Digital Promise and Peril

“Born digital” content is promising because, ultimately, libraries' most important future content is its unique content. But it's also a source of peril because many librarians lack the awareness and technological skills to actively select, collect, and preserve this content. The success of sites such as Flickr, YouTube, and Blip.tv demonstrates that individuals are creating and sharing their own content more than ever. In August 2006, 37 percent of Internet users surveyed as part of the Pew Internet and American Life Project uploaded photos to a web site so they could share them online with others.

This material (photos, videos, audio files) is typically referred to as “born digital” because it is created electronically and never had a print or physical analog. However, such materials go well beyond digital photographs, audio, and video. Born digital materials also include web sites, blogs, online newsletters, and any other content that exists in a purely digital format.

In his 2006 book The Long Tail, Chris Anderson notes that the tools of production for content have been democratized and many more people are capable of creating content. While 62 percent of all U.S. households own digital cameras, according to a 2007 Consumer Electronics Association study, the ability for ordinary people to create and distribute content on a massive scale has emerged only in the last year or so.

During World War II, soldiers sent photos and letters home from overseas; today, soldiers in Iraq send emails, write blog postings, and shoot digital photos that document their experiences. The value of these materials hasn't changed in the last 60 years. What has changed is the manner in which the materials are produced and distributed.

As Jessamyn West wrote, “Making sense of our collective past, especially our recent past, must take the digital narrative of events into account” [LJ netConnect, Winter 2007, p. 2–5]. While her comments focus on blogs, our ability to make sense of the present in the future depends on the primary source materials that we are currently creating in digital format.

Primary source materials are just the tip of the iceberg, though. For academic libraries, the nature of “faculty papers” has changed dramatically. Most new academic faculty will not have physical papers that represent the body of their scholarship to donate to the university library when they retire. Instead, librarians will have to sort through a hodgepodge of blog entries, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and digital video and photographs. Like traditional “faculty papers” in a box, these electronic records are invaluable to researchers and will make for a truly unique library collection.

Many of these digital materials are in jeopardy of being lost because librarians have not yet found adequate ways to collect and manage them. In part, this is because roles and skill sets have been siloed in libraries. Materials preservation issues have typically been the purview of special collections and archives units within the library. In contrast, cataloging expertise has resided in technical services, and technology expertise has typically resided in systems. To collect and manage born digital objects adequately requires these roles and skill sets to come together.

Another reason for libraries' difficulty in managing born digital content is that library administrators and staff can't “see” the backlog of materials. Consequently, in most libraries digital materials are treated as fundamentally different from physical collections requiring different staffing and workflow. The result is the creation of digital project or digital library groups that are separate from the rest of the library's operations, thus creating duplicate staffing and workflow, which are not sustainable. For the collection and management of born digital content to be sustainable, that content needs to be built into the everyday business of the library.