It was 1996 when digital preservation practitioners worldwide made the first steps on the way to develop a profession. We, as digital preservationists, can celebrate 30 years of experience in an evolving domain that was inspired by a tradition of libraries and archives: to preserve heritage material and keep it accessible for the long term. In this first issue of a series of blogs, I’ll describe some interesting events in 1996.
Choosing to preserve
During the event of the Leipziger Buchmesse, from 29-30 March 1996, a group of 200 participants of 35 countries gathered together in the Haus des Buches in Leipzig for an international conference with the title “Choosing to preserve. Towards a cooperative strategy for long-term access to the intellectual heritage. “
Both the participants and the speakers were people professionally involved in preservation, more specifically preservation of printed and written materials, mainly librarians. In his introduction, Klaus Dieter Lehmann, director of Die Deutsche Bibliothek explained the background for this theme with the scaring exclamation: “Today, at the end of the twentieth century, we are confronted with a threat to the collections in our libraries to such a catastrophic extent as never before”.
What he meant was the problem of the “brittle books”, the acidification, weakening and embrittlement of paper of books, printed between around 1850-1940. Large libraries like the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the British Library or Die Deutsche Bibliothek estimated a loss of 25-30 percent of their collections if this process of deterioration could not be stopped.
But the brittle books were not the only challenge for heritage organisations, nor were the heritage organisations the only ones to worry. Dianne Marcum, President of the US Commission on Preservation and Access (CPA) and of the Council on Library Resources (now CLIR) welcomed the participants on behalf of the CPA and the European counterpart, the European Commission on Preservation and Access (ECPA), (not to be confused with the Commission of the European Communities, at that time called CEC).
ECPA was founded in 1993 with financial support from the CPA, by a group of European representatives from universities and research institutions to save the “intellectual heritage” that was endangered by the brittle books problem. ECPA became a central point in Europe to monitor preservation activities: The European Preservation Information Center, EPIC, with a website. This website can still be seen in the Internet Archive and is mainly about material preservation, but there is also a bit of digital preservation. http://www.knaw.nl/ecpa/ecpatex/map/index.htm
In her speech, Dianne Marcum draw the attention not only to material preservation but also to the preservation issues in the digital environment. Regarding the “intellectual heritage” the focus was on the role of the publishers who created electronic material that was essential for the scholars. But at that time discussions were still ongoing on who should preserve that material. National libraries? Publishers? And what about the long-term availability of other research materials that would never enter the libraries? Marcum promotes in her talk more collaboration between librarians and scholars to form a united front and draws attention to the fact that procedures from the past might not be valid in the presence.
The presentations give a good impression of the turbulent times for the librarians in those days: on the one hand they needed to tackle the catastrophic threat for their paper collections and on the other hand they needed to deal with the electronic materials that were available. Several national libraries in Europe and abroad made their first steps in digital preservation. More about that in the next post.
Source: Choosing to Preserve.Towards a cooperative strategy for long-term access to the intellectual heritage. Papers of the international conference organized by the European Commission on Preservation and Access and Die Deutsche Bibliothek, Leipzig/Frankfurt am Main March 29-30, 1996. Edited by Yola de Lusenet. European Commission on Preservation and Access. Amsterdam 1997