draft

Gilliland, Anne. “Enduring Paradigm, New Opportunities: The Value of the Archival Perspective in the Digital Environment,” in Michèle V. Cloonan, ed. The Heritage of Preservation (Neals-Schuman) (forthcoming) [excerpted and updated from 2000 CLIR publication with the same title].

 

 

Enduring Paradigm, New Opportunities: The Value of the Archival Perspective in the Digital Environment[1]

 

Anne J. Gilliland

 

 

Abstract

As the digital information environment has expanded and diversified, so too has the community of professionals responsible for designing, managing, disseminating, and preserving digital information resources. This community, really a metacommunity, includes librarians, archivists, preservationists, museum professionals, information system designers, technical information specialists, and sometimes information creators themselves. Each of these parties has a unique perspective developed from its societal role and manifested in specialized paradigms and practices.  Unparalleled opportunities to enhance the processes of knowledge creation, dissemination and use in the digital environment have come coupled with critical and often seemingly intractable issues relating to the heterogeneity, scale, validation, information life cycle, intellectual accessibility and preservation of digital resources. The paradigms of any of the information professions come up short when compared with the scope of the issues continuously emerging in the digital environment. An overarching dynamic paradigm—that adopts, adapts, develops, and sheds principles and practices of the constituent information communities as necessary—needs to be created. This paper discusses some of the ways in which the archival perspective can make a major contribution to a new paradigm for the design, management, preservation, and use of digital resources through its evidence-based approach to the management of recorded knowledge.

 

 

Introduction: Enduring Paradigm, New Opportunities        

 

There is no doubt that in recent years a real shift has been occurring within which new or re-discovered record-keeping theories are emerging as fresh discourse, and equally that there are members of the record-keeping profession(s) now looking to see how the archival perspective can inform the conceptual models of other information professionals.

—Upward and McKemmish (1994).

 

Today’s conceptualization of who and what the information professions comprise has expanded and diversified in direct relation to the expanded conceptualization of what kinds of information resources and services make up or should make up the digital information environment. This broadened conceptualization encompasses everyone who manages information content as well as those who design, document, and exploit information context and structure. This includes librarians, archivists, curators, preservationists, technical information specialists, and information systems and museum professionals. The important roles played by the creators of digital information are also being recognized.

 

The drive to develop transparent, networked, multimedia, multi-repository resources has brought these professional communities and information creators into a new metacommunity. The members of this metacommunity are converging around issues of metadata standards and interoperability, electronic record-keeping systems design, interface design, intellectual property, preservation of digital content, and professional education. Each community brings a unique perspective developed out of its societal role and manifested in specialized paradigms and practices. As a result, convergence requires that each community learn the others’ vocabularies and the principles and practices to which they relate and determine what needs to be accommodated and where new practices need to be devised or new principles articulated.

 

The rapid development and widespread implementation of networked digital information technology has presented this metacommunity with critical and often seemingly intractable issues relating to the heterogeneity, scale, validation, and information life cycle of digital resources. The paradigms of any one of the information professions do not provide adequate guidance for addressing the scope and size of the issues continuously emerging in the digital information environment. This metacommunity needs to develop a dynamic paradigm that draws on those of its constituent communities. However, the metacommunity must also understand and accommodate the distinctiveness of the societal roles and missions of the different information professions as the boundaries among their practices and collections begin to blur.

 

The archival community is one of the smallest and, arguably, the least well understood of the professional communities working in the digital information environment and in knowledge management in general. It comprises practicing archivists, manuscript curators, archival academics, and policy makers who work to define and promote the social utility of records and to identify, preserve, and provide access to documentary heritage regardless of format. Archival holdings are noncurrent organizational records of enduring value that are preserved by the archives of the creating organization. Manuscript collections, however, are also often collocated with archival holdings. Manuscript collections are unpublished materials that are created or gathered by an organization or individual but are transferred from the original custodian to an archives, a historical society, or university library.

 

The archival perspective brings an evidence-based approach to the management of recorded knowledge. It is fundamentally concerned with the organizational and personal processes and contexts through which records and knowledge are created as well as the ways in which records individually and collectively reflect those processes. This perspective distinguishes the archival community from other communities of information professionals that manage decontextualized information and tend to be focused more on users, systems, or institutions.

 

In his 1958 address to the annual meeting of the Society of American Archivists, preeminent American archival theorist Theodore R. Schellenberg demonstrated with remarkable prescience his understanding of the exponential at work in twentieth-century information production resulting from the acceleration of record-keeping, information, and communication technologies. He predicted that archival practices, with their focus on the nature of materials, would be shaped by the dominant characteristics of those materials: their organic character, diverse form and content, and sheer volume. Schellenberg also predicted that these practices would be the archival profession’s most important contribution to information management in general (Schellenberg 1959).

 

Exhortations for archivists to move beyond customary custodial roles and become advocates for information that must be preserved because of its enduring legal, fiscal, administrative, research or other societal value (Dearstyne 1993) reflect a growing awareness among archivists that along with their concern for the nature of the materials, there is a critical need to promote the materials’ long-term requirements and enduring value to society. Maintaining massive quantities of digital materials of continuing value over time, especially the evidential qualities of those materials, is essential but complex. The challenge of identifying and maintaining such materials has led archivists to work with information creators to design systems capable of keeping records that will endure with their evidential integrity intact and with the preservation community to provide testbeds and evaluation for new preservation technologies and processes.

The Archival Perspective

There are several essential and intellectually-related principles that support the archival perspective, including:

•        the sanctity of evidence;

•        respect des fonds, provenance, and original order;

•        the life cycle of records;

•        the organic nature of records; and

•        hierarchy in records and their descriptions.

These principles reflect the concerns of a profession that is interested in information as evidence and in the ways in which the context, form, and interrelationships among materials help users to identify, trust, interpret, and make relevant decisions about those materials.  The following discussion will focus specifically on archival notions of evidence and how it should be preserved across its life.

 

The Sanctity of Evidence

History in the true sense depends on the unvarnished evidence, considering not only what happened, but why it happened, what succeeded, what went wrong.

—Burke (1997).

 

The perfect Archive is ex hypothesi an evidence which cannot lie to us: we may through laziness or other imperfection of our own misinterpret its statements or implications, but itself it makes no attempt to convince us of fact or error, to persuade or dissuade: it just tells us. That is, it does so always provided that it has come to us in exactly the state in which its original creators left it. Here then, is the supreme and most difficult task of the Archivist—to hand on the documents as nearly as possible in the state in which he received them, without adding or taking away, physically or morally, anything: to preserve unviolated, without the possibility of a suspicion of violation, every element in them, every quality they possessed when they came to him, while at the same time permitting and facilitating handling and use.

—Jenkinson (1944).

 

Many of the information professions interact closely with other disciplines and derive much of their outlook from those relationships. For example, the practices and perspectives of information scientists have been strongly influenced by science and computer science. Archivists are closely aligned with professions such as law, history, journalism, anthropology, and archaeology. Evidence in the archival sense can be defined as the passive ability of documents and objects and their associated contexts to provide insight into the processes, activities, and events that led to their creation for legal, historical, archaeological, and other purposes. The concern for evidence permeates all archival activities and demands complex approaches to the management of information; it also sets high benchmarks for information systems and services, particularly with respect to archival description and preservation. Recently, the paramount importance of identifying and maintaining the evidential value of archival materials has been reemphasized, partly as a result of the challenges posed by electronic records but partly also to differentiate the information and preservation practices of the archival community from those of the library community.

 

The integrity of the evidential value of materials is ensured by demonstrating an unbroken chain of custody, precisely documenting the aggregation of archival materials as received from their creator and integrated with the rest of the archives’ holdings of the same provenance, and tracking all preservation activities associated with the materials. Jenkinson (1937) described this process as the physical and moral defense of the record. Schellenberg (1956) expanded archival notions about evidence when he discussed the values that archivists should use to help them decide which materials to retain. The primary values of archival records are related to the legal, fiscal, and administrative purposes of the records creators; the secondary values are related to subsequent researchers. Schellenberg (1956) argued that the secondary values of public records can be ascertained most easily if they are considered in relation to “(1) the evidence they contain of the organization and functioning of the Government body that produced them, and (2) the information they contain on persons, corporate bodies, things [e.g., places, buildings, physical objects], problems, conditions, and the like, with which the Government dealt.” His argument acknowledges both the strict legal requirements of records that must be satisfied by archival processes and the wider concept of historical and cultural evidence that is contained in the materials and can be interpreted by secondary users.

 

The archival concern for the description and preservation of evidence involves a rich understanding of the implicit and explicit values of materials at creation and over time. It also involves an acute awareness of how such values can be diminished or lost when the integrity of materials is compromised. Evidential value in the widest sense is reflected to some extent in any information artifact, but only a subset of all information is subject to legal or regulatory requirements concerning creation and maintenance. Publications, for example, can be analyzed for evidence of the motivations and processes associated with their creation by studying their physical and intellectual form, examining different editions of the same work, and learning about the history of the publishing house or printer that produced them. Primary sources (unpublished or unsynthesized materials) particularly lend themselves to such kinds of analysis and interpretation, and such materials are increasingly being incorporated into digital information resources.

Maintaining the evidential value of information is important not only to creators of materials that are subject to legal or regulatory requirements but also to many researchers. In particular, reformatting, description, and preservation need to be considered. Reformatting has been discussed extensively in the professional literature in relation to the digitization of library and archival collections. Information professionals involved in digitally reformatting their collections must understand when a user may need to work with the original information object to appreciate some intrinsic characteristic, such as the weight of the paper; when a digital copy will do; and whether a copy needs to be high or low resolution, color or black and white. Information professionals must also decide how much of a collection needs to be digitized and what kind of metadata will enable a user to place information objects in context.

 

Archival practice places a premium on both collective and contextual description. The key is to explain the physical aspects and intellectual structure of the collection that may not be apparent and to provide enough contextual information for the user to understand the historical circumstances and organizational processes of the object’s creation. Description should also demonstrate that the physical and the intellectual form of the materials have not been altered in any undocumented way.

 

Counterintuitively, perhaps, it is during the preservation of digital materials that evidential value is often most at risk of being compromised. Digital preservation techniques have moved beyond a concern for the longevity of digital media to a concern for the preservation of the information stored in those media during recurrent migration to new software and hardware. In the process, many of the intrinsic characteristics of information objects can disappear—data structures can be modified and presentation of the object on a computer screen can be altered.

 

The Life Cycle of Records

 

If we can become overarching information generalists with an archival emphasis, we will be able to bring to bear what should be a deep and thorough knowledge of the documentary life-cycle theory . . . it may be our most important asset in relation to (I do not say in competition with) our colleagues, the librarians and other information specialists.

—Taylor (1993).

 

The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration developed the concept of the records life cycle to model how the functions of, use of, and responsibility for records change as records age and move from the control of their creator to the physical custody of the archives. In the first phase of this model, administrators create and use records (in archival terms, primary use). Records creators must develop logical systems for classifying or registering records and implement procedures to ensure the integrity of the records. Records managers and archivists also ensure that active records are scheduled for systematic elimination or permanent retention. As records age, they gradually become less heavily referenced and finally become inactive. During the second phase, the archives is a neutral third party responsible for ensuring the long-term integrity of the records. When the records enter the archives, they are physically and intellectually integrated with other archival materials of the same provenance, thus establishing the archival bond (Duranti 1996). Their physical integrity is ensured through preservation management; their intellectual integrity, through archival description. Archival records are then available for secondary use.

 

Changes in methods of record creation and in perceptions of their continuing value have recently led archivists to consider if and how to apply the life cycle model in a digital environment. The principles underlying the life cycle have been refined through projects such as Preservation of the Integrity of Electronic Records, conducted from 1994 to 1996 by archival researchers at the University of British Columbia (known as the UBC Project). An alternate model—the records continuum—has been proposed (Upward 1996, Upward 1997). This model now undergirds the conceptualization of the role and activities of the record-keeping professions in Australia and is gaining in acceptance in the United States and Europe.

 

The UBC Project sought to develop a generic model to identify and define by-products of electronic information systems and methods for protecting the integrity of the by-products, which constitute evidence of action (Duranti and MacNeil 1997). Using a deductive method drawing on the principles of diplomatics and archival science, the project identified the procedures necessary to ensure control over reliable records creation during the first phase of the records life cycle and to maintain the integrity of archival records during the second phase. The project reiterated the need in the digital environment for completed records placed under the jurisdiction of the archives.  These findings subsequently became the basis for the InterPARES 1, 2 and 3 Projects that have been examining the creation and preservation of permanent authentic records in electronic systems (InterPARES Project 2011).

 

The records continuum model takes a different approach. Records managers and archivists are involved with records beginning when a record-keeping system is designed. Physical transfer to the archives is not required; archivists establish requirements for appropriate maintenance of the records and monitor compliance by records creators. The intellectual interrelationships of active and archival records are established by integrating metadata from active records into the archival authority’s information system (Upward and McKemmish 1994). This postcustodial model expands the role of the archivist to include active participation in the production and use of records.

 

The benefits of modeling the life, uses and shifting values of information materials extend to information management in general by

• providing for the management of information resources from birth to death and identifying the points at which responsibilities for managing those resources change or certain actions must occur;
• integrating the communities responsible for creating, disposing of, and preserving information resources with those focusing on the organization and use of information;
• recognizing the motivations of different parties to ensure the integrity of information materials and points in the life cycle at which those motivations become less compelling, thus putting the materials at risk; clearly elucidating the process of creating and consuming knowledge and using it to create new knowledge;
• making it possible to meet different user needs; and
• enabling prediction of levels of use and management of information storage requirements.

 

Utility of the Archival Paradigm in the Digital Environment

Information is not a natural category whose history we can extrapolate. Instead, information is an element of certain professional ideologies . . . and cannot be understood except through the practices within which it is constructed by members of those professions in their work.

—Agre (1995).

 

The principles and practices discussed in the preceding section demonstrate how the archival community constructs information as evidence and why this construction needs to be understood and addressed in the digital environment. These principles and practices, independent of the archival construction of information, can also contribute to the management of digital information. Implementing the archival paradigm in the digital environment encompasses the following:

• working with information creators to identify requirements for the long-term management of information;
• identifying the roles and responsibilities of those who create, manage, provide access to, and preserve information;
• ensuring the creation and preservation of reliable and authentic materials;
• understanding that information can be dynamic in terms of form, accumulation, value attribution, and primary and secondary use;
• recognizing and exploiting the organic nature of the creation and
• development of recorded knowledge;
• identifying evidence in materials and addressing the evidential needs of materials and their users through archival appraisal, description, and preservation activities; and
• using collective and hierarchical description to manage high volumes of nonbibliographic materials, often in multiple media.

 

The archival community is making significant contributions to research and development in the digital information environment by using integrity, metadata, knowledge management, risk management, and knowledge preservation.

 

Integrity of Information

Integrity requires a degree of openness and auditability as well as accessibility of information and records for public inspection, at least within the context of specific review processes. Integrity in an information distribution system facilitates and insures the ability to construct and maintain a history of intellectual dialog and to refer to that history over long periods of time.

—Lynch (1994).

 

Ensuring the integrity of information over time is a prominent concern in the digital environment because physical and intellectual integrity can easily be consciously or unconsciously compromised and variant versions can easily be created and distributed. This concern has two aspects—checking and certifying data integrity (associated with technical processes such as integrity checking, certification, digital watermarking, steganography, and user and authentication protocols) and identifying the intellectual qualities of information that make it authentic (associated with legal, cultural, and philosophical concepts such as trustworthiness and completeness).

 

Functional requirements are particularly well articulated in highly regulated communities such as the pharmaceutical and bioengineering industries. Less well explored is how to identify and preserve the intellectual integrity of information. The intellectual mechanisms by which we come to trust traditional forms of published information include a consideration of provenance, citation practices, peer review, editorial practices, and an assessment of the intellectual form of the information. In the digital environment, information may not conform to predictable forms or may not have been through traditional publication processes; a more complex understanding of information characteristics and management procedures is required for the intellectual integrity of information to be understood. Attempts are often made to implement digital versions of procedures traditionally used in record-keeping and archival administration. Such attempts include establishing trusted servers or repositories that can serve as a witness or notary public; distributing information to multiple servers, thus making it harder to damage or eliminate all copies; developing certified digital archives as trusted third-party repositories; and identifying canonical versions of information resources (Commission on Preservation and Access and Research Libraries Group 1996, Lynch 1994).

 

Risk Management

 

If archivists are to take their rightful place as regulators of an organization’s documentary requirements, they will have to reach beyond their own professional literature and understand the requirements for recordkeeping imposed by other professions and society in general. Furthermore, they will have to study methods of increasing the acceptance of their message and the impact and power of warrant.

—Duff (1998).

 

Evaluation practices of library and information retrieval systems have traditionally been based on four factors—effectiveness, benefits, cost-effectiveness, and cost benefits (Lancaster 1979). Research on electronic archival records has postulated another form of evaluation—risk management—borrowed from professions such as auditing, quality control, insurance, and law. Although this concept has not been applied directly to other information environments, it has implications for assessing risk in terms of ensuring the reliability and authenticity, appropriate elimination, and preservation of digital in- formation.

 

Archivists seeking to develop blueprints for the management of electronic records have undertaken several important projects in recent years. This research showed that electronic records are likely to endure with their evidential value intact beyond their active life only if functional requirements for record-keeping systems design and policies and procedures for record-keeping are addressed during the design and implementation of the system. This increases the likelihood that appropriate software and hardware standards will be used, making the records easier to preserve. Records will also be created in such a way that they can be identified, audited, rendered immutable on completion, physically or intellectually removed, and brought under archival control.

Missing from this approach is the motivation for organizations to invest the resources required to implement expensive archival requirements in their active record-keeping systems. With the digital asset management approach discussed previously, the motivation to preserve usable digital information comes from the organization itself and is intimately tied to enterprise management.  Recent Australian metadata projects apply two other strategies (Records Continuum Research Group 1999). The first is demonstrating that well-designed record-keeping systems and metadata will enhance organizational decision-making. The second is risk management: persuading the organization that the resources invested in electronic record keeping will reduce the organizational risk incurred by not complying with archival and record-keeping requirements. Organizations such as public bodies and regulated industries are generally aware of the penalties for noncompliance. Noncompliance by a public body could result in a costly lawsuit. Noncompliance by a regulated industry could result in not getting regulatory approval to market a new product. The cost of noncompliance with record- keeping requirements may be significantly higher than that of compliance. In other environments the risk analysis may be less straight-forward because the risks may less evident or the costs of noncompliance less tangible.

 

The risk management approach developed by the Recordkeeping Functional Requirements Project at the University of Pittsburgh between 1993 and 1996 greatly influenced subsequent electronic record-keeping research and development projects, including the Australian metadata projects. The Pittsburgh project was an inductive project based on case studies, expert advice, precedents, and professional standards (Cox 1994). There were four main products of the research:

• functional requirements—a list of conditions that must be met to ensure that evidence of business activities is produced when needed;
• a methodology for devising a warrant for record keeping derived from external authorities such as statutes, regulations, standards, and professional guidelines;
• unambiguous production rules formally defining the conditions necessary to produce evidence so that software can be developed and the conditions tested; and
• a metadata set for uniquely identifying and explaining terms for future access and for using and tracking records.

 

The contribution of the Pittsburgh project, beyond the development of the functional requirements and metadata set was the development of the concept of warrant and a methodology for creating a warrant relevant to the individual circumstances of an organization. Warrant relates to the requirements imposed on an organization by external authorities for creating and keeping reliable records. If organizations understand warrant regarding how they manage their electronic record-keeping systems, they can assess the degree of risk they might incur by not managing their systems appropriately (Duff 1998).

 

Knowledge Preservation

The digital world transforms traditional preservation concepts from protecting the physical integrity of the object to specifying the creation and maintenance of the object whose intellectual integrity is its primary characteristic.

—Conway (1996).

 

Preservation is arguably the single biggest challenge facing everyone who creates, maintains, or relies on digital information. Awareness of the immense scope of the potential preservation crisis has brought many groups together to experiment with new preservation strategies and technologies. Preserving knowledge is more complex than preserving only media or content. It is about preserving the intellectual integrity of information objects, including capturing information about the various contexts within which information is created, organized, and used; organic relationships with other information objects; and characteristics that provide meaning and evidential value. Preservation of knowledge also requires appreciating the continuing relationships between digital and non-digital information.

 

Concern for retaining the evidential value of records has placed the archival community at the vanguard of research and development in digital preservation and authentication.

Moreover, because archives focus on records, archivists have an awareness of the societal, institutional, and individual construction of memory and an understanding of the implications of how that memory is represented and transmitted over time. This awareness becomes increasingly important as more of the world’s collections are reformatted and represented online. It is also important for retaining evidence in time and over time, especially through digital preservation processes.

 

Archives today are engaged with both the creation of information and its ultimate disposition (either destruction or permanent retention). Since the 1960s, the archival community has worked increasingly closely with the creators of records and record-keeping systems to develop means to identify and preserve digital records that have no paper counterpart. The problem of what to do about records that are born digital has forced archivists to reexamine and reinvent their principles and practices in light of a digital challenge that emerged before the advent of digital libraries. This engagement at various points in the life cycle of materials also helps to establish a bridge to information and knowledge production processes and communities—from electronic publishing to digital asset management—that have traditionally fallen outside the domain of bibliographic information.

 

The archival mission of preserving evidence over time has resulted in demanding criteria for measuring the efficacy of the range of strategies proposed for digital preservation, including migration, emulation, bundling, and persistent object preservation (later referred to as persistent archives technology). Projects using archival testbeds have been undertaken in several countries with the aim of understanding the extent to which different strategies work with a range of materials and what limitations need to be addressed procedurally, through the development of new technological approaches, or both.

 

The Cedars Project

The Cedars Project was a United Kingdom collaboration of librarians, archivists, publishers, authors, and institutions (libraries, records offices, and universities). Working with digitized and born-digital materials, Cedars used a two-track approach to evaluate different preservation strategies through demonstration projects at U.K. test sites; formulate recommendations and guidelines; and develop practical, robust, and scaleable models for establishing distributed digital archives (Cedars Project 1999). Cedars also examined other issues related to the management of digital information, including rights management and metadata.

 

The Digital Repository Project

The Digital Repository Project of the National Archives of the Netherlands aims to create a Trusted Digital Repository for the Dutch central government and some of the Netherlands regional archival institutions that will ensure the authenticity, accessibility, and longevity of archival records created by Dutch government agencies (Slats 2008). The project brought together two important concepts—the emulation technique devised by Jeff Rothenberg and the reference model for an open archival information system (OAIS) developed by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (adopted as an ISO standard in 2003) (Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems/International Organization for Standardization 1999). The emulation technique involved creating emulators for future computers to enable them to run the software on which archived material was created and maintained, thus recreating the functionality, look, and feel of the material (Rothenberg 1995 and 1999). The OAIS reference model is a high-level record-keeping model developed to assist in the archiving of high-volume information. It delineates the processes involved in the ingestion, storage, administrative and logistical maintenance, intellectual metadata management, and access and delivery of electronic records (Sawyer and Reich 1999).

 

The Digital Repository Project is most concerned with determining the functionality of the repository, scope of the metadata, standards to be applied, and differentiation of the intellectual and the physical and technical form of the records. As with the Cedars Project, a two-track approach has been taken. One track built a repository to preserve simple records in a stand-alone environment implemented by the National Archives. The other track developed a testbed and experimental framework for examining preservation strategies such as migration, emulation, and XML on electronic records acquired by applying the OAIS reference model (Hofman 1999).

 

Persistent Object Preservation

Persistent object preservation is a highly generic technological approach that was developed jointly by the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration and the San Diego Supercomputer Center. This project addressed the need of the National Archives to find efficient and fast methods for acquiring and preserving, in context, millions of files that can be applied to many types of records and that comply with archival principles. The approach focuses on storing infrastructure independent proxies (IIPs) for the original information objects that make up a collection and identifying their metadata attributes and behaviors that can be used to recreate the collection. Persistent object preservation also exploits inherent hierarchical structures within records, predictable record forms, and dependencies between them. It is designed to be consistent, comprehensive, and independent of infrastructure (Thibodeau 1999, Moore et al. 2000a, Moore et al. 2000b).

 

Like the Digital Repository Project, persistent object preservation was built around the OAIS reference model. It supports archival processes from accessioning through preservation and use, and it recognizes the importance of collection-based management.  It went on to become the basis for the Persistent Archives Testbed, which sought to develop, in collaboration with several state and university collaborators, the Archivist’s workbench, a community model for electronic records management, with archival and technological functions including appraisal, accessioning, arrangement, description, preservation and access performed within in a distributed network using data grid technology (Marciano n.d.).

 

Achieving the Full Potential of Cross-Community Developments in the Digital Environment

The long-term preservation of information in digital form requires not only technical solutions and new organizational strategies, but also the building of a new culture that values and supports the survival of bits over time. This requires that a diverse community of experts—computer scientists, archivists, social scientists, artists, lawyers, and politicians—collaborate to ensure the preservation of a new kind of cultural heritage, the digital document.

—Lyman and Besser (1998).

 

Much of this paper has focused on explicating the archival perspective and demonstrating how it can contribute to the management of digital information. It has also pointed out some of the opportunities resulting from the extension of archival principles to the management of electronic records. A similar explication of the perspectives and functional requirements for digital information and information systems of other information communities, such as museum professionals, preservationists, and systems designers, is now needed. This will enable everyone engaged in the digital environment to see points of commonality and divergence and develop technological, procedural, policy, and educational approaches accordingly.

 

Several other activities would assist in this endeavor. First, more opportunities are needed for cross-community dialog on issues relating to the development of digital information infrastructure. Such dialog has increased in recent years, as shown by the development of the Dublin Core, the ongoing debate over intellectual property in the digital environment, and the collaborative projects mentioned above. Workshops and conferences hosted by the Council on Library and Information Resources, the Institute of Museum and Library Servoces, National Science Foundation, and Northeast Document Conservation Center, among others, have brought the different communities together to discuss key issues such as digital preservation and access and the education of boundary-spanning professionals. More could be done, however, to bring together rank-and-file members of the professional communities.

 

Second, identifying substantive documentation on the various projects under way can be difficult despite the presence of substantial project Web sites. A clearinghouse of project-related papers, especially final reports, would help, as would additional interdisciplinary publishing outlets.

 

Third, and perhaps most important, professional education and continuing education mechanisms need to be reevaluated. A new kind of professional is needed, one whose primary domain is the information metacommunity and who can function effectively in the dynamic interdisciplinary information environment. This might involve

• changing the core curricula in library and information science programs to include additional professional perspectives,
• developing more intensive education in archival science and museum administration under a more interdisciplinary rubric such as information studies, and
• developing new interdisciplinary or interprofessional programs. Similarly, a pressing need exists to develop effective mechanisms for keeping practicing professionals abreast of techniques and issues in the digital environment. The information professions lack a coherent continuing education infrastructure to systematically address this need.

 

The archival community has come a long way in the past 200 years. Challenged by increasingly rapid changes in record-keeping and reproduction technologies as well as by changes in bureaucratic structures and collaborative processes, the archival paradigm has evolved into a sophisticated and confident articulation of an evidence-based approach to information management. The archival community has made the following important contributions individually and collaboratively:

• articulating functional requirements for information systems and records creation processes to ensure the reliability and authenticity of records and the preservation of their evidential value,
• providing testbeds for implementing and evaluating preservation techniques and technologies,
• exploiting the roles of context and hierarchy in information retrieval, and
• developing interoperable metadata. Such contributions demonstrate the relevance and utility of the archival perspective in the digital environment and argue for consideration of its principles and practices in the development of a new paradigm for the emerging metacommunity of information professionals.

 

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