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Librarians Speak Up: "What's the number one archiving challenge facing librarians today?"

Jeff Coghill, AHIP, Collection Development & Electronic Resources Librarian,
William E. Laupus Health Sciences Library, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC, USA

Good question — where would you begin the archiving? Think of all the information that is available electronically. How would you archive information that resides in a virtual world? We would assume that all scholarly information would be archived.
If someone else owns the current issues of a journal and the back issues, how would a library archive all knowledge owned by another entity? And then, is all relevant information published on the Internet worthy of archiving? We need librarians to be the arbiters of winnowing good from bad information. What about wikis, blogs or emails? Are those worthy of archiving? The flurry of activity in the virtual world is staggering. How could you capture the look and feel of items in the ether? Libraries have traditionally been good stewards of the print record of scholarship, but what about all items electronic? That is the challenge for librarians in the 21st century and it seems I have posed more questions about archiving than I’ve answered.

Professor Derek Law, Librarian and Head of IRD, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland, UK

I believe the biggest challenge we face is in defining quality assurance standards for archives. Libraries define archival standards in terms of centuries; computer managers define archiving in terms of months. We need to be sure that when we hand over data it will be preserved in agreed ways for agreed periods of time.
What we need is a modern equivalent of the five Maori tests for oral archives:

1. Receive the information with accuracy
2. Store the information with integrity beyond doubt
3. Retrieve the information without amendment
4. Apply appropriate judgement in the use of the information
5. Pass the information on appropriately

When we can do all of these with electronic data, we will have a reliable system.

Victoria Steele, Ph.D., Head, Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, USA

The special collections community is confronting what is being called the “hidden collections problem,” that is, the challenge of providing access to uncatalogued and unprocessed archival and rare book collections. All of us bring in more archival collections than we are able to process and make accessible, creating over time large backlogs. One way we’re addressing this problem at UCLA is through the Center for Primary Research and Training. The center pairs graduate students with unprocessed or under-processed collections in their areas of interest and trains them in archival methods, resulting in processed collections for us, and dissertation topics for them. Once a collection is processed, the finding aid becomes the basis for a MARC record searchable in our OPAC. A link on the MARC record leads the user to the full finding aid. Currently, we have more finding aids searchable on the California Digital Library’s Online Archive of California than any other institution in the state.

Dr. S. Venkadesan, Head, Library Services, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India

The issue of access to archives presents a top challenge to today's information professionals. We must consider the issue from several aspects, e.g. assuring access at any future date, covering costs of perpetual access to subscribed data, and ensuring rapid access. However the most important factor is providing access to active archives.

Passive archives and active archives differ considerably. Used to retain data for long-term storage, passive archiving moves data and may use more affordable media and more affordable storage locations. Active archiving organizes data into information collections and ensures easy retrieval.

A passive set-up may lack software enabling presentation of journal articles (including full text) in a navigable and user-readable form. Constructing active archives is most desirable since over a period of time a collection may amass large amounts of data and moving all items from a passive to active archive will be a Herculean task.

Setting up an active archive demands a strong computing and network infrastructure.

Dr. Kathleen (Katie) Clark, Biotechnology Librarian, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA

I think most of us at academic institutions, such as the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, are concerned about whether the electronic materials we purchase today will continue to remain accessible to our faculty and staff in perpetuity. This is especially so as economic factors are forcing us into the difficult decision of canceling our print subscriptions in favor of e-only subscriptions. We consider our e-subscriptions “purchases,” not “licenses,” and so expect to continue to have access to the content we’ve purchased whether the original publishing house is purchased by another, the title changes, or at some point we cancel our current subscription. In all cases, just as if we’d purchased the print issues, we expect to continue to have e-access to the purchased content. At this point, we are trusting that projects such as LOCKSS (http://lockss.stanford.edu/) will succeed, and that technology will rise to meet the challenge of providing access to the diverse formats that will surely evolve.