Review: Partners for Preservation (2019)

Ashley Howdeshell

Jeanne Kramer-Smyth, ed. Partners for Preservation: Advancing digital preservation through cross-community collaboration. London: Facet Publishing, 2019. 212 pages. Paperback. $88.80.

In Partners for Preservation, Jeanne Kramer-Smyth seeks to illuminate the issues of digital preservation outside of the GLAM (gallery, library, archive, and museum) communities. Kramer-Smyth presents ten chapters written by experts in professional fields outside of GLAM emphasizing their specific difficulties in the move to digital. The books divides the chapters into three parts: Memory, Privacy and Transparency; The Physical World: Objects, Art and Architecture; and Data and Programming.

Part One: Memory, Privacy and Transparency demonstrates how the move to digital has created issues in some of the most basics aspects of our society like death, memory of an individual, and the authority of law. Edina Harbinja writes about how death has become more complicated now that most people also have digital assets in additional to physical property. Estate planning needs to now encompass the things like passwords to online accounts, who has “ownership” of the information in those accounts, can third-parties even legally access these online accounts, and what do companies do with these online accounts after death. Paulan Korenhof discusses how the internet makes it harder, if not impossible, for an individual’s actions to be forgotten. Search engines allow for a level discovery of information not seen before and this calls into question the right to memory and the right to be forgotten. Ellie Margolis writes about the issues of link rot in the legal field and how this threatens the validity of legal opinions if citations cannot accurately point back to sources. Without the ability to see the reasoning behind a court’s opinion, there is real threat to the growth and validity of the law.

Part Two: The Physical World: Objects, Art and Architecture discusses how the move to digital has effected the seemingly stable world of physical objects. The effects of digital objects and appliances in our homes, the ability to have color consistently rendered on our digital screens, and the lifecycle of buildings are all addressed. Éierran Leverett discusses the risks and impacts of having so many digital objects in our homes. The concerns about the hacking of objects and issues of privacy of an owner’s actions and information all show how the digital world has impacted our daily lives in a way not really considered. Abhijit Sarkar writes about the struggle to have color render correctly and consistently on digital screens. This issue of true representation of a creator’s work, art or otherwise, highlights how even a seemingly stable concept such as color has now become problematic due to the ubiquity of digital screens. Ju Hyun and Ning Gu discuss how the ability to create vast amounts of digital information about a building has led to issues previously unfamiliar in the architectural world such as maintenance of digital repositories and the possibility of augmented reality increasing the amount of information shared with the public about a building.

Part Three: Data and Programming deals with the issue of data sharing and future viability. Natalie Shlomo discusses the issues surrounding the release of large amounts of statistical data. How data is represented, preserved and privacy protected presents major issues for current and future users of that data. Vetria Byrd examines the issue of data visualization, specifically in the scientific community. The need to create visualizations is obvious when dealing with such large amounts of data, but these visualizations need robust documentation and transparency in order to be of use for scientists. Ildikò Vansca tackles the world of open source software and the pros and cons of this movement of open code and community-based maintenance.

With all of these very different professionals detailing their struggles with the move to digital, a familiar pattern emerges. The issues concerning archivists and digital preservation are the exact same issues facing these seemingly disparate professions. All are concerned with privacy, security, transparency, preservation, and accessibility.

Kramer-Smyth shows that the widespread and constant creep of the digital into our lives has consequences. The benefit of hindsight shows that our digital world should have been created more purposefully and less haphazardly. In order to address the issues presented in this book and those of the future, we must create more standards, less proprietary, more security, more documentation, and more control of personal information. There must be a movement to engineer all things digital with an eye towards the long term and with a focus on the impacts it can have on the people using these objects or data.

By creating a world that increasingly lives in the digital, preservation has become more important than ever. Archivists and other technology professionals will be needed to ensure that all this data in its various formats is accessible and stable over the long term. This book expertly points out that archivists and their skills are needed beyond GLAM. Our professional needs to push for more positions in places and processes that might not currently see our value or traditionally hire archivists. There is a great need for our skills and Kramer-Smyth’s book shows us a way to approach non-traditional professions and demonstrate our worth by illuminating our shared concerns about digital preservation.

Ashley Howdeshell is the Assistant University Archivist at Loyola University Chicago Archives and Special Collections