It is hard to imagine a more interesting time to work in libraries, nor a more challenging one.
In an era of post-truth obfuscation and sinister deletion, the ability to collect, retain and authenticate is suddenly a super-power; in an era of relentless proliferation, the confidence to select and consolidate, with implied permission to relegate and de-duplicate, is ubiquitously essential; in an era where data is the ‘new oil’ of the ‘information society’, the unassuming librarian holds the keys not only to the past, but now also to the future. One would have thought that this generation more than any other would be the age of the library, an enduring proof of common cause for the common weal: deposit libraries at the summit of our ambition, the record of all we have achieved and source of all we might. Why does it not feel that way?
It’s not yet clear whether the digital turn will be the making of the library or its undoing, given many of these opportunities are disruptive, mostly provisional, and largely originate outside of the library community. These challenges arise just at a moment where the social and economic context of operations are profoundly unsettled, whether through the continuing dysfunction of economics, the puzzling impasses of public discourse, or a global crisis of dislocation and dispossession. With such uncertainty about the times in which we will shortly live, this is no time for an identity crisis. Yet there is little prospect of staying unchanged.
A new volume of papers edited by long-term DPC collaborators Melissa Terras and Paul Gooding has just been published by Facet: Electronic Legal Deposit: Shaping the Library Collections of the Future. The book is the culmination of an AHRC-funded project led by Melissa and Paul which looked at the impact of changes to electronic legal deposit legislation upon UK academic deposit libraries and their users. The book inclues contributions from experts worldwide who look at issues and successes in preserving our digital publishing environment and it includes a chapter discussing the work which DPC led in 2018 to review digital preservation capability of the UK's legal deposit system. The publisher's open access policy means I am allowed to share a pre-print of my contribution to the debate . This will be published, with the rest of the volume, on World Digital Preservation Day 5th November 2020.
- Preprint of Making History: Digital Preservation and Electronic Legal Deposit in the Second Quarter of the Twenty-First Century
- Full text publication: Electronic Legal Deposit: Shaping the Library Collections of the Future
- Details and Registration for the Book Launch, 5th November.
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