Editorial: Funding the Past—and Future

The landscape for archiving and accessing electronic and print materials has changed drastically over the last decade—mostly but not always for the better. On the one hand, the profusion of content, born print or digital—papers, letters, reports, government records, memos, web sites, blogs, and so on—produced by both individuals and the government means that we have potentially more information than ever at our fingertips. However, the burden on institutions to preserve, organize, and make this material available has increased exponentially at a time when funds—and trained staff—are under ever greater pressure.

At the National Archives, tightening budgets have led to reduced hours, expanded backlogs of items waiting to be described, longer waits for materials, and fewer archivists to consult in person. “Why does this matter?” asks author David Kahn (The Codebreakers) in an op-ed piece in the New York Times (3/19/07). Because, he says, from the archives' “astonishing riches emerge not only the records of one's immigrant grandparents but the documents and images that produce books and telecasts about this country. Without the service of the archives, the nation risks amnesia and loses direction.”

We risk “amnesia” not only at the National Archives but also at the Library of Congress (LC) and public and private institutions nationwide. The recent slashing of federal funding ($47 million from a promised $100 million) for LC's National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (see “LC Needs Digital Support,” News, p. 16) threatens efforts to retain web-based information and born-digital material. In testimony before Congress last month requesting the restoration of those funds, Librarian of Congress James Billington noted the “widely held but false assumption that digital materials accessible today on one's PC or Blackberry will necessarily be available in the future.... The average life of a Web site has been estimated to be 44 to 75 days....”

For those who share Billington's concerns about the disappearance of web-created material, Jessamyn West's article in this issue's netConnect supplement is essential reading (“Saving Digital History,” netConnect, p. 2ff.). West illuminates the complexity of tracking the past in the digital realm and points to some solutions. Referring to blogs like her own librarian.net as “the diaries and letters of the present day,” she reminds us that they are hyperlinked “to other blogs, news reports, digital images, videos, and sounds recordings.” While such links enrich our understanding, they also complicate “how to store this linked set of web sites and media for later retrieval and/or reassembly.”

West points to projects both small and large, like LC's September 11 Web Archive and the Internet Archive's “harvesting” of web sites, respectively, as examples of current efforts to preserve the past. Even these aren't enough, however, given the speed at which digital information is created. Billington noted in his Congressional testimony that University of California–Berkeley researchers estimated that “the amount of information produced and circulated on the Internet in 2003...was equivalent to 37,000 times the content of one Library of Congress.” Billington may be using the term “equivalent” loosely, since there's a huge difference between what is on the net—from crap to high-caliber—and what is in LC.

Nevertheless, the challenge is daunting but not insurmountable. If, as West urges, we want “to open the doors to our collections wider and to share the work we do as well as the thrill of discovery,” librarians and archivists must say, “This matters,” “we can do this,” and we will “find people to help us.” But collective goodwill and technology alone won't save the past. It's up to Congress to provide money for the National Archives to preserve access to what is already available, to catalog the backlog, and create online “finding” aids. It's up to Congress to fund LC and the preservation projects launched by state government partners. And it's up to the library community to remind our representatives that this is a national challenge that we must meet.