the importance of digital preservation of their content. Even among libraries or researchers there may be an expectation that content that is not behind a subscription wall is not at risk of disappearing. However, one might argue that a publisher not receiving an access fee (and the pressure from customers to preserve content that comes with that obligation) may not feel the responsibility to pay to preserve that content for future use. What are librarians doing, or what should they be doing, to ensure that today's open-access content remains freely available for tomorrow's scholars?
In addition, most preservation entities are not yet prepared to handle the dynamic content in databases or in wikis. With the growing availability of databases and even data sets, a practical solution must be found. Unique resources held within libraries are also at risk. Perhaps publishers could cooperate with libraries in an effort to ensure continuing and wider access to their unique collections.
WHAT IS THE VALUE OF INVESTING IN PERPETUAL ACCESS?
With viable options available, librarians are making decisions based on whether or not perpetual access is provided. Some typical decisions that rest on plausible perpetual access provisions are moving current subscriptions to electronic-only, weeding older print, and shifting print to storage facilities. All of these decisions can reduce the amount of space required for the collection and free it up for other uses.
Initial conversations about the role of the library in the preservation of print and digital scholarship are more frequently expanding to include issues of space. User preference for desktop access to content combined with budget pressures related to staff and buildings are shifting the focus of the conversation at a growing number of institutions to the tangible gains that could be achieved by reducing print subscriptions and the space devoted to print collections.
At Duke University a determining factor in the decision to drop the current print subscription is whether the content is in a trusted archive from a trusted publisher or available from LOCKSS or Portico. Over the last three years the library has been able to acquire electronic backfiles of journals based on one-time funding offered by the university rather than building a new science library. Owning these backfiles and knowing that they were available in a trusted archive enabled the libraries to move the print runs to off-site storage.
Librarians may find that it is beneficial to revisit the library's strategic goals and examine how the various digital initiatives could support those goals. Digital preservation can be used to help libraries protect their own local investment in digital scholarship, as well as help manage their print collections and facilities. Librarians can use traditional cost-benefit analysis to evaluate the value of digital preservation initiatives. One useful metric in the value assessment is a comparison of the library's holdings with the content being preserved or made available by preservation initiatives. A holdings comparison will provide an accurate picture of possible collection management savings, as well as the incremental preservation cost on a per-title basis.
There is a cost to ensure perpetual access and it is necessary to understand the limits of digital options as not all content in the collections is covered. Those librarians who work closely with electronic resource management may need to be prepared to educate their library administration about the current state of digital preservation for scholarly journals. Managing expectations on campus for cost savings with digital collections needs to be balanced by the need to provide long-term access; otherwise, the university's prior investment in collections as an asset becomes an expense for temporary access to digital content.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
CLOCKSS. http://www.clockss.org (accessed July 21, 2009). | |||||
LOCKSS. http://www.lockss.org (accessed July 21, 2009). | |||||
Portico. http://www.portico.org (accessed July 21, 2009). | |||||