Preserving Digital Information: A How-To-Do-It Manual (review)

Preserving Digital Information: A How-To-Do-It Manual, Gregory S. Hunter.(How-to-do-it Manuals for Librarians, no. 93). New York, London: Neal-Schuman Publishers, Inc., 2000. 169 p. $59.95 (ISBN 1-55570-353-4)

The title suggests the nature of this work, which is intended as a practical guide for librarians, archivists, and preservation administrators faced with the challenges of maintaining access to digital materials. Hunter is an associate professor at Long Island University's Palmer School of Library and Information Science and his contribution is the latest in a series of self-help manuals offered by Neal-Schuman Publishers, including a previous one by Dr. Hunter on developing and maintaining practical archives.

This manual is presented in seven chapters. Chapters one and two cover the challenges and nature of digital information. Chapter three describes eight research initiatives that the author finds particularly significant. Chapter four provides general recommendations, primarily covering storage and media. Chapter five presents case studies on electronic mail and web pages, while chapter six covers digital imaging. The final chapter outlines the author's practical recommendations for how to establish a digital preservation program. The publication is easy to read and is geared to those who are just starting out.

I have several reservations, however, that prevent me from giving the book a resounding endorsement. First, much of the volume represents a synthetic regurgitation of other people's work. Time and again I found myself reading material that I had encountered in other publications. Large parts of several chapters (1, 3, 4, 5, and 6) represent little more than cut and paste jobs. For instance, the chapter on digital imaging seemed very familiar--in large part because well over half of it is a loose paraphrase of sections taken from Digital Imaging for Libraries and Archives, a book I co-authored in 1996 with Steve Chapman.

My second objection is that the author relies heavily on a lot of dated material. Many of his references are to publications that were state-of-the-art in the mid-1990s. This is particularly problematic in a rapidly changing field that is the focus of intensive research and development. For instance, chapter three is devoted to "recent research in electronic records and digital preservation." However, several of the projects cited were completed a number of years ago, including the Pittsburgh Project (concluded in 1996) and the Preservation of the Integrity of Electronic Records Project at the University of British Columbia (concluded in 1997). Certainly these were important initiatives, but it would have been more useful to cite current work deriving from those projects. A third project highlighted in this chapter, the Universal Preservation Format Project, faces a very uncertain future. Only one of the projects, InterPARES, is ongoing, and not much has been reported on it to date. The inclusion of the Digital Library Federation is puzzling, as it is not a research initiative but a consortium. And Jeff Rothenberg's work on emulation is listed under the Rand Corporation, although the two most relevant initiatives testing this approach include the CAMiLEON Project, a joint effort of the University of Michigan and the University of Leeds <http://www.si.umich.edu/CAMILEON/> and the NEDLIB project, a collaborative archiving project for electronic publications involving eight European national libraries <http://www.kb.nl/coop/nedlib/>. The former was launched in 1999, the latter in 1998.

One looks in vain for references to more recent digital preservation initiatives within the electronic records and digital library communities. Particularly noteworthy by its absence is the Open Archival Information System or OAIS initiative <http://ssdoo.gsfc.nasa.gov/nost/isoas/us/>, which has informed digital preservation research efforts in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe, and Australia. Where is mention of the significant collaborative efforts of the National Archives and the San Diego Super Computer <http://www.sdsc.edu/NARA/>? The...