For iPRES 2024 my poster Into the future was accepted. This blog post is intended to give some background information.
As some of you might know, I’m preparing a book about the origins of digital preservation. My curiosity involves reading many articles about digital preservation activities in the world. I’m trying to better understand the way of thinking and the background of decisions made in those days. It is my belief that by knowing this background, we as digital preservationists will have more respect for our predecessors, and value better the contribution of these pioneers to the current status of digital preservation. Knowing the past will help shape the future.
During my research I came across the 6th DELOS workshop on Preservation of Digital Information in Tomar (Portugal) in 1998, organized by DELOS and NEDLIB.
Three things that triggered me.
This event in Tomar had some elements that immediately caught my attention. The first was that, as far as I could see, before this workshop, there was no international meeting in Europe with explicitly “digital preservation” as the main topic. With 24 authors from 3 continents, this meeting can be seen as the first conference in Europe about digital preservation. iPRES, now celebrating its 20th birthday, had its first conference in 2004.
The second striking element was that the DELOS workshop was co-organized by two different European projects: DELOS and NEDLIB. Both DELOS and NEDLIB represented projects, partially funded by the FP4 research program of the European Commission, but via two different sources. DELOS was part of the ESPRIT long term research programme and NEDLIB was a project started in the EU Telematics for Libraries program. What was the focus of these projects and how did they come together?
The third element that drew my attention was that the opening of the conference started with a movie Into the Future, made in the US and shown on television there to get the attention of the general public for digital preservation. It made me wonder whether we are taking the best routes to inform funders and the general public about digital preservation?
The DELOS working group
The DELOS working group, as the project was called, had a kick-off meeting in March 1996 in France and the project lasted until 1999. Many successive project initiatives under the name DELOS would follow. Some say the influence of DELOS was crucial for projects like PLANETS, SCAPE etc.
The initiative for the DELOS working group came from ERCIM, European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics, extended with the US University of Michigan and publisher Elsevier. Their objective was to stimulate research related to efficient and cost-effective developments in digital libraries and to collaborate with organisations working in the same area. The 6th DELOS workshop can be seen as an attempt to link two worlds: the computer science people and the digital library people.
The NEDLIB project
The NEDLIB (Networked European Deposit Libraries) project was an initiative of the Conference of European National Libraries (CENL). Every year the directors of the European national libraries came together and discussed pressing topics. Their COBRA+ standing committee , a collaboration of eight libraries, decided in 1997 to start a task group focusing on “long term storage of, and access to, electronic publications and digital collections”, resulting in a project proposal for the EU 4th Framework Programme. The NEDLIB project started in January 1998 with 9 European national libraries plus a national archive and 3 publishers, including Elsevier.
The linking pin
But how did the two initiatives meet? Was there a linking pin, an organisation that took part in both projects? In fact, there was. It was not an organisation, but as so often happens, it was a person. José Borbinha from Portugal. In 1998 he worked both at INESC, a member of ERCIM and participating in DELOS and at the National Library of Portugal, a project member of NEDLIB. José Borbinha commemorated this Tomar meeting in a blog post for the Digital Preservation Day in 2017, adding an interesting anecdote. https://www.dpconline.org/blog/wdpd/two-early-episodes-on-digital-preservation-plus-one. He also came to the conclusion that this 1998 meeting was “one of the world’s first scientific events on digital preservation”.
Both he and people from the National Library of the Netherlands (the project lead of NEDLIB) organized the Tomar meeting. It was a unique collaboration between information scientists and librarians.
The announcement
In a time when social media were not yet present, there were list servers and “electronic” journals that kept the small digital preservation community up to date. One important source of information was the D-LIB Magazine, an US initiative, started in 1995.
In February 1998 in the category “Goings On”, the Magazine published an invitation for position papers for the Sixth DELOS Workshop on Preservation. In the announcement, a wide range of possible subjects was suggested, highlighting three main topics: digital, preservation and information. The 17 suggested subjects give an interesting insight in the challenges the library community saw itself confronted with in those days: formats, copyright, authenticity, access, storage, metadata, standards, strategies, policies, longevity, hardware, repository, reliability and storage etc. All these areas were new challenges. No shared ideas about approaches were formulated yet, nor did OAIS or PREMIS exist.
The workshop
Responses to the invitation came from 3 continents: Europe, the US and Australia. In total 24 authors from 20 organisations submitted a proposal and they were all accepted. The workshop was all about informing each other. Many speakers were involved in national projects and pioneering in their discipline. Although I could not find a list of attendees, reports say that there were around 60 people. From an eye witness I heard it was a very lively meeting, with people enthusiast and fully aware that they were entering a new field of research and practice.
The presentations were a mix of practical solutions and more fundamental approaches to digital preservation, like defining a framework for preservation policies (UK). An important part of contributions was about the preservation of electronic publications and web publications. That is no surprise. National libraries saw an important part of their collection replaced by digital. They were not sure how to capture and preserve this. We see presentations about early web archiving initiatives like PANDORA (Australia) and EVA (Finland).
The early attempts of thinking about metadata were reported in the presentation about the CEDARS project of the UK. This was also a topic in the NEDLIB project, leading to the publication in 2000 of a metadata scheme which was further developed by CEDARS. No doubt the meeting in Tomar made collaboration between the partners of both projects easier.
Another area was the preservation of audiovisual materials in projects like VOCS (Switzerland) and VIDEON (Portugal). But the fast-changing file formats in this discipline forced people think about a solution. The “Digital Rosetta Stone” was an attempt to find a model to preserve information about file formats and storage devices, so that data could be retrieved from obsolete media at a later stage. Others focused on developing a “Universal Preservation Format”, containing all relevant information to make an object permanent accessible.
One thing that is nowadays often forgotten, is that digitization was seen as a preservation approach, part of the usual set of migration, emulation and hardware preservation. By making it digital, it was supposed to be less vulnerable than (acid) paper. This meeting was the right place to inform colleagues about digitization projects in Bulgaria or the digitization approach in the UK by scanning the scientific journal Nature.
Into the future
Although all participants were aware of the importance of digital preservation, the movie Into the Future, made by Terry Sanders and presented at the opening of the workshop, made a big impression.
The US Commission on Preservation and Access was the initiator of this movie, which was intended to raise the interest of the general US public in digital preservation, or as it was phrased, the importance of saving the human record, now that it became more and more digital. The movie was shown on television via the Public Broadcasting Service in the US a few months earlier, reaching a large audience. The movie is still available on Vimeo.
In the movie we see several preservation pioneers contributing their vision on the importance of digital preservation and giving an explanation of the problems society was facing. For example Jeff Rothenberg, Tim Berners Lee, Deanne Marcum, Paul le Clerq, Margareth Hedstrom and Kenneth Thibodeau. They were worried about the sheer quantity of digital information, the wide range of file formats, the speed of new hardware generations, the high investments that needed to be made, the lack of standards. Although you can hear the optimistic view on the promises of the world wide web (“connecting people”, knowledge available for everyone), the web itself is seen as a chaotic place where it is difficult to find things. Quite understandable from a library point of view! The development of the digital library should bring solutions.
What can we learn?
Almost three decades later, the digital preservation community has found answers to the questions these pioneers raised in the movie and during the Tomar workshop. We agree on standards, we share preservation principles, we developed tools and services. We reached a maturity level and are starting to evaluate what we achieved. OAIS, Audit and Certification, metadata, curricula, all these things are now subject of evaluation or criticism.(See for example the DPC presentations on #IAW2024 – Digital Preservation 2049 on YouTube and this RDA presentation ). The coming years the question will be: what should we keep and what can we leave behind? Arguments like “too complicated” or, “too much”, in itself are not valid, as they distract us from the ultimate goal we want to achieve.
In my opinion it is important to keep the original focus center stage: saving the digital human record, whatever changes are suggested. This is the foundation of our effort, it is where our energy should go. Previous insights that were inspired by this foundation can be replaced by new insights, but only if they will reach the same goal: saving the human record.