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0098-7913/03$–see front matter © 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.PII: S0098-7913(03)00024-8

Reviews

Teresa Malinowski, Column Editor

with contributions from T.G. McFadden, Hazel Cameron, Linda Heichman, Shelley Myer, Susan L. Scheiberg, and Peter Whiting

T.G. McFadden reviews

Building a National Strategy for Digital Preservation: Issues inDigital Media Archiving

, and

The State of Digital Preservation: An International Per-spective

, Hazel Cameron reviews

The Librarians’ Internet Survival Guide: Strategiesfor the High-Tech Reference Desk

, Linda Heichman reviews

The Librarian’s Guide toIntellectual Property in the Digital Age

, Shelley Myer reviews

Maxwell’s Guide to Au-thority Work

, Susan L. Scheiberg reviews

Coaching in the Library: A ManagementStrategy for Achieving Excellence

, and Peter Whiting reviews

Naked in Cyberspace:How to Find Personal Information Online

. Serials Review 2003; 29:157–165.

© 2003 Elsevier Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Building a National Strategy for Digital Preservation: Issues in Digital Media Archiving

Washington, DC: Council on Library and Information Resources, April 2002. 95 p. $20.00. ISBN 1-887334-91-2

The State of Digital Preservation: An International Perspective

Washington, DC: Council on Library and Information

Resources, July 2002. 95 p. $20.00. ISBN 1-887334-92-0

T.G. McFadden

Do you know where your data are tonight? Are theyhanging out with defunct data formats, has-been hard-

ware, or obsolete operating systems? If so, they aren’tcoming home in the morning. Ever. This is the bracingmessage of these two recent publications of the Councilon Library and Information Resources (CLIR) and theLibrary of Congress.

1

If you are the custodian or pub-lisher of digital data, or a subscriber to someone else’sdigital data, you need to know the risks involved in anyof the currently proposed strategies for preserving thesedata into the next decade (let alone into the indefinite fu-ture). And you need to understand one thing very clearly:All of these strategies suffer from the same inescapabledefect, namely, that the future has not yet arrived. Wehave

no

real-world experience with the success or failureof any known technique for preserving digital data intoany specified time in the future. This is not a trivial prob-lem. Other methods for preserving information—print-ing, say, or microfilm—have already proven their viabil-ity for very long periods of time. We therefore knowsomething about the likelihood of success using suchtechniques because we have already seen it happen. Thisis not the case with any of the strategies for archiving dig-ital information discussed in these two, otherwise veryhelpful, publications.

Building a National Strategy for Digital Preservation:Issues in Digital Media Archiving

(hereafter,

Building

)reports, in part, the results of a series of interviews andother surveys done in late 2001 among members of thepublishing, academic, and library communities. Each ofthese sectors of cultural production has concerns—manysimilar, some distinct—about the preservation of theresulting products or inventory. Many of these issues arematters of public policy and not merely preoccupations

McFadden

is College Librarian at Schaffer Library, Union Col-lege, Schenectady, NY 12308; e-mail: mcfadden@union.edu.

Cameron

is Librarian, College of Business and Economics,Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA 98225; e-mail:hazel.cameron@wwu.edu.

Heichman

is Business Librarian, Pollak Library, California StateUniversity–Fullerton, Fullerton, CA 92834; e-mail: lheichman@fullerton.edu.

Myer

is Technical Services Librarian at Lockwood Library andCatalog Librarian at Health Sciences Library, State Universityof New York, Buffalo, NY 14214-3002; e-mail: smyer@ascu.buffalo.edu.

Scheiberg

is Assistant Director, RAND Library, Santa Monica,CA 90407-2138; e-mail: susanls@rand.org.

Whiting

is Serials Librarian, David L. Rice Library, Universityof Southern Indiana, Evansville, IN 47712; e-mail: pwhiting@usi.edu.

Tools of the Serials Trade

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Malinowski / Serials Review 28/3 (2003) 157–165

with historical or cultural archiving of the life and mind ofa society. In either case, the central questions are clear:

1. What will be preserved?2. For what purpose?3. For whom?4. For how long?5. Who will decide (and take responsibility)?

The contributors to

Building

raise, discuss, and some-times attempt preliminary answers to these questions fora variety of digital formats: journals, electronic books,the World Wide Web, sound recordings, video recordings,and television programming. Several of these formats arethemselves frequently a complex bundle of other formats.A television broadcast, for example, may include digitalelements, analog elements, sound, still and moving im-ages, and computer-generated images that do not appearin all versions of the final product.

2

As the broadcast isput together in all its details, the formats of various partsmay pass through several stages of sophistication.

3

Sim-ilarly, a Website can be an enormously complex inter-section of data formats of all kinds. How to preserve thismixture while also salvaging even approximately thelook and feel of the original is a daunting problem.

Kenneth Thibodeau’s contribution to

The State ofDigital Preservation: An International Perspective

(here-after,

State

) is an intelligent and comprehensive survey ofthe technical problems and prospects of digital archiving.

4

Any strategy for preserving digital formats immediatelyruns into the following obstacles:

• Medium longevity• Format compatibility• Hardware compatibility• Operating system compatibility• Reader (interpreter) availability

We know very little about the stability of (CD-R) op-tical disks, the most probable medium for long-term dig-ital archiving. Despite the scare stories of a few years ago,this technology seems likely to yield a physical objectthat will retain data storage capability for upward of 100years, if carefully preserved in archival conditions. Butnot only is this time period inadequate for true archivalpreservation, these results are based solely on laboratoryaging tests. So, in any case, we will almost certainly facethe need for data refreshing onto new media types. Butthere is a more serious problem with the data.

We are sadly familiar with the problem of reading ourold text files after we have enthusiastically upgraded tothe latest version of our favorite word-processing pack-age. Most applications software includes backward com-patibility for a few generations (

�

6 months), but afterthat a document starts to lose weight. Formatting fea-tures are the first to go, then other file formats embeddedin the text, and finally the entire document. Variousshared file formats into which text files can be convertedfor transfer among programs are only a temporary solu-tion. The crucial question, for which right now there isno obvious answer, is: How do we preserve data formatcompatibility across multiple generations of operating

system and applications program environments? If wecannot solve this problem, then having a long-term phys-ical storage medium will be of no help.

5

State

contains contributions from Meg Bellinger andLaura Campbell on recent digital preservation projectsconducted by OCLC and the U.S. Digital InfrastructureInitiative. Clearly, unless a national effort is sponsoredand funded, much of the information we now withoutquestion assume will be archived for future generationswill in fact be lost. This is especially true of documentsand images traditionally regarded as subject to “ar-chiving” by educational, administrative, and governmentagencies. Australia, geographic isolation notwithstand-ing, has initiated a number of extremely interesting effortsto identify and preserve national and regional datathrough centralized coordination and support. ColinWebb, in his contribution to

State

, remarks that the Na-tional Library of Australia (NLA) has “made a substan-tial contribution to digital preservation practice, re-search, and thinking” (

State

, p. 65).

6

This statement ismuch too modest. The library’s Website on digital ar-chiving in general, “PADI—Preserving Access to DigitalInformation,” is a goldmine of information about thetheory and practice of digital preservation. At the sametime, however, the NLA has also put online its own ef-forts to preserve the published national heritage, espe-cially material published in electronic formats. Somehowit seems appropriate that this project should be calledPANDORA (Preserving and Accessing Networked Doc-umentary Resources of Australia). Anyone wanting tounderstand the technical and public policy issues sur-rounding digital preservation, and the myriad of conflict-ing solutions currently being discussed, could do muchworse than start with these NLA resources.

7

Given all of the talk in CLIR publications about theimportance of metadata in digital archiving, it is unfor-tunate that none of their publications on this topic areindexed. They should rethink this editorial policy. Asidefrom that, these two most recent publications can beenthusiastically recommended as maintaining a strongtradition of original contributions to the conversation ondigital archiving and preservation.

Notes

1. Other titles in the series relevant to the digital archiving issue are:Jeff Rothenberg,

Avoiding Technological Quicksand: Finding a ViableTechnical Foundation for Digital Preservation

(Washington, DC:Council on Library and Information Resources, 1999); Gregory W.Lawrence, William R. Kehoe, Oya Y. Rieger, William H. Walters, andAnne R. Kenney,

Risk Management of Digital Information: A File For-mat Investigation

(Washington, DC: Council on Library and Informa-tion Resources, 2000);

Authenticity in a Digital Environment

(Washing-ton, DC: Council on Library and Information Resources, 2000); DanielGreenstein and Suzanne E. Thorin,

The Digital Library: A Biography

(Washington, DC: Council on Library and Information Resources,2002). In general, the CLIR series entitled “Strategies and Tools for theDigital Library” will be useful to anyone interested in these problems.

2. In one market, a given television broadcast may include, for exam-ple, a Coke can in the background of a scene; in another market, thisobject may be digitally altered to appear as a Pepsi can. In what senseare we talking about the “same” television program and which one dowe preserve?

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Malinowski / Serials Review 28/3 (2003) 157–165

3. For example, a still photograph, when panned in the technique pop-ularized by Ken Burns in his documentary films, takes on a whole newlevel of format complexity and, therefore, implications for preservation.

4. Thibodeau is the director of the Electronic Records Archives Programat the National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC.

5. Remember the Osborne? Sinclair? These, among a great many, areexamples of defunct microcomputer hardware platforms. Emergingand existing data formats constitute a veritable alphabet soup of evolv-ing and often incompatible standards. There is little reason to believethat any currently existing format standard will retain readability intothe near-term, let alone indefinite, future. For a useful survey of theseproblems, see Bryan Bergeron,

Dark Ages II: When the Digital DataDie

(Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2002).

6. Webb has been Director of Preservation Services at the NLA since1993.

7. http://www.nla.gov.au/padi and http://pandora.nla.gov.au/ (24 Feb-ruary 2003).

The Librarian’s Internet Survival Guide: Strategies for the High-Tech Reference Desk

by Irene E. McDermott, edited by Barbara Quint. Medford, NJ: Information Today, Inc., 2002. 267 p. $29.50.

ISBN 1-57397-129-X

Hazel Cameron

In

The Librarian’s Internet Survival Guide: Strategies forthe High-Tech Reference Desk

, Irene McDermott pre-sents a series of carefully selected chapters originallywritten for her “Internet Express” column in

Searcher

magazine. McDermott’s informal and sometimes humor-ous style, polished through ten years of experience as aneditor for Salem Press, creates a refreshingly witty andpersonally reflective guide to the Internet.

McDermott divides her book into two principal sec-tions. In Part 1, “Ready Reference on the Web,” shepasses on the tips and tricks she learned using Internetresources to answer questions at the reference desk of theSan Marino Public Library. In the first nine chapters,the author carefully selects and evaluates free Internetsites that have provided high quality answers to typicaldaily questions. Whereas her guide is aimed primarilyat helping the busy information professional save time atthe reference desk, McDermott’s choice of such diversetopics as using search engines, tracking down lost rela-tives, finding the latest breaking news stories, and discov-ering medical information, appeals to many differentusers. In particular, Chapter 5, “Internet Sites for Kids,”would certainly interest any parent concerned aboutpopular, kid-safe portals, online games, and general home-work sites. The chapter on cybershopping would interestmost consumers as it provides resources that allow con-sumers to compare the quality and prices of goods, todownload money-saving coupons, or to check out thereputation of merchants, products, and services. Thereare also investment sites for the financially astute. Mc-Dermott neglects, however, to mention employment re-sources, mortgages, nutrition, or legal information—allissues of high interest to the general public.

The readability of the book is enhanced by the un-crowded appearance of the text, the images of key Web-

sites, and the use of topic divisions within each chapter.In Chapter 7, “Health and Medical Information On-line,” McDermott includes a special section that focuseson cancer resources, including information on clinicaltrials. Her interest in this area is driven in part by per-sonal concerns: A friend was diagnosed with colon can-cer (pp. 109–10). Unfortunately, there is a paucity of in-formation on heart disease, the leading cause of death inthe United States,

1

and alternative forms of medicine thatare frequently requested at reference desks.

McDermott introduces each section with a prologthat presents interesting research and background infor-mation and explains key technical terms. She also drawson personal examples of use of the various sites in herdaily work, demonstrating the strength and limitationsof sites and providing additional tips and tricks along theway. The prologs appeal to the neophyte and advancedprofessional alike. Each Web link appears on a separateline from the title with an abstract underneath. The ab-stracts are short and capture the key characteristics andimportant features of the site; they are not bogged downwith excessive detail. This feature makes this compila-tion a wonderful book for quick reference questions. Itdiffers from

Best Bet Internet,

2

which has page-longabstracts, and

The Information Specialist’s Guide toSearching and Researching on the Internet and the WorldWide Web,

3

which provides extensive detail about howto use the sites.

Regrettably, McDermott does not compare sites orprovide readers with any sense of which sites to try first.Since this is a broad-based Internet guide rather than acomprehensive listing of one particular subject, the au-thor includes only one to ten sites within each category.These sites, though, tend to be the portals, or the “best ofthe net.” They are current, authoritative, and primarilyU.S.-focused, appealing to the U.S. library professional.

McDermott includes several high quality Europeansites as well as some portals of literature in languagesother than English. These portals are useful for publiclibraries with increasing numbers of multicultural pa-trons. I was disappointed to find only one listing forMexican (Spanish) materials, especially since the Come-dia Project (Association for Hispanic Classical Theatre,Inc., at http://www.coh.arizona.edu/spanish/comedia/Info.html), which operates out of the University of Ari-zona, is so well known. With the increasing number ofHispanics in U.S. cities, this is indeed an unfortunateoversight.

The author’s organizational scheme is also problem-atic. Chapter 4, “Quality Reference Resources on theWeb,” examines a wide variety of resources under vari-ous subject categories, including medicine. There is alsoa separate chapter entitled “Health and Medical Infor-mation Online,” and “Subject-Specific Web Resources”is a subtopic of the last chapter, “Keeping Up withChanges on the Web.” It would have made more senseto tie these subject resources together by topic and then tosubdivide them by full text or portals.

What becomes abundantly clear through Part II, “TheLibrarian as Information Technician: Working with theMedium and the Machines,” is that librarians are asked