Hi everyone and welcome to Barcelona. It is my great pleasure to introduce for you
our keynote speaker and to kick off the
the action assembly, uh, adventure, that we are all about to embark on together.
So the person that I'm introducing probably needs very little introduction
for most of the people here. Cliff Lynch has been around for a
long while. He's been the director of the Coalition for
Networked Information since 1997, and has been ubiquitous with the
issues of digital preservation and data and, you know, education
and libraries and the intersection between the
the scholarship and the libraries for most of his career.
Among his great talents has been flying around the countries of
the world for many many years and so he embodies the principle of
alignment maybe better than anybody else in our in
our group. If we could just take Cliff's brain
and you know map it out somehow we would have a much better
idea of where the opportunities and gaps lie. Since we cannot take out his brain
we will let him share with us a different way.
I will say that my memory of first meeting Cliff and first
engaging with him dates back to the very first library conference
that I ever had the pleasure of attending, back this was
more than a decade ago, I was moving over from scholarly
space into the library space and was mesmerized by web-wise
getting exposed to all kinds of things and Cliff was there that year
and I remember seeing him and I thought he was asleep
and I remember Martin Halbert was sitting next to me
he you know nudges me with his [inaudible whisper]
and I remember meeting Cliff and I was struck by three things simultaneously.
when he was clearly not asleep he was more awake than anybody else at that
conference had every you know piece of what was
going on that's in his mind along with everything else that he had been exposed
to in the weeks and years prior to that um his knowledge was astounding to me as
a very junior person in the field trying
to first understand what was happening. Second, I was amazed by how gracious and
kind he was to me as a newbie and i think that that too
you know in terms of principles of alignment as a keynote speaker fitness
uh that that is something that he brings to the table
i've i've seen that generosity of spirit and very few
major leaders who have come to the level of prominence that
Cliff has and he can hop up with the youngest and the oldest
uh among us in terms of knowledge and years with ease
uh which is something that we all should be grateful for
the third thing was that from the beginning it was clear that he had a
perspective that crossed sectors it wasn't just about crossing
institutional boundaries it was about crossing sector boundaries and from
the beginning that's been something that i've been very interested in and he
continues to be one of the the people that i look to as
a clear leader in uniting visions and ideas and
ideologies even philosophies across these various
players in different corners of the space.
So there's my very long-winded introduction of the man who needs no introduction.
Cliff Lynch, we are so delighted to have
you not closing our conference this time but instead
opening our conference order. Thank you.
[Applause]
Wow that was a very kind introduction thank you,
a very flattering and touching one. I am in an interesting position here
in that I have the opportunity rather than to try and
sum up some of what i heard which is often the role i'm cast in a
conferences in the role i played at the first end of that meeting
but rather opening the meeting this time and what i really hope to do in
the next 40 minutes or so we'll have some time for a conversation
at the end is to build a little bit of a bridge
between the first meeting and where we left that
and where we are today um it's been a little while since the first
meeting some things have changed in the world
um i actually think we have made some progress on some of these
areas of alignment or at least change the playing field
a bit around these areas so that it will be easier to make progress
and i'll identify a couple of those places as i go along
i also um think that opportunities have shifted a little bit
one of the things i tried to do at the close of the last meeting is
to trace through the various arenas of potential alignment that were
identified at that meeting and to provide some thoughts on some of
the places that i thought were most promising either in terms of their
long-term payoff if we could make progress
or in some cases simply because various various situations had taken place that
would allow some fairly quick achievement and
i'll reflect on a few of those i think it's also always important in
these areas to keep asking what are we missing it's easy to start
with you know here are six big problem areas
now you know isn't that enough and aren't
you happy with six big problem areas but sometimes i think that
we keep coming back to those because we know they're important and don't realize
that as the world shifts there are new important areas that need to join some
of these classical areas of challenge so
i want to divide my comments into two pieces
one is to reflect a little bit first about this interesting word alignment
that we've used in these two meetings and some of the um
some of the things that that implies some of the things that
it permits some of the things that it enables i think that's actually a very
well-chosen word and i'm glad that the organizers held on
to it because i think it's a word that leaves a lot of room and so
i'll i'll talk a little bit about alignment in abroad
then i will come and i want to look through
at least very briefly the various areas of um of cooperation or alignment
or discussion that were outlined at the last meeting supplemented by a
few more that i'll put out some of them i mentioned in my closing
remarks at the last meeting some of them are sort of new considerations
and hopefully those reflections will be useful as we go into
our plenary panels and our subsequent action discussions so let me start
with this word alignment now
there's been you know endless talk of collaboration
and the need for collaboration in building digital libraries in digital
preservation in maintaining cultural heritage
collaboration is one of these one of these words that makes everybody
very comfortable because often it's just a lot of talking
and
any of you who have been in organizations who've been involved in
collaborations with other organizations know full well from your experiences
what happens is there's sort of an early stage of collaboration
where it's mostly about sharing knowledge and talking
with others about what you're doing and other sorts of things but then you start
coming up upon this barrier
where it's it starts creeping towards interdependence
and that's a very serious threshold for organizations to cross
all of a sudden you now have to worry about
how your choices affect other organizations
critically and how failures in other organizations
may jeopardize your own ability to carry out your mission or deliver
services and one of the things we've certainly
seen in the cultural memory sector in the u.s
in the higher ed and research sectors in the u.s
is that getting across that threshold is very difficult
it is particularly difficult when you're dealing with large numbers of
institutions and in fact one of the classic ways that
we found in the states of getting around that
is rather than multilateral arrangements among a whole
series of institutions we may set up an organization that the institutions
fund but the critical interdependence is really between
each participating institution and that organization
rather than a very diffused kind of multilateral interdependence
so interdependence um you know is an issue that um that is
very tricky and i think it's a threshold that
organizations need to be very clear and thoughtful about crossing
collaboration is fine but collaboration that suddenly forces you into
interdependence with a partner that you're not necessarily confident in is a
very very big problem we've had a lot of
conversations in the u.s recently that i think have been significant
about interdependence and alignment among projects
there's a group that chuck henry president of clear put
together about a year ago called rather grantly
the committee on coherence at scale
which is a um it's a it's a group that includes a
couple of university presidents a few other higher
ed leaders um people who are involved in the
leadership of large-scale projects like hottie trust
or deepen or um digital public library of america things
like that share the the newly emergent effort
to kind of rationalize the management of scholarly literature
um that's coming out of the um the research library community in the
states thus far it has been mostly a u.s discussion
but i think the themes you know really really echo here and
this issue of interdependence comes up the issue of identifying infrastructure
comes up and particularly what infrastructure
that might be might be shared across projects
questions of sustainability come up very quickly
one interesting thing that i had not really thought about perhaps as much
as i might have that's emerging is that you can have
very fruitful conversations between
projects that that silo within specific areas
so for instance all of a sudden if you look across
preservation oriented projects and access oriented projects like
the digital public library of america and content stewardship
projects like how do you trust you begin to see specialization of
function and linkage in a way that i wasn't sure we were
really ready to have a discussion and while the
focus here has been on digital preservation
i think that it's worth recognizing we may want to have those kind of standing
conversations as well about what to align
national strategies for digital preservation
have to do with what are fundamentally access
and discovery and aggregation mechanisms like
europeana or the digital public library of america
so i think there's some interesting opportunities there that may be gained
by expanding school but let me circle back to alignment
again and um note something else
the language that we use here is national approaches
and when we start thinking about interdependency
interdependency is a big leap for organizations
it's an even bigger leap for nation states
there are certain fundamental things that nation states
need to do and should do and that's why you have them
and you don't necessarily contract that out
it gets a little bit tricky to get too interdependent there
the language of alignment gives us a lot of room to move
there without without really crossing that interdependency barrier
too much and yet it gives us some very very powerful opportunities
to the extent that national consensus in multiple nations can
if not speak with one voice speak in a way that reflects common values and
common goals and common themes which is very much what i see alignment
as being about i think it can be a very powerful force
or project for progress as we try and deal
with the sometimes seemingly overwhelming
challenges of digital preservation and you know they are in some ways genuinely
overwhelming there is more to do than there are
resources available than i think they're going to be resources
available anytime soon and we really need to be able to make a case
for those resources for example in a coherent way
let me say one other group of things about national approaches
one of the things that i found challenging and a bit troublesome
about the first antidote meeting was that we were trying
to have a conversation about
national approaches and how to align them
but it's very complex to answer the question who speaks for a
nation in digital preservation particularly
when we are looking broadly at digital
preservation of cultural heritage which i indeed think we must and not
just cultural heritage but the full body of the scientific
record and the intellectual record that our nations hold that i i view is sort
of part of that cultural heritage and i
should probably be very clear there when i
speak in language invoking something like the idea of the
cultural record i believe that that entirely subsumes
the intellectual work of society the scientific and scholarly work of the
society the evidence that supports that
scholarship it is not limited at all to the
creative or governmental or historical kind of record of
societies it really does incorporate the full intellectual life there now
when we think about preserving that kind of cultural record
it's really not just the library sector and even speak
even the question of who speaks for the library sector
or who speaks for the research library sector
is a lot easier to answer in some countries than another
certainly in the united states we see leadership
from organizations like the library of congress but we also
see the broader research library community
and particularly the institutions that are attached to our major universities
carrying out an agenda that is you know aligned with
if you will the library of congress but actually
you know differentiated from it in numerous
important kinds of ways so i'm delighted to see you know just
speaking from a parochial u.s point of view for a minute
participation from our research library leadership
as well as from our governmental sector i think that's highly appropriate and
i hope that you know other nations who are represented here
are able to do that as well as is appropriate for their setting but
really when we go on to talk about digital preservation in the broad sense
it's not just the library sector it's the archive
sector which you know has variable relations with the library
sector from nation to nation um it includes museums
um i can remember um as a younger
and more ignorant person having some conversations with
folks in europe um about some interesting collaborations
that were starting to happen in the united states in the 1980s
between museums and libraries and
being told that that is a very difficult thing to do
in many european countries where in fact the national library reports to an
entirely different ministry than the national
structure of museums and that in fact there is um you know very strong
siloam between them in that sense that's something we have to work around
and something we have to we have to deal with it a
conversation about aligning national perspectives
um there's more the old the old trinity was
libraries museums and archives but in fact
the 20th century and now the 21st century
has seen the emergence of other kinds of cultural memory organizations that are
vitally important in this discussion public broadcasting for example which
holds enormous records that are critical to
the the understanding of society and culture in the 20th century
and more recently and i'll have a little more to say about this later
we see the emergence of large data from every quarter
one part of that includes all of the um all of the supporting evidence for
data intensive scholarly work across the sciences the social sciences
the humanities medicine
all of those kinds of areas and the organizations and
institutions that have dealt historically with scientific data
come out of a whole nother set of silos you see organizations historically like
codata who have worked a little bit in the preservation
of scientific data as well as in sharing um many of the national code
data organizations are attached or affiliated in some
fashion with the national academy of the various
participant nations so that's a that's a whole nother set of
voices and um priorities that uh need to factor i'm delighted to see
among us some representatives from initiatives
like the research data alliance who are starting to bridge those gaps
i think that on a national level we've made
quite a bit of progress in the states and bridging those gaps in recent years
certainly i can say that our research library community is starting to engage
data management and data preservation a lot more seriously
you see um you see organizations like the
national digital stewardship alliance that the library of congress has brought
together that are putting these prominently on
the agenda i was really interested i had an
opportunity earlier in this year to get to the most
recent library meeting i had not had a chance to visit with that group in
some years and i was
fascinated to see how that group had become reinvigorated and how
one of the important agenda items there was
to see the to understand the role of research libraries within europe in the
in the data management and data preservation areas so
i think that we've seen some significant changes of landscape occurring there
since the um the first handed out meeting and those set us up
for some very constructive conversations about
how we can align national strategies for digital preservation
specifically in some of these new areas such as big data i'll have just a little
bit more to say about data and intensive preservation
later but that's sort of fills out my my thoughts on
the nature of this word alignment the amount of
room it gives us it certainly opens the door
to collaborate projects to indeed even interdependent things if we need to
do that to the development of common
infrastructure that we can all rely upon all of those are allowed under
under alignment but we also have room for
coordinated approaches approaches that work together
um approaches that um gain strength from a common voice
but do not take us across this this very challenging line to
interdependence now let's talk a little bit about
some of the specific areas in which we're hoping to see some
alignment strategy or perhaps more so
what pack of issues is legal now you know legal issues have always had
this sort of fascinating character that countries have legal regimes and
probably aren't going to outsource those anytime soon
they all like to have their own legal regimes but there is a recognition
we need to coordinate them um
it would be nice in my view it would be better than nice it would be miraculous
if we could get to a point where we can agree more effectively on common
principles and goals we'd like to achieve through legislation
on a national basis and see that kind of coordination
um i i think we have seen some you know first attempts at that
within the european world there was a wonderful report that we
talked a bit about at the first handout meeting
that really tried to sort of step back from the minutia
of law and international law and comparative national law
and this is an area where unfortunately often the people you get get you get
helping you hear our lawyers and they plunge very quickly into the minutia
and the details and really um you know it feels to me we need some
sort of sweeping principles here about the there is a genuine
importance and public policy objective in the preservation of cultural heritage
those sorts of things that are not well articulated i don't
know exactly how we elevate the conversation
to that level but that seems to me to be the there i mean
there are venues for this kind of detailed
you know coordination and international law but what we need to do i think
perhaps is to try and connect this to the broader goals of
digital preservation at the organizational level
i've already talked about this sort of complexity about national organization
of conversations about digital preservation and how you bring
that into an international forum like this it would seem to me that
there are a number of other areas and many of
these have at least
elements of things other than the organizational way
they include economic and legal and other kinds of considerations
but a couple places it seems to me that there may be low-hanging fruit or
the ideas about mirroring material between countries
it's quite remarkable to see how this has been accomplished from the
ground up in certain strange ways so for example you have you know
brewster kale one of our you know in my mind
unquestioned visionaries and leaders in the digital preservation area
who builds this internet archive and very shortly after
he starts building it he starts going around and putting copies of it here and
there in other countries so that he's got some
redundancy against a whole lot of bad things that
can happen ranging from you know physical problems
to legal meltdowns of various kinds can we make it easier to mirror
collections across contexts and particularly to do it in
such a way that the mirror sites don't have to go
through all of the agony of reclearing rights
and things like that i think that's a good question to ask
that's one that creeps up towards interdependence
but it's a very real and pragmatic scenario that we need to deal with
another set of issues that i've been thinking about a lot in the
last few months and we're seeing this pop up
in a surprising number of contacts is the idea of what i call transition
distortion now let me give you a couple of examples
of what might drive that so there are the obvious ones that we're
familiar with where for example now we mostly license access
to scholarly journals that are held at publisher sites rather than
bringing copies of that material into each library that subscribes and we
set up a number of community wide
mechanisms um mostly revolving around some variation of an escrow principle
so you see this in portico you see this in clocks you see this in some of the
deposit arrangements with national libraries
so that if the material ceases to become available from its primary source
we have another source for that material and there each of the services that
deals in this area has ideas about um you know when when does something
cross the threshold between becoming unavailable and what happens
after that um in another venue um
uh deepan is starting in the the digital preservation network
backbone network in the us is starting to think about
what they're referring to as successor or succession arrangements
for material that's deposited there so that if the
original depositor you know has to give up on it
then there's some way to get it somewhere else
um uh into some other custody there are lots of other places this is
showing up one place is what happens when you get
organizational failures of various kinds either
either preservation has become too much for some
institution or the institution itself which may have been many other functions
besides preservation is collapsing i don't know if you've seen the
statistics or what the statistics look like in
other nations but you're seeing some very dire predictions in the united
states about the long the sustainability over the next 20
years for many of the lesson needed smaller four-year colleges
some of those actually hold important collections
um and uh those are you need to be taken care of
and i'll give you one more example of a place where
we're very busy creating a big problem for ourselves with this kind of transfer
of stewardship so in the area of
scholarly and scientific data where we know so little about the
long-term use patterns and it is so difficult to really figure
out how to assess data sets
and how long to keep them in an environment where resources are
hideously competitive and the source of that funding is very
problematic it's pretty easy to work an arrangement
where you write a grant and you put something in the brand that
says i'll make the data available for 10
years and you can even get some funding to
help with that the trouble is before you know it the 10
years is over and now starting pretty soon
we're going to see a steady stream of data that's sitting in various
repositories and various institutions saying
my time is up i need to be reassessed i need to figure out whether my current
keeper is going to continue to keep me or whether my currency burden presumably
wants to be a principled kind of well-behaved
participant in the world is going to you know bid me out and see if somebody
else wants to keep being instead we have no mechanisms for doing that
right now and um we're going to need to do that
not just nationally but internationally i can't imagine
how particularly for scientific data sets
we're going to be able to deal with that kind of
appraisal and succession in anything other than an international
context so i i think that's a very thinking about
in the technical common tools infrastructure are of great
interest they're easy wins in some sense at some
level
benchmarking again that's a very useful thing that one can do
collectively um does not cross the line um
to genuine interdependence but it's a place where we can
gain leverage from our colleagues work i think some conversations about
security and integrity wouldn't be bad um this is one of these great
ignoring talk about digital preservation yet um it sure feels like
the threat level just keeps ratcheting up
um you know how often now do you see in the newspaper or
in professional journals of various kinds
announcements of data breaches isn't it strange that they so seldom
show up in the context of cultural
heritage collections and preservation does it make you worried occasionally
that maybe we just haven't noticed since uh it seems to be showing up
everywhere else um i don't know quite what we do there
um i mean i think some information sharing might be a really good start
just moving on fairly rapidly through these areas though
um uh another one that was identified with standards
um i'm actually not a huge fan of that right now
i think that we there are probably a few rather specific
places we need standards but i think we need to be instead of just sort of
going around saying we need standards we need to be
rather specific about the areas we need to be
struggling with i think we also need to recognize
that we got really confused about 20 or 30 years ago and we started doing
a lot of things under the umbrella of standards
which more genuinely are best practices or
guidelines for best practices they're not the sort of thing that's you know a
genuine standard you might plug this plug into that
output and expect it to work um that are really readily testable um
these are much more um you know sort of statements
of best practice trustworthy repositories and things of that nature
i think that you know we would probably do ourselves a genuine service
if we were clearer about calling many of these best practices
because that's what they are and they're very valuable they are well
worth sharing by amending a best practice is a lot
less ponderous than um
amending the standard where you have to start worrying in a standard about
what does that do with backwards compatibility
to install bases and things like that best practices should be quite fluid i
mean think think about medicine for example
where there are there's a tremendous use of best
practices and unfortunately they often refer to them as standards of care
and as soon as they go down that path they start getting very difficult to
change in the face of new evidence about what works and what
doesn't it's it's a very interesting ironic
situation and i don't think we might get ourselves in the same track
um economics uh the nightmare of sustainability um
i'm not sure what we can do collectively here other than
other than weep together and share you know thoughts on approaches
that have helped out i do think that there's a connection
that i'll come back to at the very end between
making the case and sustainability and um that's a pretty
i'll i'll say just a little about that now so
sustainability has become this sort of funny code word in many settings for
um somebody else needs to pay for this
i can't i don't have the funding for it so you gave me grant funds to get
started and how they've taken them away or
i got some government funds to build this and now the government is
disinvesting in cultural heritage
you all know the stories here sometimes the right answer to
sustainability i believe is to say that these genuinely
are part of the public good and public heritage
and that um you know making clever statements about how these should
be you know outsourced somehow
and paid for by fees from their user base
is not really the right answer sometimes the right answer i think
is to remind people that there is a public policy and public obligation here
that needs to be picked up and i think that that
is a proposition that is best done on an aligned basis
it's one where speaking with a common voice i think there's something to be
said for i don't want to suggest that that's the
right way to handle all problems in this area
but i think we've seen a sort of uh overcompensation in the other direction
yet in the past decade within at least in the united states
a terrific amount of disinvestment in research and cultural heritage broadly
in education
in my comments closing the last handout meeting i
called out the preservation of
the audio visual record ranging from the late 19 late 1800s through
the beginning of the 21st century as a particular priority
and that's kind of a funny one because mostly
it's not digital actually a great deal of this
is pre-digital it's going to get turned into digital
as we put it up i don't really see any alternative
in most cases uh that that's simply a fact of life
it would be much better if it was digital already than we could
deal with it but actually right now it's just this sort of
horrible pit of obsolete devices and media and poorly documented storage
standards and all kinds of wonderful stuff
it's a problem that i think all of our nations share
i think that there's a lot of specialized knowledge and specialized
equipment that's involved here this is one
where i i think that we may have no choice but to be a lot
more interested than we've been up till now because
um unlike many problems this one is coming with very
short fuse a lot of this media is literally you know running away week
by week in the shelves in the storage facilities we can arrest
that to some extent by climate control and things like that
but um a lot of the media just wasn't built
to last the equipment that you read this with
you know they're not making any more of it
so it becomes you know an endless quest on ebay and other places to find
you know barely working devices from 40 years ago and trying to use them to do a
bit of copying um they're they're you know the time is
very much against us on this and i think
that because of it and because most of it i think is going to end up
converging into digital forms it probably makes a lot of sense to
consider using scope for landing strategies even though it's
a little bit on the fringe of digital preservation
let me say a little more about the data and data i've talked a bit
about the sort of scientific and scholarly
side of that and i think we're increasingly
recognizing that as a genuine challenge and
starting to mobilize to deal with it i'm not sure
we get the scale of it at this point or the level of investment that it's going
to take but at least we're starting to grapple with it but there's a lot of
other stuff happening in this area too which is more elusive i'll just give
you three or four quick examples
our memory organizations are full of what i would characterize as ephemera
um think about stuff like gift catalogs that used to come in the
mail
20 30 50 years ago that gave a sense of what
what was manufactured and what was purchased and what it
cost think about railway or airplane schedules that gave you a
sense of how what was it like to try and journey
from one place to another 50 years ago
menus i don't know if all of you realize this
but menus which a number of libraries and archives collect historically
have turned out to be items of great fascination to the public
and draw in huge numbers of viewers who are interested in
what did people eat 50 years ago and even
and what did it cost
now all of these kinds of things used to be easy to capture because they
were just physical things and somebody would put them inside an
archive now so many of these things are actually
hiding in databases that you can't see on the web
you can simply query them and the databases change all the time
and you can't really get it through traditional web archiving
and if you want to answer the question you know where could you fly directly to
from atlanta 15 years ago that's actually a pretty
tough question to get a handball
in the individual cases these ephemera are
probably not critical but when you start aggregating them it
really is a tremendous loss of historical knowledge
and i think we all struggle with this in different ways i think this is a
place we might at least have some conversations about
um a second one which actually shares um a number of common aspects of the
ephemeris situation is news which i mentioned in my comments
last time that's a really you know vital piece of
history that every nation collects in some way
and as people like um bernie reilly have observed
news isn't what it used to be you know it's not paper anymore it's
databases that are held by people or sometimes discarded by people um
this is one that i think it's very important getting angle on
and i can imagine ways in which handles on this could be developed
nationally through policy or regulation but then we
have a question of how we share these results
internationally how we share these resources internationally
uh third area is large organizational databases of
various kinds not just government but corporate
huge problems here and then finally just you know i'll mention in the
interests of um of time without getting into it is the
whole question of how personal records and activities are
becoming digital the so-called area of personal digital
in their digital lives that's that's one that again you know every nation here
has got to wrestle with as part of its attempt to
um to deal with its segment of of the cultural record
um and it's a very very challenging one so just just kind of um fleshing out
from these areas um talking about collecting
policies trying to not necessarily align collecting policies even
in an interdependent way but just understanding
what other people are doing and if possible
where somebody's doing it so maybe i don't have to or maybe i can mirror it
in some way these are discussions that are
really hard but potentially could be very fruitful
and as a sub-piece of that um i'd also encourage us to think a little
bit about measuring how well we're doing
it at a very abstract level i could pose questions for you like you
know how approximately what percentage
of the cultural record that's out there and that we should be
preserving are we actually preserving now
that's a very challenging thing to quantify at that level of abstraction
but you can take it down to some specific areas you can ask this question
about journals for instance and there have
been a couple of preliminary studies that have started to
ask the question of about you know of the
journals that are published of various types or periodicals
what percentage are ending up in one or more of these
these preservation facilities that i spoke about earlier
you could ask this question about ebooks we actually
have you know some data on what publication looks at looks like
nation by nation year by year you could start taking a rough shot at
and how much of that is ending i think
there have been some good pieces of work trying to estimate
how much of the surface web is being captured and who's capturing it and
with what frequency and you can combine that with other stuff
about how quickly does the web change to you know not get perfect numbers but at
least a feel for how well we're doing there
we should be thinking about whether we can do that in other areas
without again getting overly formal about
measuring exactly the same way if we can agree roughly on how to count
we can start getting a sense collectively of how well we're doing
and whether the tide is coming is it is coming in for us or
whether it's just getting worse and worse every year
and that takes me straight to the final point of alignment that i want to make a
particular point for
the public i believe and policy makers do not adequately understand what's at
stake in digital preservation they don't understand the scale of the problem
they don't understand how serious the results will be if we fail
at this in major ways
we don't have to do perfectly we won't do perfectly preservation is never
perfect you never get all the cultural record
but getting enough so that we have
some sense of this material and getting really good coverage in areas
where it's really critical that we need to be able to do
all need to think about how we can make the case
nationally and internationally and perhaps
how we can align strategies here to help the public in all of our nations
to understand what's at stake here and the necessity of allocating
adequate resources and making policy accommodations as well as
simply allocating resources it is a very interesting fact that
you can't solve the problem of preserving cultural memory
comprehensively by writing a check you actually need to couple funding
resources with public policy accommodations
with provisions in copyright law that recognize the importance of
memory organizations being able to preserve material
those kinds of things so you need to make a case on both of those fronts and
i believe that collectively we can
make that case and we must make that case
i would note that we are actually an interesting moment of real opportunity
here because many members of the public now
are sort of recalibrating their own personal
relationship to their digital memories and
to the cultural record as they discover that you know
digital images that replaced photographs don't preserve themselves automatically
as they discover they can become estranged
from the collections of ebooks or digital music that they've spent a
great deal of money on as they recognize that their assumptions
about being able to share that kind of
information with others or pass it on to their children or
grandchildren are very different than what those
assumptions were in a world of physical goods
you're actually seeing again in the states i know
and i suspect this is true in other nations as well
a growing stream of individuals going to their public libraries going to
you know the library of congress in its role as the
big public library in the sky but reaching out to libraries and saying
how do i maintain my own sort of piece of cultural record
just as i view it so that's a that's a
doorway into having these broader conversations
and i think it's a genuine opportunity that we have
to make those kinds of aligned cases for
public support and public accommodation of
the preservation of the cultural heritage
material and the cultural record more effective
i think that that is a tremendously important area
that we can work together on and where i hope and i believe
there is some substantial progress to be made
so with that i want to kind of complete the
bridge from our last session our last meeting
into the opportunities here i hope that i've given you some feeling for how
we've got there for some of the structure around the
conversations here that may be fruitful and at least some opinions and
i have to be clear they are opinions there's no
right answer other than the answers we find collectively maybe
over the course of the next few days for for where some of our priorities and
opportunities might lie so i hope that we will be able to
make at least some progress on this during this meeting
and i'm really delighted you're all here to help work on this set of
challenges thank you
so we have time for a couple of questions and i would just ask
um
okay i will be happy to repeat this in
here
i'm chris graham from the u.s national institute of standard
technology so my question has to be about standards
and you um made the point that uh standards that you're not a big fan
i guess i would argue that the transition to interdependencies is
closely coupled to the time when you need to move from
informal best practices to more formalize standards that enable
energy dependencies that interact into an interdependency
as part of a business model
um i i think that that's a very that's a very helpful
comment um uh i think most people could hear who could
hear at least most of what chris said so i won't repeat it but i will just
reflect i'm actually a big fan of standards i
just think that sometimes we we try and do them too quickly
rather than going through some of these phases of
best practice and getting getting pilots working particularly
i guess i've lived through some of the efforts to do
you know standards fiction and six volumes
and seven layers that didn't come out well
um i do think standards are are important and i think one of the one
of the things that we don't have a good process for in
settings like this is um identifying
where where we really need them you know where the prior
development priority should be um i also you know i i think that
many people have have a limited understanding
of how much stuff really falls under the umbrella of standards
you know you think about an organization like the one
you're affiliated with nist you know they do some things that
are standards like you know communications protocols but
then they also do things like benchmark data sets and
benchmark measuring standards you know standards on how to measure
um these are create whole industries and that you know really allow you to
talk about interoperation um in meaningful ways and
i think i i think it's really really helpful
broadly like that about what are the needs here
you know it's not not not every standard is going to be a format
standard or metadata standard which are two of the things that this community
historically has been particularly enthused about um
those may not be the places of greatest um i should also mention
just while chris stood up chris is also one of the
important architects behind the new research data alliance and i'm sure
we'll hear more about that but this again
is something that didn't exist when we held our first meeting and it's
one of the several things that i think is
significant in changing the landscape here
uh new channel at the mountain university columbia
i have a comment on which of your people
so he said we need to make the case nationally and internationally
um it seems to me that unesco made a very strong case through the vancouver
degeneration of 2012 to governance industry and memory
institutions it has done it again now you must say
10 days ago and i was sort of shocked noticing that you know there
were lots of policy makers government
representatives the industry was all there in mind that
we have not met constitutional people
so i think that we also have to move towards those
who are taking the initiatives or just let them
go ahead and do it by themselves um yeah i think that's a really good
comment i mean i i i have to say you know i i don't really
have a good sense of some of the genuine international politics of this as as
distinct from aligned national kinds of activities so
um i know a little bit about the work unesco has done
with the memory of the world program and the
registry of historic sites and things like that
uh you know i i don't know really how widely
some of that work gets publicized
certainly in the united states i would say it doesn't have a really
high profile um but that ranges because
the united states is not only very parochial often but seems to have a
particularly difficult history in unesco for various
reasons um i i do think
that ways to strengthen that connection would
probably be useful
but i i think that there's also an element here
that is is very much bottomed up you know when i think about how to make
a public case in the united states
i would be less optimistic about pointing to well as the people of unesco
say rather than rolling up a whole
a whole alliance of memory organizations within the states to make the case
the library of congress the research library community the museum community
and then being able to say and yes you know
we're seeing similar movements in uh you know canada in france in germany
across the european um union and you know here is the scale of
investment that they're putting in place i i suspect that that would probably be
a more effective pr strategy at least in the united
states
one more question all the way to the
back
uh tom wilson from the university of alabama
uh cliff it in your comments that you just gave there
um i i certainly agree that i think they're in
in the states anyway there's an opportunity
to um
collaborate in a sort of political advocacy
kind of role but that presupposes that we are speaking with one voice
and maybe with regard to digital preservation that
may happen unfortunately i think even within the
research library community alone we don't have a good
history of speaking with one voice
i would hope um and maybe this is a greatly misplaced
hope um that on these matters we can find
at least at a high level one voice it would be
very disappointing to me if we could um i think that i think that the more
sectors you cross it gets harder i think that you know finding that one
voice between for example research libraries public
libraries and museums is a much bigger challenge than just
within the research
library community but i i would really hope that as
as we see because of the move to digital formats and greater and greater
convergence among those kinds of organizations
in various ways that at the right at the right level
of distraction generality we can find that common voice
that's that's what i hope but i hope we can find it not just
within the united states but within all of the nations represented here and
that those voices will at least echo one to the other i'm out of time and in
back to pass sorry about that thank you
you