0.23 Perpetual stewardship: comments on penelope kaiserlian’s paper  (Page 2/5)

Differences in functionality

One set of difficulties derives from the fact that we are quite properly unwilling to settle for merely using digital technology as a way of reproducing what we used to do in print. If all that were at stake were the equivalent of typesetting and distribution of fixed editions (as is the case with works that were born in print and then scanned), digital technology could be an almost unmitigated boon. But, as a quick glance at the CV’s of many of the attendees at this symposium will demonstrate, scholars will not settle for mere reproduction of the print world. Rather, they want to produce and use works that have rich sets of links and specialized tools that allow them to do new and exciting things. The Rotunda Press’s electronic publication of Melville’s Typee is a fine example. The reader is given access to many editions, both in manuscript and encoded text, along with rich editorial commentary. This work could not be fully produced as traditional print. The implication is that for many applications, traditional print just won’t do. Alan Liu uses a number of examples to argue persuasively that “even in the care of humanists bred up in libraries, the digital today makes books go away.” “The End of the End of the Book: Dead Books, Lively Margins, and Social Computing,” Michigan Quarterly Review , Vol. XLVIII, No. 4, Fall, 2009, p.503.

The desire of scholars to produce and use works that can only be produced digitally poses both technical and economic problems for academic libraries and for publishers who produce works that are of interest to academic libraries. The essential functionality of digital scholarship is encoded in particular formats and markup languages that are likely to become obsolete over time. As newer works embody newer gadgets, the expertise needed to provide continued reliable access to older works often becomes hard to find. All of this can be dealt with, but only with costly attention and costly intervention. See, for example, Sustainable Economics for a Digital Planet: Ensuring Long-term Access to Digital Information, Final Report of the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access, February 2010. Final draft available at brtf.sdsc.edu/biblio/BRTF_Final_Report.pdf .

Differences in continuing curatorial requirements

Even when the technical problems involved in preserving digital works are relatively straightforward, libraries and publishers (whichever is doing the direct provision) have to deal with the fact that digital works require active effort on the part of provisioners in a way that is quite different from print. The Founding Fathers Papers and Founding Documents published by Rotunda provide good examples here. The papers are in XML, which will last a while and which will surely have a good migration path in the future, so the issue I have raised above is relatively unimportant. But no matter how stable the format, it costs money—power, hardware replacement, staffing the help desk—to make the works accessible every day. There is nothing very fancy about this—it’s actually analogous (if I may use that word) to the cost associated with keeping books on a shelf. But, unlike the cost of keeping books on a shelf, there is a continuous set of production activities and associated outlays of money that can be attributed to each digital publication. When a major research library “purchases” the electronic version of George Washington’s papers, it shells out several thousand dollars and it commits to paying an annual maintenance fee to cover operational costs and improvements. For the highest tier of libraries, the annual maintenance for the Washington papers is $300, which has a present value of $10,000 discounted at 3 percent real interest (that is, interest net of inflation). At 5 percent real interest, the present value would be $6,000. At the lowest tier of institution the charges would have present values that are a tenth of these amounts. No doubt in terms of cost the large institutions subsidize the small ones, but note that the present values, which can be interpreted as the endowment necessary to provide the maintenance in perpetuity, are additional to the one-time purchase cost of $7361, approximately doubling the total cost of the resource for a library. The details are different for other publications of Rotunda Press, but the story is qualitatively similar. Assuming similar first copy costs for both print and electronic, this ratio is high for electronic publications, but typical of print publications (see footnote 6).