It was 1996 when digital preservation practitioners worldwide made the first steps on the way to become 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 issue the publication of the CPA/RLG report, published 30 years ago.
In December 1994 the Commission on Preservation and Access (CPA), together with the Research Libraries Group (RLG) in the US invited a group of 21 preservation pioneers. These pioneers represented universities, publishers, industry and heritage organisations like the Library of Congress and the National Archives in the US. The goal of this “Task Force on Archiving of Digital Information” was to create an inventory of the issues around preservation of digital material. But this was not all: the group was also asked “to remove the issue from the list”. In other words, to come up with practical solutions. Donald Waters, at that moment deputy librarian at Yale University and John Garrett (Cyber Villages Consortium) chaired the Taskforce. Members of the group were amongst others Howard Besser (University of Michigan), Margareth Hedstrom (University of Michigan), Clifford Lynch (University of California) , Ann Okerson (Yale University), Karen Hunter (Elsevier Science) and Henry Gladney (IBM Almaden Research Center), just to name a few.
For many librarians and archivists, the task of digital preservation was overwhelming in those days. There were no ready to use solutions, no systems, no rules. Software and hardware versions succeeded in a rapid speed. More and more digital publications were published and the heritage institutions wanted to preserve that for the longer term. But the question was: how?
The Task Force met twice physically and in the meantime many emails were exchanged between the participants, according to Karen Hunter. Already in September 1995 a draft report was announced in D-Lib magazine, that was just launched a few months earlier. Via the list server of the Task Force everyone could participate in the discussion. Feedback was received mainly from US organisations, but also the National Library of Australia reacted. The final version of “Preserving Digital Information” was published in August 1996.
The report describes in around 60 pages the range of aspects of digital preservation as a coherent entity and seen from different viewpoints. In their own words “an analysis of the digital landscape”. The Task Force formulates some starting points, like the big question of who is responsible for preservation? The answer was “the creator or owner of the digital information”. Not everyone agreed on this. Especially national libraries did not, as they did not trust for example publishers with the task of long term preservation. The Task Force also made some recommendations, for example the advice to start with certification of digital archives. This ultimately led to the RLG/NARA project in 2003 to develop certification criteria, which we can recognize in the ISO 16363 and the TRAC list.
The report was very influential on the activities of the pioneers in the 1990-ties. In Europe, Australia and the US. It was presented at an early stage to the developers of the OAIS model. The CPA/RLG report can be seen as one of the cornerstones of digital preservation and should be on the “Reading List” of every preservationist, as a valuable and insightful legacy.