[DOC] 2 Reports from CLIR

[Terry Kuny]

The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) recently published
two new reports, "Collections, Content, and the Web" and
"Enduring Paradigm, New Opportunities: The Value of the Archival
Perspective in the Digital Environment".

For information on their contents see the CLIR press releases below.
Both reports will shortly become available on-line (as full text in
HTML and in PDF format). You will then find them at the list of CLIR reports:

http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/reports.html

Collections, Content, and the Web

This report explores how the World Wide Web is affecting collections-based
institutions. It is based on a conference organized by CLIR and the Chicago
Historical Society in October 1999, with financial support from the Institute
for Museum and Library Services.

Although libraries and museums share few professional organizations or other
structures that regularly bring them together for substantive purposes, they
share a fundamental purpose: to collect physical things to make recorded
knowledge and aesthetic experience accessible to their patrons. But when art
and research objects go from real to virtual, how does the relationship
between an object and its viewer or user change? Who uses museum and 
library Web
sites, and what do they seek?

These questions drew 30 leaders of museums and libraries to the two-day
conference, which was designed to focus on issues of collections, audience,
and technology. Four papers, distributed before and presented during the
conference, addressed these topics and served as a basis for discussion and
recommendations. The report includes the papers and summaries of the
discussions they provoked. It also summarizes a survey of institutional Web
sites that was conducted to gather preliminary data about museum and library
Web site design and use.

Libraries and museums come to the Web with very different experiences of
information technology. Libraries have long used automation for managing the
description, cataloging, and inventory control of collections. On the other
hand, museums in the last several decades have made great strides in making
their collections more accessible to a large public and have developed
intellectual, aesthetic, and educational portals for onsite visitors to their
institutions.

The differences that became apparent between the operating assumptions of
library and museum leaders were some cases quite predictable. Perspectives on
intellectual property, for example, diverged because of the traditional
functions that libraries have served in the administration of fair use in the
print world and the particular interest that museums have had in protecting
the rights of artists whom they display. Museums dealt forthrightly with 
issues of
selection and presentation because they have a mandate to interpret.
Librarian sometimes approached the matter of selection as if it were 
synonymous with
censorship, because they traditionally place a high value on making
information accessible without mediation. But in some cases the differences 
between types
of museums (art or historical) and types of libraries (academic or public) were
even more striking. In summarizing the discussions, the report aims to
represent distinctly these four points of view - public and academic libraries,
art and historical museums - to highlight the often-surprising intersections of
values and concerns and the equally unexpected divergences of interest or
experience.

The report concludes that the fundamental challenge now is to determine what
steps will ensure that the Web can be greater than the sum of its parts, that
is, that the museum and library presence on the Web amounts to more than a
cluster of individual Web sites. No one believes that the Web will replace
libraries and museums, but many can see a time when the Web blurs and
eventually erodes, in the user's mind, the current distinctions between
libraries and museums. We are rapidly moving into an environment in which
preconceptions formed by traditional institutional associations and
proprietary
control are being challenged and dissolved.

####

Enduring Paradigm, New Opportunities: The Value of the Archival Perspective in
the Digital Environment, by Anne J. Gilliland-Swetland, assistant professor in
UCLA's Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. The report
examines how the archival perspective can be useful in addressing problems
faced by those who design, manage, disseminate, and preserve digital
information.

For years, archivists have grappled with many of the issues that are gaining
broad attention in the digital environment. Since the 1960s, the archival
community has worked closely with creators of records and record-keeping
systems to develop means to identify and preserve digital records that have no
paper counterpart. Emerging dialog about how to define and ensure authenticity
in digital objects can also benefit from the archivist's perspective. Archival
institutions serve an important legal function in society, and concern for
retaining the evidential value of records has placed the archival community at
the forefront of research and development in digital authentication.

There are other aspects of the archival profession that bring valuable
perspective to the creation, management, and dissemination of digital
information. The author notes that because archives focus on records,
archivists are keenly aware of how societal, institutional, and individual
memory is constructed, and the implications of how that memory is represented
and transmitted over time. This is especially important as more of the world's
collections are reformatted and represented on-line, where information is
subject to not only to corruption or outright loss, but also to loss of
context. The archival community has been active in exploiting the roles of
context and hierarchy in information retrieval.

Whereas libraries primarily manage existing information- traditionally in
published form, but this is changing - archives are also intimately engaged in
the creation of information and its ultimate disposition.

The author reviews several recent and ongoing projects in which the archival
community has provided leadership in setting the agenda or integrating the
archival perspective. The projects have addressed the integrity of information,
metadata, knowledge management, risk management, and knowledge preservation.
Many of the projects discussed have in common a concern for evidence in
information creation, storage retrieval, and preservation; cross-community
collaboration; strategies that use both technological processes and management
procedures; development of best practices and standards; and evaluation.

Digital technology is erasing many of the distinctions between custodians of
information and custodians of artifacts. Museum curators, librarians,
archivists, and information technology specialists face many common
concerns in the digital environment. The author views this
broad base of professionals as a new "metacommunity" and argues
that its members face an unprecedented opportunity to contribute
their distinct perspectives to develop a new paradigm
for the creation, management, and dissemination of digital information.

*****