Preservation 2.0

Cloonan, Michèle Valerie. "W(H)ITHER Preservation?" The Library Quarterly, 71, No.2 (2001): 231-242.

Smith, Abby. “Valuing Preservation.” Library Trends, 56, no.1 (2007): 4-25.

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Abby Smith’s “Valuing Preservation” addresses how the ubiquity of digital information necessitates new understandings of and arguments about the value of preservation. Like Michèle V. Cloonan’s “W(H)ITHER Preservation?” before it, Smith’s article eschews detailed discussions of specific technical problems in favor of addressing broader questions about the nature and importance of preservation. For Smith, the digital explosion presents those in the field of preservation with the “conceptual challenge of articulating intrinsic values inherent in content that is abundant rather than scarce” (10).


This issue of information abundance recurs throughout as Smith moves from juxtaposing the challenges of digital and analog preservation, to exploring how certain aspects of content value--such as utilitarian value, species value, hedonic value, and secondary (or re-use) value--“behave differently in the digital realm” (10), to enumerating key affordances that the practice of preservation itself (as independent from content) provides. Though Smith is adept at pointing to fundamental discontinuities between analog and digital preservation, I occasionally found myself wishing that she had spent more time addressing notable continuities. How might the information explosions of the past (such the rise of the printing press or the rise of mass literacy) provide (and/or fail to provide) useful precedents for addressing the current digital preservation crisis?


In advocating on behalf of preservation, Smith occasionally falls into assertions that are a little too facile, as when she claims that “What is uniquely important about cultural content, as opposed to factual information and knowledge about our world, is the moral value of having access to knowledge from the past, in its authentic and unmediated form” (18 emphasis mine). At moments such as this, Smith would do well acknowledge what Cloonan terms the “paradox of preservation”: the notion that “[t]o conserve, preserve, or restore is to alter” (235). As Cloonan notes, objects are changed simply “by virtue of aging or by a change in surroundings,” so that preservation itself constitutes a form of mediation (235). At other times, Smith arguably oversells the representativeness of archival materials. She asserts, for example, that a silent film melodrama from 1906 allows us to “see the way people dressed, walked, held their hands, and made gestures; or the shape of the landscape a hundred years ago; what faces looked like before contemporary dentistry, universal inoculation against small pox, or modern nutrition” (16). Though certainly important cultural information can be gleaned from a melodrama, it would be a mistake to take it as representative of the physical appearance and demeanor of the turn-of-the-twentieth-century Americans, just as it would be a mistake to generalize about early twenty-first-century Americans based on an episode of Gossip Girl. Such faults in logic, however, are overshadowed by Smith's productive meditations on how digital information must occasion new theories about and articulations of the value of preservation.


One of the article’s most useful interventions is the series of public policy goals laid out in its final section. In asserting that we must “make it easier and cheaper to preserve content; provide incentives and rewards for individuals and organizations to preserve; [and] protect the public interest in privately held content,” Smith offers a concise but far-reaching set of objectives for national and international preservation policy (19). Though these goals (and the accompanying suggestions for implementation) don’t strike me as radically “new,” their value lies in their pragmatic and easy-to-grasp nature. It is their simplicity that makes them effective tools for forging conversations and collaborations between the preservation community, industry, government, and the broader public. It is precisely upon such collaborations, Smith would argue, that the wide-scale preservation of digital materials depends.