Archivists on the Issues is a forum for archivists to discuss the issues we are facing today. The following post is from Laura Alagna, Digital Preservation Librarian at Northwestern University; Keith Pendergrass, Digital Archivist at Baker Library Special Collections at Harvard Business School; Walker Sampson, Assistant Professor and Digital Archivist at the University of Colorado Boulder; and Tim Walsh, Software Developer at Artefactual Systems.
Background
In 2017, we came together due to a shared concern over the increasing environmental impact of digital preservation. Despite some notable recent work calling attention to and investigating the environmental costs of practices in our field,[1] we observed that most discussion of sustainable digital preservation was still focused on financial and staffing concerns, sustaining practices as a long-term program, or on the large amount of electricity used by digital storage infrastructure. Additionally, we noticed that current frameworks and standards push practitioners toward optimal digital preservation whenever resources allow, instead of providing guidance when lower levels or standards may be sufficient.
In light of these trends, we proposed a paradigm shift in digital preservation practice in our 2019 article, “Toward Environmentally Sustainable Digital Preservation.”[2] Rather than focusing on strategies that simply reduce the unsustainability of current practice by improving the efficiency of the technological infrastructure we use to do our work, we argue that truly sustainable digital preservation can be achieved only when digital object management, successful use, and environmental sustainability are explicitly balanced and integrated into decision-making criteria. Suggesting a paradigm shift[3] along these lines, we outline ways for practitioners to critically reevaluate appraisal, permanence, and availability of digital content—providing a framework for integrating environmental sustainability into digital preservation practice.
Workshop Protocol
Throughout our research and writing, we returned again and again to a driving factor behind our work: that the changes we propose can make a difference. The breadth and enormity of the climate crisis should not drive us to despair that our actions are inefficacious. When aggregated, our actions can result in significant positive change. To this end, we want to continue sharing our work in the hope that it will inspire others to implement and advocate for environmental sustainability at their own organizations. To facilitate this, we developed a workshop protocol designed for participants to discuss issues of environmental sustainability in digital preservation, identify and enact change toward sustainable practices in their organizational contexts, and identify and plan further research. The protocol is available at: https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-hxe1-m195.
BitCurator Users Forum 2019: Workshop First Run
We ran the workshop for the first time at the BitCurator Users Forum 2019 on October 24, 2019 at Yale University. We briefly introduced our article’s core arguments, set the ground rules for discussion, and split into three discussion groups based on the paradigm shift areas. Groups reported back in two sessions, with participant-created notes available here.
In the first session, we broke into three groups, each lead by a facilitator:
- Appraisal. Discussion in the appraisal group focused on collecting policies, and in particular that many participants feel that they do not have the authority to influence the appraisal process or collecting decisions. There was consensus that the low cost of storage has resulted in an reluctance to invest in staff and technological resources to conduct critical appraisal, and that reappraisal is even more difficult to accomplish.
- Permanence. Participants in this discussion group also discussed digital storage, particularly whether participants’ organizations accounted for environmental factors when implementing new (or refreshed) on-premises or cloud storage solutions. On the idea of acceptable loss, participants discussed how much loss would be acceptable at their organizations in different contexts, and how the concept could be communicated with collection curators. Those in the permanence group also compared notes on how each organization approached fixity checking, with a wide variety of practices reported among participants.
- Availability. This discussion group observed that the availability of digital content is tied to reappraisal and permanence decisions. Decisions earlier in a digital object’s life cycle have consequences for access that should be incorporated into organizations’ decision making and transparently explained to researchers. Participants discussed digitization projects in detail, particularly the issue of on-demand digitization versus mass digitization, and the lack of clear guidelines on determining what the critical mass of user need is that would move a collection or group of materials from on-demand to mass digitization.
After the general discussion on each of these areas, the three groups focused on plans for implementation, and the facilitators encouraged participants to think about actionable steps that they could take at their own organizations. A sample of these action items follows:
- Appraisal
- Develop and implement policies for regular reappraisal.
- Ensure that curatorial and collecting guidelines cover digital content.
- Write preservation policies that include tiered levels of preservation so that organizations can consistently select the most appropriate level during acquisition (and communicate this to donors).
- Permanence
- Promote collaboration with those responsible for appraisal to ensure implementations of tiered preservation solutions are meeting donor/organizational/user expectations.
- Implement a lower tier of preservation commitment for digitized content that has a stable analog original.
- Enact file format policies that do not migrate stable file formats.
- Availability
- Document demand for digitization to inform preservation approaches in line with the tiers advocated for in OCLC’s 2011 Scan and Deliver
- Develop criteria for shifting collections or groups of materials from on-demand to mass digitization, especially for audiovisual materials.
- Investigate central or interoperable discovery systems, to avoid duplicating digitization efforts across organizations.
When the groups reported out, it became clear that there were some implementation ideas common across all three areas. Foremost among these was advocating for environmental sustainability: all three groups brainstormed ways to advocate at their own organizations, from demonstrating the need for environmentally sustainable practice to working with existing environmental initiatives. Additionally, some participants noted that having more quantifiable data on the environmental impact of digital preservation, and the positive correlation between environmentally sustainable actions with staffing and financial sustainability, would help them make the case for their action plans to their organizations’ administrators.
Next Steps
We are making the workshop protocol available so that others can run this workshop at conferences and in their local organizations and communities. Conducting the workshop at BUF2019 made it clear that participants had many areas of shared interest, and significant enthusiasm for the subject. There is ample further opportunity to learn from each other and work together to implement specific actions across organizations.
We hope that individuals and existing or newly-formed working groups will take on investigating subjects such as:
- Data and metrics on the impact of digital preservation at cultural heritage organizations.
- Strategies for advocating for sustainable digital preservation practices.
- Frameworks for gathering use statistics or user demand for digitization.
- Guidelines and policies for implementing tiered preservation approaches.
We are excited to continue working with the digital preservation community on moving toward environmentally sustainable digital preservation and look forward to seeing new research on this topic from others.
[1] See for example Eira Tansey, “Archival Adaptation to Climate Change,” Sustainability: Science, Practice, & Policy 11, no. 2 (2015), https://doi.org/10.1080/15487733.2015.11908146; Benjamin Goldman, “It’s Not Easy Being Green(e): Digital Preservation in the Age of Climate Change,” in Archival Values: Essays in Honor of Mark Greene (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2019); and Linda Tadic, “The Environmental Impact of Digital Preservation” (presentation, Association of Moving Image Archivists conference, Portland, OR, November 18–21, 2015), updated December 2018, https://www.digitalbedrock.com/resources-2.
[2] Keith Pendergrass, Walker Sampson, Tim Walsh, and Laura Alagna, “Toward Environmentally Sustainable Digital Preservation,” American Archivist 82, no. 1 (2019), https://doi.org/10.17723/0360-9081-82.1.165, open access via Harvard DASH: https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/40741399.
[3] See Donella Meadows, Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System (Hartland, VT: The Sustainability Institute, 1999), open access via the Academy for Systems Change: http://donellameadows.org/wp-content/userfiles/Leverage_Points.pdf; and John R. Ehrenfeld, Sustainability by Design: A Subversive Strategy for Transforming Our Consumer Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008).
Issues & Advocacy 