NATIONAL PRESERVATION OFFICE

‘Parallel Lives’: digital and analog options for access and preservation

Papers given at the joint conference of theNational Preservation Office and King’s College London

held 10 November 2003 at the British Library

Organised by the National Preservation Office – www.bl.uk/npoand KCL Digital Consultancy Services – www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/kdcs

© The Contributors 2004

First published 2004 by The National Preservation Office The British Library 96 Euston Road

London NW1 2DB

ISBN 0-7123-4867-7

‘Parallel Lives’: digital and analog options for access and preservation

Papers given at the joint conference of the National Preservation Office and King’s College London

held 10 November 2003 at the British Library

Edited by John Webster

Contents

Biographies of speakers……………………………....………………...………. 1

Introduction……………………………………………………………………... 4

Photographic images and digital copies: some issues Mike Evans Head of Archives, English Heritage National Monuments Record…………….. 5

The Old Bailey Online Tim Hitchcock Professor of Eighteenth-Century History, University of Hertfordshire………… 23

Policy and planning issues in the creation and management of surrogates of cultural objects Marilyn Deegan Director, Forced Migration Online Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford………………………………… 40

Securing the past for the future: the NEWSPLAN 2000 experience John Lauder Project Director, NEWSPLAN 2000…………………………………………… 45

The Burney Collection of Newspapers: will digitisation do the trick? John Goldfinch Head of Incunabula and Early Western Printed Collections, British Library…... 49

Managing the life cycle decisions for the long term use oforiginal collection material and surrogates Helen Shenton Head of Collection Care, British Library………………….......…….…….….… 61

A question of cost: choices on the road to digitisationSimon Tanner Director, KCL Digital Consultancy Services………….......………….......……. 75

Biographies of Speakers

Marilyn DeeganDirector, Forced Migration Online Refugee Studies Centre University of Oxford

Marilyn Deegan has a PhD in medieval studies: her specialism is Anglo-Saxon medical texts and herbals. She has published and lectured widely in medieval studies,digital library research, and humanities computing. She is currently Digital ResourcesDirector of the Refugee Studies Centre at Oxford University, and runs the Forced Migration Online project, a major digital library and portal for materials concerned with all aspects of refugee studies. She is Editor-in-Chief of Literary and Linguistic Computing, the journal of the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing, and Director of Publications for the Office for Humanities Communication based at King'sCollege London. She has recently published a book Digital Futures: Strategies for theInformation Age with Simon Tanner.

Mike Evans Head of Archives, English Heritage National Monuments Record

Mike Evans has been a member of staff at the English Heritage National MonumentsRecord since 1992, and has been Head of the Archives since 1996. Previously he worked as an archivist at Buckinghamshire Record Office, the Grange Museum of Community History, and the Greater London Record Office (now the London Metropolitan Archives). In his current post he is responsible for managing thecuration and cataloguing of NMR holdings, and has been involved in several digitisation initiatives. These include the NMR’s own Viewfinder and Images of England projects and the digitisation of images of medieval stained glass by the Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi project

John GoldfinchHead, Incunabula and Early Western Printed Collections, British Library

John Goldfinch is currently Head of Incunabula and Early Western Printed Collections at the British Library. As Reading Room Manager for the Rare Books and Music Reading Room at St Pancras, and its predecessor at Bloomsbury, the now-vanished North Library, he has been concerned with issues of access to difficult-to-handle rare materials for many years.

Tim HitchcockProfessor of Eighteenth-Century History, University of Hertfordshire

Tim Hitchcock is Professor of Eighteenth-century History at the University of Hertfordshire. He has published widely on the history of eighteenth-century poverty, sexuality and gender. His most recent books include English Sexualities, 1700-1800 (1997), with Michèle Cohen, English Masculinities, 1660-1800 (1999), and with Heather Shore, The Streets of London From the Great Fire to the Great Stink (2003).He is also, with Robert Shoemaker, co-director of 'The Old Bailey Online' – selected best overall website at the 2003 Cybrarian Project Awards. He is currently completinga monograph on how to beg on the streets of eighteenth-century London.

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John LauderProject Director, NEWSPLAN 2000

John Lauder is Project Director of the NEWSPLAN 2000 Project and was appointed to the post in June 2000.

He is a Chartered Librarian and a graduate of the School of Librarianship and Information Studies at the Robert Gordon Institute of Technology, RGIT (now theRobert Gordon University) in Aberdeen.

John worked in public, school, and college libraries before becoming the first director of the Scottish Newspapers Microfilming Unit (SNMU) in 1993. The SNMU was established with a grant from the Mellon Microfilming Project as a joint partnership between the National Library of Scotland and the Scottish Library and InformationCouncil (SLIC) to provide high quality archival microfilming services to the libraryand archive community in Scotland. The SNMU is still active in Scotland and has a growing reputation for its microfilming and digital imaging services throughout the UK.

Helen Shenton Head of Collection Care, British Library

Helen Shenton is Head of Collection Care at the British Library (BL). This covers all aspects of the care of the BL’s collections, including conservation and preservation, collection storage, environmental control and digital preservation. Current projects involve a new centre for conservation; the development of conservation training, library conservation research and public outreach; digital preservation; new storage facilities and the development of preservation and storage data management systems. Helen manages a staff of about two hundred and leads on life cycle collection management strategy for the British Library.

Helen read English Literature at University College London and trained at the London College of Printing, where she became assistant to the Arts and Crafts Book Conservator Roger Powell. In 1984 she joined the Victoria and Albert Museum; by the time she left to join the BL in 1998 she had become Assistant Head of Conservation, a post that encompassed textile, painting, photographic, paper and book conservation.

She is currently a Board member of the Digital Preservation Coalition and theNational Preservation Office and chairs the NPO Preservation Advisory Panel. She is Chair of the Preservation Division of the Ligue des Bibliothèques Européennes de Recherche (LIBER) and a member of the Preservation and Conservation Committeeof the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) Helen sits on a number of national and international advisory boards, including the boards of Lambeth Palace Library and Lincoln Cathedral Library. She has taught and examinedMasters degree courses in conservation and preservation, and is a Fellow of theInternational Institute of Conservation.

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Simon Tanner Director, KCL Digital Consultancy Services

Simon Tanner is the first Director of KCL Digital Consultancy Services (KDCS) atKing's College London. He manages and delivers KDCS services aimed at theinternational non-profit heritage sector. He works closely with other KCL departments and also reaches out beyond KCL to create joint activities with other institutions in the area of digitisation. Simon has a library and information science background. Before joining KCL, Simon was Senior Consultant at Higher Education Digitisation Service (HEDS) playing a key role in its successful development as a service of The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). He has also worked forLoughborough University, Rolls-Royce and Associates and IBM (UK) Laboratories. He has recently published a book Digital Futures: Strategies for the Information Age with Marilyn Deegan.

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Introduction

For most cultural heritage institutions the preservation of the original artefact(whether that is a manuscript, a painting, a photograph or other format) is likely to be a key element in that institution’s relationship with that artefact. This objective is closely followed by the provision of access, enabling research, study and education.Digitisation is a way of providing new approaches to research, enabling a widerpotential audience, and presenting a renewed means of perceiving our cultural and information heritage. These twin paths of preserving the original and digitisation foraccess are actually intertwined and dependent upon each other. This conference hasan important role to play in highlighting the links and dependencies between digitisation and preservation needs.

Digitisation is neither without consequence nor without limitations. It requires themost rigorous planning, financial management and work-flow design, if it is to beseen as something that adds real value. During the conference the speakersdemonstrate some of the careful planning and consideration that is needed to makeprojects successful. Strategic, financial and policy issues are also described andhighlighted wherever possible.

This conference suggests that there is no one life cycle that is of more vital importance than another. It is not possible to state that microfilming is everything and will solve all problems, nor can we say the same for digitisation. The culture and heritage community is steering a course through a digital age, with many heroic intentions to digitise collections. But it would be wrong to assume that digitisation isgoing to be the solution to all problems. The conference encourages the reader to think about these parallel life issues and consider a continuum of responsibility where the activities of physical preservation and digitisation will enhance each other.

Simon Tanner, Director, KCL Digital Consultancy Services

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Photographic images and digital copies: some issues

Mike Evans

I would like to talk today about a few of the ways in which, in our experience, the process of digitisation changes the relationship between the photographic image, thecurator and the viewer. I should say at the outset that in referring to digitisation, I amusing this as a shorthand, not just for image capture but for the whole range of processes around this, including display to users.

It is of course a truism that photography has changed the way in which we understand and relate to the world. Susan Sontag claims that photographs “are perhaps the mostmysterious of all the objects that make up and thicken the environment we recogniseas modern…. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at, and what we have a right to observe.”i

Architectural and topographical photography, the areas on which the archives of theNational Monuments Record focus, share this power, this ambiguity.

The images held by the NMR vary enormously in their purpose, context and complexity. Photographs may be taken purely as a record of work carried out, such as the image captured at Leiston Abbey, Suffolk, in April 1967 and captioned, ‘A view of the east window arch looking west taken during consolidation’[Fig.1]. They maybe taken as an advertisement for the work of a designer or an architect. For examplethis photograph of a cinema in Finsbury Park in 1915 [Fig.2] was taken by Bedford Lemere and Co., the first firm of professional architectural photographers in England, who helped create the market for good quality architectural records among interiordesigners and architects. They may be taken to support an argument aboutarchitectural style or as an exemplar: much notable nineteenth century photography of historic buildings was created to inform architects about examples of historic styles and details. A photograph may be taken as an image which stands in its own right as aformal or a pictorial composition. And of course the perception of an image will be affected not only by the intentions of its creator, but also by the purposes and preconceptions of the viewer.

One image which I think brings some of these points together is Figure 3 whichdepicts the cooling towers of Ferrybridge B power station in the background, with thechurch of St Andrew Knottingley in the foreground. It was taken by Eric de Maré inthe 1960s, and what it shows can in one context be described straightforwardly enough as a series of buildings or sites. But the meaning and the power of the imageare rather more difficult to pin down, and depend on the preconceptions and concerns of the viewer. Some people see this image as a warning - our ecclesiastical heritagethreatened and overshadowed by the forces of modernity. Others see it as a celebration of technology and the architecture of industry. Still others might see itsuggesting some kind of equivalence between the ecclesiastical architecture of the past and the design of contemporary structures. De Maré himself was a pioneering champion and recorder of the functional tradition of nineteenth and twentieth centuryindustrial architecture, so we may feel we can make some assumptions about his views, but we cannot ultimately know what was in his mind when he pressed theshutter release. I have laboured this point because, although these issues of intention and perception have been extensively discussed in an art historical context, in our

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domains I am not sure that we have tackled them to the same extent, and I believe that there are some implications for how we approach digitisation.

Fig. 1. Leiston Abbey, Suffolk

A view of the east window arch looking west during consolidation, April 1967

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Fig. 2. Cinema in Finsbury Park, 1915 taken by Beford Lemere and Co.

Fig. 3. Ferrybridge B power station (background) and Church of St Andrew Knottingley (foreground)taken by Eric de Maré in the 1960s

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The examples I have used so far come from the holdings of the National MonumentsRecord of England, which has since 1999 been part of English Heritage. The NMRaims to document the historic environment of England and there are sisterorganisations in Scotland and Wales with the same role. This remit clearly overlapswith that of other memory institutions, and is potentially extraordinarily extensive.When the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments of England, one of our predecessors, received its initial warrant in 1908, its brief ran to 1914; it wasn’t thought appropriate or necessary to go beyond that date. Now we include photographs and surveys of Cold War sites like the Fylingdales early warning radar [Fig.4], which of course has now been demolished. As part of the work of the NMR we maintain anarchive of over ten million items which describe the historic environment in someway. While these include plans, reports, and most other record formats, the greatestpart of what we hold are photographs, and these are consulted by a wide range of users from architectural historians and archaeologists to environmental consultants, solicitors and of course the general public. The majority of our inquiries are carried out remotely, that is, we receive inquiries by post, phone or email, and we deal with them in the same way, often by sending copies. It is only a minority of researchers who visit us to actually look at original material.

Fig. 4. The Fylingdales early warning radar

Before I talk about the digitisation programmes of the NMR, there are a couple offurther aspects of photographic collections I would like to touch on. The first is that photographs may come in very large numbers. The ease of production, at least in the twentieth century, the increasingly democratic nature of the medium, and the sheer usefulness of photographs in recording information, mean the collections can be verysubstantial. Predictably, those which are created in an institutional context tend to bethe largest. A substantial part of the Property Services Agency collection wasdeposited with the NMR at privatisation, and contains over 360,000 images.However, even collections by individuals can be very large – the NMR holds a

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collection of transparencies and negatives recording stationary steam engines which contains 90,000 items. The issues of management which these volumes give rise to are matched by those of access. In order to allow users to identify whether there is animage relevant to their inquiry in a collection, our general experience, albeit with exceptions, is that we have to catalogue the collection to item level. Most of the usefulinformation from the point of view of the user comes at image level, not at that of series or even collection, and as a result, we tend to work with very flat archivalhierarchies. This in turn has implications for the scale and nature of our digitisation programmes, because if images are to be included in such programmes they have notonly to be scanned but also catalogued.

The second point concerns the complex nature of the physical photograph. I havealready commented on the richness of content and meaning in photographs, but the physical reality of photography has its own complexities, and these centre on the relationship between the negative and the print. That relationship varies in different contexts; the differences between the negatives of my holiday snaps and the prints which a commercial bulk printer produces from them are not generally that problematic. However, at the other end of the scale, Ansel Adams famously said, “The negative is comparable to the composer’s score, and the print to its performance.Each performance differs in subtle ways.” The choice of paper, the exposure used, thehighlighting of certain areas, and a thousand other factors, will all affect how a print looks. At its most extreme, some information will be visible in one print which is quite invisible in another, because it has disappeared into shadow. The implication of this is that the printer, who may or may not be the same person as the photographer, is a partner in the creative process, and the same may of course be true when images are scanned and prepared for display.

I would now like to turn to the NMR’s experience of digitisation, and to some of theissues arising out of that. Perhaps the first and most important feature is that for us digitisation has grown out of conventional darkroom work. As a photographic archive we have always had our own darkrooms, and from the mid 1990s staff in this area were experimenting with the new digital tools, scanners and workstations. While we still have a substantial conventional silver capacity, we envisage that over the next few years a rapidly growing proportion of our photographic work, whether it is producing prints for public orders, printing up backlog collections, or digitising material for projects, will be carried out on digital workstations. As a result of this, we have come to digitisation very much as a craft process, with the particularpreconceptions and skill sets which that implies. On the one hand this has made itmore difficult for us to step back and take a root and branch look at processes. But on the other, it has allowed us to build on the strengths and the insights of existing photographic practice, and I have found the dialogue that I have had with the staff inour darkrooms extremely interesting and useful.

In terms of specific digitisation projects, I will briefly describe a couple of our maininitiatives to provide some context for the rest of the talk. The first is the Viewfinderproject (http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/viewfinder) which was funded by the New Opportunities Fund. With our partners, Oxfordshire County Council, we digitised approximately 13,000 images representing most of the known surviving images by Henry Taunt, a commercial photographer who worked in the ThamesValley in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. We also digitised

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approximately 7,000 images, from a wide variety of NMR collections, which documented the changing face of industry in England. This project helped us developan online picture library into which we are now slotting further digitised collectionsand work created for some earlier pilots.

The second project, Images of England (http://www.imagesofengland.org.uk), is focussed slightly differently. The aim of this is to have volunteers take a single imageof every listed building in England, and to make scans of these available on theInternet, alongside the texts of the listing descriptions. By putting the images and thetext together, a very powerful new tool for assessing the architectural heritage of England is being created. In this case scanning has been carried out by third party contractors, with a strong quality assurance process being managed by the project.

I will now turn to some of the ways in which digitisation itself may change therelationship between the viewer, the archive holder, and the images which have been scanned. Firstly however I just want to note that in reality many of the things I will talk about are already visible, or at least possible, in a conventional, analog context. What digitisation has done is to give them far greater force, or to open up existing possibilities to a much greater extent.

An obvious point to make is that through digitisation we can provide access via the Internet to a much larger and wider audience in comparison to the number of people who could ever visit an archive. This has been a particularly important driver for the NMR, in part because of our location in Swindon, which is not uniformly accessible to the rest of the country, but also because we have reached an effective limit to the number of remote inquiries we can support with existing resources. We very much seeour way forward in terms of providing as much content as we can via the Internet, and focusing our staff resource on dealing with those inquiries which fall outside this. I think it is worth noting that in our experience, both internally and externally, it isaccess which has been the driver for the investment in digitisation. Preservation hasbeen seen as a useful by-product but would not I think have liberated on its own thekind of sums needed for substantial digitisation.

The next point is that this wider audience which we want to reach has very high expectations of what can and should be provided over the Internet, significantly higher than those expressed by existing users of conventional archival services. In arecent article, Elizabeth Hallam Smith of The National Archives noted that “online users of archival services are …. generally less satisfied than on-site users, (and canbecome overtly and aggressively critical when online services hit problems)”ii. Whenwe launched our own Viewfinder site, we received a lot of favourable comments, but also several queries as to why the rest of the archive was not available online. In part this undoubtedly reflects a lack of awareness of just how much is involved in digitisation programmes. The fact that anybody can scan their holiday snaps in a few moments means that they may have less patience with the time taken to set up a majorprogramme. However I suspect it also represents a general digital impatience which we will all increasingly have to respond to, a feeling that if you can’t Google it, it mayas well not exist.

One risk of these expectations is that they focus attention on those parts of the collections which have been digitised at the expense of other holdings. We are all of

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course likely already to have parts of our holdings which are particularly well known and heavily used. In the case of the NMR we have a topographically arranged open access collection of architectural photographs which is one of the original historiccores of the National Monuments Record. It continues to be heavily used by visitors, though we have not added any new material since 1980. We have considerabledifficulty in persuading people to look beyond the collection to the far greater volumeof material which is stored elsewhere and accessed via our catalogues. There is a risk that digitisation will accentuate this problem, that we could become known primarilyfor a limited range of images which are constantly recycled, and that perverselydigitisation could end up discouraging access to un-digitised areas of the holdings.We are trying to counter this by providing access to our catalogues of images, even where we have not digitised material from those collections, via the Access to Archives initiative and on our own website. I think in addition that where a digitisation initiative involves selection, as inevitably many must, then that process of selection needs to be thought through, and the relationship between what is digitised and what is not must be clearly expressed. Otherwise we risk losing some of thecontext and meaning of our holdings. There are also pragmatic arguments for being cautious about selection; in our Viewfinder project, we found the process of identifying and selecting a group of industrial images from several collections very time-consuming and problematic. The scanning of a whole collection, even one splitlike the Taunt collection between two repositories, was far more straightforward.

Digitisation forces to the surface choices about what to record, what to scan and how to display it, which may otherwise be hidden. I referred earlier to the complexrelationship between the negative and the print. The negative will always contain themost information in absolute terms, but the print may be a better reflection of the intentions and purpose of the photographer. An example of this from the NMR’s own holdings is a photograph of a monument to Alexander Chapman in Canterbury Cathedral. This was taken in December 1941 by Bill Brandt, one of the mostimportant photographers working in England in the twentieth century, if not the mostimportant. He was commissioned by the National Buildings Record, one of the precursors of the NMR, to record monuments in several cathedrals. He supplied a number of images of the Chapman monument to the NBR, and prints of these weremounted on card and placed in our filing system. The card [Fig.5] includes four images by Brandt, and it is easy to see that the bottom centre and bottom right imagesare not by him. It is possible to compare a scan of the photographic print of one of theBrandt images [Fig.6] with a scan taken from the original negative used to create that print [Fig.7]. It is immediately obvious that the printed version was heavily cropped to focus on the half-length statue and to use the framing provided by the carved drapery. To complicate matters further, we do not actually know whether these prints represent choices made by Brandt himself or whether he simply handed over the negatives andthese decisions were taken by NBR staff.

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Fig. 5. Photographs of the Alexander Chapman Monument, Canterbury Cathedral(Top row of photographs and bottom left photograph by Bill Brandt)

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Fig. 6. Scan of photographic print of one of Brandt’s images of the Chapman Monument

Fig. 7. Scan of original negative used to create the photographic print shown in Fig. 6

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Our default digitisation strategy is to scan from the negative where we have one. I would argue that this works for most of our collections because of their strongemphasis on informational content, and because in many cases the differences between the print and the negative are not great. There are collections, and that of Ericde Maré is one, where we know that the photographer often printed or published images in very heavily cropped forms. Most often we do not have an easily accessible set of prints to compare or scan from, and so scanning from the negatives is the onlypractical way forward. However, in cases like the Brandt images, there must be astrong argument for scanning both print and negative, and explaining to the user the context in which the two different versions have arisen.

Digitisation also allows the exploration of individual images in new ways. Many photographs have a depth of detail in them which was previously only available to the enthusiast or professional with a magnifier. For example, a photograph of LiverpoolStreet Station in the late nineteenth century [Fig.8] can show some fascinating details such as the titles of magazines on sale at the kiosk in the bottom left-hand corner[Fig.9]. At the moment access to this kind of detail over the Internet is generally dependent on specific choices being made by those running the project. In the longerterm, with the spread of broadband, it should be possible to envisage researchersroutinely being able to move into and around such images for themselves. A fascinating example of how information can be revealed by digitisation is some work done on a collection of images of settlement on the Great Plains taken bySolomon D. Butcher and held by the Nebraska State Historical Society (http://www.nebraskahistory.org). Here, information present all along in a glass negative had not been seen, because it was underexposed compared to the rest of the image [Fig.10]. It is comparatively straightforward, using image manipulationsoftware, to change the values within the doorway of a house so that the furnishing ofthe interior can be seen for the first time [Fig.11/12], thereby opening up a whole new source of evidence.

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Fig. 8. Liverpool Street Station in the late nineteenth century

Fig. 9. Detail of kiosk from Fig.8

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Fig. 10. Unidentified family near west Union, Nebraska 1886, by Solomon D. Butcher

Fig. 11/12. Cropped and enhanced image from Fig.10

Digitisation also, of course, changes the way in which viewers can find and use images. For some of our existing users this is perceived as a loss. I have already mentioned our open access collection, and it is the case that no online system can wholly duplicate the ability to browse and the serendipity which are features of such asystem. On the other hand, the development of our own online photo libraries has spurred us to focus more clearly on user need than was previously the case, and to

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take user feedback very seriously. Moreover the development of online resourcesgives us an opportunity to use new media to tell stories in new ways, to give theimages a new resonance and power. Even within an archive like the NMR, which mayseem short of drama in some ways, there are stories to tell, and these stories are oftenabout time, depth and about change. For example, Figures 13 – 15 show St Bride’sChurch, Fleet Street, in the 1930s, in 1941, and after restoration in the 1980s. In a similar vein Figures 16 – 18 show the same street corner in Leigh, Greater Manchester in the 1870s, 1890s and 1980s. It is this ability to juxtapose images in new and perhaps more dramatic ways and combinations that digitisation can help deliver.

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Fig. 13. St Bride’s Fleet Street 1930s Fig. 14. St Bride’s Fleet Street 1941

Fig. 15. St Bride’s Fleet Street 1980s

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Fig. 16. Street Corner in Leigh Greater Manchester in the 1870s

Fig. 17. Street Corner in Leigh, Greater Manchester in the 1890s

Fig. 18. Street Corner in Leigh, Greater Manchester in the 1980s

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I come to my final point about how digitisation can change relationships with somenervousness. It is that digitisation raises the issue of why we keep originals. I cannot be the only archivist or cultural manager who, having explained why our digitisation programme is such a wonderful thing, and how it will broaden access to theseimportant collections, has been asked by managers whether we can now save somespace and get rid of the originals. My response of course was that no, we couldn’t; however, I do not think that the question will go away for several reasons. Firstly, the NMR has, like many other institutions, been following a policy of creating a high resolution preservation digital master which we intend to keep indefinitely. We are effectively asking our employers and funders not only to continue to pay for the curation of our original collections in high quality archive storage, but also to support the archiving of a substantial amount of digital data at an unknown but almostcertainly substantial cost. A second reason is that we will face, or are already facing, the need to archive “born digital” images, and will have little choice but to maintainthese as digital entities. If we can do it for these images, we will be asked, why not for images converted from analog formats? And a third reason is that all conventional photographs decay. We may be able to slow the rate of change, but we cannot arrest it. Surely it would be better, the siren voices say, to preserve an unchanging version of the image.

Against this of course there are powerful arguments. The most immediate andcompelling is that the majority of organisations, ourselves included, do not yet have a robust digital archiving infrastructure which can guarantee the content, the authenticity and the stability of the image in the long term. It is also the case thatdigitisation does not necessarily capture all the information in an original. Certainly the amount of potential data in some larger photographic formats still far exceeds what in the real world we are likely to try and capture. Equally with some collectionsthere may be important information contained in the physical format of the item; the chemical make-up of an image layer for example may help date when the picture wastaken. And of course we cannot necessarily anticipate the questions which we mightwant to ask, or be able to ask of these originals in the future. Destroying them now would close off those possibilities definitively. There are collections where for thesereasons one could not envisage destroying originals just because one had digitalsurrogates. However, I think the question is whether this is true for all collections, orare there situations where it would be acceptable to move from an analog to a digitalformat, provided that there was a robust digital archiving solution? If it were to be acceptable, how would one begin to define the criteria used to judge where this wasappropriate? Needless to say, I do not have the answers to these difficult questions, but I do feel that in the longer term our response as a community will be stronger if we can approach the issue collectively.

I am conscious of having raised many more questions than answers, but I hope that atleast they are interesting questions. If there is one overriding point which I would liketo make, it is that digitisation programmes need to take into account the complexnature and meaning of photography and of photographs. Those issues should not paralyse us, or force us down overly complex dead ends, but they should help us to understand how and why particular photographs and collections were created, and to build that understanding into how we present those images to wider audiences.

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MARILYN DEEGAN (University of Oxford): I was fascinated by what you weresaying about the Bill Brandt example, and the cropping, and it made me think about, on the one hand the advantages of what technology gives to you, and on the other hand how there are technological limitations to anything that we choose to use. I’m a keen photographer, and I use zoom lenses all the time, and so I crop in the camera.Whereas presumably Bill Brandt didn’t use zoom lenses, so would have cropped afterwards. And so, zoom lenses give you a different way of actually composing right from the start, whereas something that gives you a much more sort of broad view actually preserves a surrogate that might not have been the surrogate you intended to preserve, but gives you more information, and then you can do things with that afterwards. When we do digitisation, we often crop in straight away, or do some kind of manipulation. And so, you’re talking about original objects which might be abuilding or a statue or whatever, a photograph which is one kind of representation, a cropped print which is another kind of representation, a digital file which is anotherkind of representation. And that whole kind of chain of technology opportunity and limitation as against artistic choice seems to me just a fascinating thread of what youwere talking about. I’m not sure if there’s a question in there, but I was fascinated by the point you were making, and wanted to emphasise it.

MIKE EVANS: I think it is a very complex chain. And there will be times when Ithink it right and valid to pursue that chain and to seek those kind of details about the type of camera used, what was the photographer trying to do, what equipment was heusing. There will be others, and I guess this is part of what I was trying to get to in myfinal point, where material was taken with a much simpler set of intentions, and I think you have to recognise that not all photographs are equal, that they don’t all carry the same weight and meaning and purpose. Some may be taken simply as a record photograph to indicate what that ruin looked like when we were doing a particular piece of restoration work on it. The number of people who are likely to go back to thatimage frankly is very low, but from an English Heritage point of view, that remainsan important piece of documentation of what has been done to a particular site.

RICHARD TAYLOR (National Railway Museum): Again it’s not really a question, it’s just actually picking up the point you made at the end about the lurking cost benefit analysis of the retention of digital copies. We are still actively collecting at theRailway Museum across a range of artefacts and records, and we have a very largephotographic collection. We have to do a cost benefit justification of anything we take in to the collection, and we’re increasingly getting to the point where rather than collecting objects, we are going out and making film, video, and photographic recordsof them, rather than collecting the objects, because it makes more sense - there’ll be more meanings preserved by creating a visual surrogate than by having a lump ofmetal or a lump of wood in the museum. Are you in an active collecting mode at the moment, are you actually having to deal with those cost benefit issues for activecollecting, or is it at the moment still a theoretical issue with regard to the existing collections you have?

MIKE EVANS: The focus is actually coming more in the context of our existing collections, but you’re quite right, it’s one that also affects collections coming in. At the moment we are still collecting, albeit increasingly under space pressures, and of course because it will be a long time before we get to the tail of conventional silver photography, we are still collecting images from the nineteenth century and early

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twentieth century. The possible case for a cost benefit analysis on whether to keep originals isn’t focused here, it is rather the more recent material, where there are verylarge volumes of record photography, that we have to think carefully about. But I think that the point you make about recording surrogates in different ways is very interesting. If I had had time I was going to raise a parallel from a different domainwhich English Heritage is very involved with, which is archaeology. Here there is an assumption that wherever possible you save archaeology in the ground, that you don’t excavate it, you save it for future generations, because excavation involvesdestruction. But where there are overwhelming social or economic benefits, then you will destroy that archaeology by excavation. You will keep as good a record as youcan, but you are inevitably closing off options of analysis and understanding by the act of excavation. And I think perhaps there is a parallel or two there.

Image credits

Fig. 1, 4, 15 © Crown copyright.nmrFig. 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18 Reproduced by permission of English HeritageFig. 10, 11, 12 Reproduced by permission of The Nebraska State Historical Society

Notes

i Susan Sontag On Photography (Penguin, 1979) p.3

ii Elizabeth Hallam Smith Customer focus and Marketing in archive service delivery: theory andpractice in Journal of the Society of Archivists Vol. 24 no 1, April 2003 p.37

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The Old Bailey Online: http://www.oldbaileyonline.org

Tim Hitchcock

Home Page

The Old Bailey Sessions Proceedings are the very stuff of social history. Published eight times a year, they give detailed accounts of every felony trial conducted for theCity of London and Middlesex between 1674 and 1834. In total they amount to some25 million words, recounting 100,000 trials. They give details of what was certainlythe most important event in most of 100,000 lives, and recount the stress and pain suffered when a broader population confronted violence and theft, murder and assault. It is not hyperbole to say that all of human life is here. The Old Bailey Onlinecurrently gives anyone with an Internet connection free access to eleven millionwords of this text. The site attracts between eight hundred and a thousand visitors a day from around the world, and the full twenty five million words of text will beavailable online, free and in its entirety by next summer.

What I want to do today is explore how the site works, and what it can do, and to then describe the methodology we used in its creation. In addition I want to briefly discuss the importance of this process of digitisation for historians, and librarians, archivistsand a broader public; to question how we should view that huge body of information,of images and text, which is gradually crawling towards your computer screens as wespeak.

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The site makes available both a full transcript of the Proceedings and an image of theoriginal from which the transcript was taken. If we start at the home page and do akeyword search for 'Salisbury Court' with the 'near' operator radio button selected, weshould get 74 trials in which this notorious alleyway just off Fleet Street and over the wall from Bridewell, figured in the evidence:

Keyword Search Page

›››

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Search Results, Page 1

This search is based on an XML index of every word in the Proceedings, and uses afreeware search engine called eXist.

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If we then click on trial number 9, that of Judith Watson for pick pocketing, on 11 Sep1734 the full text of the trial comes up, with 'Salisbury' highlighted in the second last line.

Trial of Judith Watson

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Needless to say, you might want to see the original, so GIF files of these are also available, at the click of a mouse:

Image of original text of trial of Judith Watson

This is one way in to the material – and if you were interested in playhouses orwheelbarrows, toasting forks or turmeric – a keyword search would produce resultsyou need.

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But this in turn is only the beginning. It is also possible to interrogate this material ina more analytical, and statistical way. If we go back to the home page, and choose 'Statistics', a different path in to the material is exposed:

Statistical Search Page

From here we can choose to create a pie chart, bar chart or table. We may decide to create a bar chart:

›››

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Create a Bar Chart Page.

By selecting to organise information by decade, and looking at the broad crimecategory of 'killing', we end up with a chart that essentially gives us an overview ofthe number of unlawful deaths tried at the Old Bailey for the whole of the eighteenth century:

›››

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Bar Chart Page

Here is the stuff upon which whole academic careers, whole popular perceptionsstand (and hopefully fall).

At the same time, this is the sort of thing you should never trust. Far better to look at the same information in the form of a table:

›››

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Table Page

If we choose to create a 'Table', and then choose 'display by decades' and 'types of killing', we should get a full statistical breakdown of the same trials upon which thebar chart was based, but this time it will be broken down even further:

›››

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Table Page

Over 1,200 trials are reflected in this table, and several different types of killing. Wehave murder, infanticide, manslaughter and petty treason (the killing of a husband by a wife, or a master by his or her servant). These statistics are based on a thoroughXML mark-up of the full text. Each trial has been 'tagged' to indicate defendant and victim, crime and crime location, verdict and punishment among a slew of other bits and pieces. The content of these tags has been exported to a database in MySQL, and that database has in turn been used to generate the statistics you see today. The story it tells is a simple one, and one which reinforces the observation that the murder rate hasbeen in rapid decline since the thirteenth century. When you consider that thepopulation of London grew from just under 600,000 in 1700 to over a million in 1800, this decline is even more impressive. This is the sort of information that up until now was only available at the cost of a head of grey hair and poor eyesight. But, at the same time, it is the sort of information any reasonably sceptical historian would distrust.

Fortunately, this table conceals something beneath. If we look for a moment at therow for 'infanticide', and the column for the 1730s, we see that there were 18 casesduring the decade, and if we click on the number 18, we get back to a list of trials, ofthe very 18 trials upon which the numbers in this box are based:

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Trial List of Infanticides in the1730s, Page 1

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Number 7 on this list is the trial of Mercy Hornby, 'of Stoke-Newington, [who] wasindicted for the Murther of her Female bastard Infant, by casting it alive into a Privy,by which Casting it receiv'd one mortal Bruise on the left side of the Head, of whichmortal Bruise it instantly dy'd, March 15.' 1734. If we click on trial number 7 we reach the screen below:

Trial of Mercy Hornby

And here a further bit of information is available.

By clicking on the 'Associated Records', you are taken immediately to the entry for Mercy Hornby's petition to be transported instead of being hanged, which sits quietlyat the National Archives(formerly the Public Record Office), and forms one entry in our 30,000 item database of related documents:

›››

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Associated Records Page

And finally, assuming you are still anxious about the veracity of the material, you can always go to the image of the original page:

Image of original text of trial of Mercy Hornby

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Beyond this, of course, you can read the 50,000 words of historical background written by Robert Shoemaker and myself. You can browse the trials by date. You can search by name and place, crime and verdict. You will soon be able to trace the trials on to contemporary maps, and to relate the trial texts to transcripts of manuscriptdepositions and court documents. In other words, what the site provides is acomprehensive gateway to the manipulation and search of a large body of text,eventually 25 million words, in a variety of ways. It is flexible and it works.

In the context of today's event, the important thing, however, is how we got here and why, and what the result adds to historical scholarship. And the answer to the first question, how we got here, is quite simply, by starting from a microfilm. Like so many fantastic historical sources, the Proceedings were filmed in the early 1980s,creating, in the process, a comprehensive set of images and a new archive that both brought together disparate holdings from North America and Britain, and which re-created the eighteenth-century Proceedings as a serial publication of a sort that would be recognised by an eighteenth-century reader. The existence of this starting point, of a comprehensive microfilm, allowed us to avoid that single most contentious and problematic aspect of the current generation of electronic, historical resources - theselection of material. We avoided the creation of a new canon, and the exclusion of material that looked extraneous to us, but which will no doubt form the basis of somefuture obsession - we hope in the process to have avoided that subtle imposition of today's perceptions on to resources that are meant to last in to an unknown future.

Our methodology was formulated in consultation with Simon Tanner, who was then at the Higher Education Digitisation Service (HEDS), at the University ofHertfordshire, and with the Humanities Research Institute (HRI) at the University of Sheffield. HEDS then largely implemented the transition from microfilm to a set of electronic images and from there to a set of electronic texts. The films were scanned in black and white, and saved in an uncompressed TIFF format. Early on, wediscovered that the film provided had been poorly reproduced and had to be remanufactured. We also discovered that the original guide to the material, produced along with the film in the early 1980s, was marked by significant errors. Despite these problems, we rapidly found ourselves in possession of 60,000 image files, named inaccordance with date and page number, and keyed to the original reels of film. Infuture, we are likely to move towards a compressed JPEG format and grey scale scanning at 400 dpi. If I have anything to do with it, we will also start off with a morerobust file management system than we did two years ago, at the beginning of this project. We are also moving away from the use of CDs for the transportation andtemporary storage of files.

The images we received, all 60,000, were then double entry rekeyed in India. Eachpage was typed twice and the two versions compared in order to identify and correcterrors - some 450 million individual keystrokes fell one after another. This was a slower process than originally envisaged and was marked by a few significant difficulties. Some of the original text would challenge the competence of even the best-trained historian - some pages were torn and stained, blotchy gothic script wasincluded, and some pages were simply unreadable. From this point, the text was marked-up in XML by a group of research assistants at Sheffield, and finally incorporated in to the website, which had been written by Bob Shoemaker and myself.

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Marked-up text.

The answer as to why, is perhaps less subtle. Basically, we want to challenge the way history is written, to radically transform who the object of that history is, and to ensure that everyone can be much more their own historian than was possible in thepast. Each decision about this site has been driven by these preoccupations and concerns. The fact that it is a comprehensive reflection of a single source and based in XML, the fact that it is possible to search it by keyword, as well as through structured queries, is all driven by the absolute need to give authority to the end user, to ensure that we are creating a resource that allows others to create a history. Similarly, thechoice of criminal records as the basis for this project was driven by the need to giveaccess to non-elite people (even if they are criminals). It was a part of a broaderstrategy to create a new history from below; a new popular, and at least implicitlypolitical approach to the British past. The original microfilm was created to giveaccess to the history of working people. Our project is a simple extension of thatmuch older ideal, an ideal which in turn is embedded in the history of the publiclibrary movement and the Workers Education Authority. In our view we are simplyextending that most progressive of traditions in British public life; the tradition thatsuggests that everyone has a right to the tools of social empowerment.

As to the final question of what our site adds to historical scholarship, I think the answer is twofold. First, I hope it provides a model of good practice. It creates a 'scholarly edition' that will last for at least a couple of generations. But second, and more importantly, it changes the way in which we can write history. It avoids the pitfalls of both databases and of keyword indexing. It also provides the basis for the creation of a truly transparent search facility that allows historians to link together,and interrogate imaginatively, the huge variety of records for London in this uniquely important century and a half. At the same time, because two generations of historians

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have come to know the Proceedings as a microform, the site ties in to and extends good historical practice. Historians who would never use, or perhaps trust a source they have not seen as a real object, or at least a real image, are drawn in to a new world of interactive text.

One of the greatest frustrations of any historian must be the certain knowledge thatevery note they take, every page they turn, is as much a lost opportunity, as it is an addition to knowledge. There is a sense in which every time we look at a single pieceof text we are looking at it through the lens of a slightly different question. Theproblem that computing has always presented, is that up until now it has demandedthat we specify the question in advance. You have to design a database before you canstart filling it in.

If the profession's experience of historical computing over the last twenty-five yearsteaches us anything, it must be that attempts to encode and select information, to translate a historical document in to something that a computer readily recognises, is doomed to relative failure. The questions that are embedded in every code, the selections that are forced on every database designer have a shelf-life shorter than a tin of baked beans. The beauty of concentrating on the process of delivering a full transcript is that even ten years down the road, we will still have something of value, we will still have something that can be searched by someone asking a question we cannot now conceive. The tagging involved in XML mark-up will age, and becomeincreasingly less useful, but the text itself will remain. In a generation or two, the site will no doubt have the dated and musty smell of nineteenth-century antiquarianism,but like the collections that fill the shelves of the British Library it will neverthelessstill be of use and used.

We are still faced with a series of difficulties and problems. At the moment we are struggling to integrate visual material, and in particular maps, in to the website. Whenone moves beyond text the issue of keyword descriptors and modern interpretationsbecome more pressing. The nature of 'mark-up' also creates a series of problems.Although more flexible than any other approach, 'mark-up' still forces us to define some text elements in advance. Just like a more traditional database, it imbeds a descriptive hierarchy in to the text and forces us to ascribe to a collection of words and letters the quality of a 'trial', or of a 'surname', 'forename', 'crime' or 'punishment'.This is necessary in order to be able to effectively count different types of informationand does not really impact on keyword and text-string searching. Nevertheless, itcreates problems when searching across, and counting information from, different types of sources. Is a surname in a parish register, the same thing as a surname in a trial account?

For the Old Bailey, we are now seeking to transcribe and post a full range of associated sources. Among these, we are particularly anxious to create online editions of the Ordinary of Newgate's Accounts (the published biographies of everyone held at Newgate and hanged) and the sessions papers (the manuscript administrative recordsof the court), of prison records from Newgate, the London Compters and the Hulks, and those of transportation to both North America and Australia. In the longer term we want to include parochial records, and letter books, justices' notebooks, and property records, to create the tools that will allow historians to access the informationthat has always sat between and betwixt that wonderful variety of early modern

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records." We want to give historians and the broader public access to the informationthat so frequently gets misplaced on the gentle stroll from the Corporation of LondonRecord Office to the Rare Books Reading Room at the British Library. In the process we also want to create a different and more democratic kind of history. Besidessatisfying the needs and demands of professional historians, we are also engaged in creating resources for family historians, and local historians, undergraduates and school children. At the end of the day the Old Bailey Online is about making the livesof working people accessible to as many people as possible in as flexible and useablea way as is feasible. It is a technical answer to the political and intellectual conundrum of history from below.

In relation to today's agenda, what we have created is a new form of access, rather than a new means of preservation. We have not, and cannot change the fundamentaltension faced by all the culture industries between preserving the past as a collectionof artefacts, and giving individuals access to that past as a series of ideas. Nor should we try. Rather than parallel lives, the two are conjoined twins, and any operation designed to separate the two could do untold damage.

ELLIS WEINBERGER (Cambridge University Library): What steps have you takento ensure that the access will be preserved over the next five years, what funding streams, what methods?

TIM HITCHCOCK: The University of Sheffield has undertaken in the first instanceto guarantee its continued support for seven years from the beginning of the project'sNew Opportunities Fund (NOF) funding. Beyond this, we are also moving towards a publishing agreement with HRI Online, the Humanities Research Institute Online atSheffield, which is a peer reviewed Internet site, which at least gives us a secure institutional context for the posting of material that survives even the seven-year guarantee provided by the University of Sheffield. We are also, of course, applying madly for extra funding to extend both the site and its life. We are also depositing everything at the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS) at the University of Essex.

MATT ZIMMERMAN ( New York University): I just had a question about the search engine, which looks really great. Are you using a native XML database, or...?

TIM HITCHCOCK: Basically we are using two different search engines and two different search strategies. This first is an XML index which is accessed using asearch engine called eXist. And second, we export all the tagged information, all the text within specific types of tags, into a more traditional database which is thenanalysed using MySQL. So, in a sense the keyword searches are derived from anXML index and the table and charts and pie charts come from MySQL.

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Policy and Planning Issues in the Creation and Management of Surrogates of Cultural Objects

Marilyn Deegan

Policy and planning issues are not exactly at the most exciting end of surrogate creation and care, but they are of fundamental importance. The responsibility of care for the cultural heritage of any society rests with skilled, trained professionals in memory organisations, who are daily faced with hard choices about setting priorities in a climate of increased demand and dwindling resources. This is true even in therichest of institutions in developed Western nations; almost no institution can doeverything it would wish to in the acquisition, curation and accessibility of culturalobjects. One significant aspect of the management of cultural objects has for centuriesbeen the creation of surrogates of some kind, to ensure that knowledge, art, religion etc. can be preserved. The manual creation of surrogates is of course a costlybusiness, and the advent of mechanised means of reproduction, from printing onwards, has offered new means to ensure both distribution and survival. And of course the more copies of something that are made, the more likely is the survival ofthe content of the cultural artefact. But this is not always true. For instance, politicalpamphlets printed in their thousands in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuriessometimes now only survive in very few copies, so it shows that as well as profligacy, you have to have long-term care and management. As Mike Evans pointed out, photo-duplication techniques developed from the nineteenth century onwards have of course had a huge impact on the cultural industries. Without photographic reproduction, there would probably be no discipline of art history, just as without the advent of the video recorder there would be no film or media studies. Mechanical reproduction does have problematic areas to be considered, for some of those who study cultural formsfind the substitution of surrogates for originals unacceptable, as this raises questionsabout the authenticity of the experience of the interaction. In day-to-day practice however, interaction with a surrogate can be more informative than with the original,if for instance that has to be locked in a glass case. The Turning the Pages programmedeveloped by the British Library for the presentation of some of its most preciousmanuscripts, such as The Lindisfarne Gospels and The Sherborne Missal, for instance,can give more sense of the completeness of the manuscripts than seeing just one opening at an exhibition, though for those privileged to see or work with the originals, nothing can really evoke the wonder or the awe of the object itself.

What has all this to do with policy or planning issues? Well, the creation of a surrogate has a purpose, and that purpose will most likely dictate how surrogates are to be created, for whom, by whom, how they are to be delivered, how they’re to bestored, and many other factors. And one of the most important decisions that is going to be made is what will then happen to the originals? The creation, delivery and long-term future of any surrogates, be they analog or digital, is first and foremost a matterof strategic planning and the establishment of policy and protocols. It should be part of institutional policy at the highest level, and built into its economic strategies. Onlythen can methodologies and all the technical, practical and human issues be discussed within an institutional context.

The kinds of policies on surrogates an institution should define will be driven by many factors. First of all, what kind of an institution are we talking about? A small

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local public library that holds only copies of widely available books, reference works and serials may very well have no need to create surrogates, or to be thinking about policies in this area. However, even this kind of smaller institution will almostcertainly provide photocopying services, and may also hold some collections of purely local interest that may need copying in some form to release their full utility. At the other end of the spectrum may be the national museum crammed with millionsof objects, many of them unique, with a responsibility to catalogue, care for andexhibit as many of these as possible to the millions of people that daily come through their doors. Such institutions will be creating many kinds of surrogates for different purposes: preservation copies, slide sets for teaching or sale, digital files for the Internet or CD, Christmas cards, place mats, mugs. The Bodleian Library even makesfacsimile wooden chairs, something unlikely to be replaced by digital reproductions.

Our intention here is to look at the dual options for surrogacy, the analog and thedigital, and to discuss the different roles of both. At the current state of our knowledge about preservation or access, we are not making necessarily either/or choices, for many institutions are doing both, and have set up imaging studios that cover the whole gamut of surrogate production, microfilming, analog photography, digital imaging, text rekeying etc. The Bodleian Library, the British Library, the Library of Congress and many others offer most of these choices. Interestingly though, there are some institutions that have gone over completely to digital means for creating surrogates, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. This does not mean that analog versions are not produced, but just that most of the primary capture is now digital. The University of Michigan has recentlypurchased a Zeutschel book scanner to scan and OCR brittle books instead ofmicrofilming, which is an interesting development. They comment:

After 20 years’ experience preserving brittle books by copying them to microfilm, the University of Michigan’s University Library is now leadingthe field in creating digital copies for long-term preservation. Among today’sreformatting choices, digital imaging is now the Library’s preferred method.i

This is clearly a policy decision that has been many years in the making, and manyinstitutions are currently grappling with the same issue of whether to scan digitally or to use some photographic means of capture. Again, they are not exclusive choices. Scanned materials can be output to film, film can be scanned later. Many digital projects start with filming for a number of reasons, creating a stable preservation copy being among the chief of them. Another key reason that a project may start with filmis that the film already exists, a huge factor in the Old Bailey project discussed elsewhere in this volume. Memory institutions have been microfilming documentsand filming artefacts for decades, some possibly even centuries, and modern scannerscan create a good, flexible access scan from the film and do it relatively fast and economically, thus accruing huge present benefit from past investment.

Another policy issue that institutions are going to face is whether they should create their surrogates in-house, or out-source the work to vendors, and there are benefits from both approaches. Sometimes there is no choice. Rare and fragile materialscannot be allowed to be sent off site, and so have to be processed locally. However, some vendors do offer onsite processing, so this may be an option. The Library of Congress and the Czech National Library are institutions that have both worked with

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vendors who install machinery onsite for the capture of such materials. The advantages of onsite capture are that it can build expertise locally, and objects do not need to be out of circulation for too long. Curatorial staff can also oversee the process,and be confident that the objects are not being subjected to unacceptable stress. However, running capture services for any surrogate format is challenging and costly.Simon Tanner deals with cost issues elsewhere in this volume. Almost no institutionsset up such services for their own purposes; they are mostly established in response to user demand. And if an institution holds valuable, rare content, it will have constant demands upon it for copies.

Another issue that an institution must deal with is the rights in any surrogates createdby the institution, and how to charge for and protect those rights. Rights protection is generally assumed to be easier in the analog world, given that there are physical limitations on the further reproduction of surrogates, while, the story goes, digital reproduction can proliferate unchecked. And though this is true, it is perfectly possible to reproduce a photographic image many times over, and use it for unauthorised purposes, and it is also possible to apply protection mechanisms to digital materials, such as making them available at low resolutions, disabling printfunctions, applying some kind of watermarking, or digital encryption. Someinstitutions, in realising the difficulty of policing digital images, have made policy decisions to allow any private, non-profit uses of digital materials without any restrictions, while charging for public and commercial usage. The Library of Congress for instance allows downloads of uncompressed archival TIFF images of some of its digital content, without the user even having to register.

The cost issues around rights protection are interesting, and they are complex, partial, and often opaque. This is because it is very difficult to know what value there is in theright to reproduce something. It all depends of course on the value of the something,on the purpose of the reproduction, and the possible income to be generated. That iswhy most institutions do not quote costs for rights as standard, but make decisions on a case-by-case basis, depending on the user or on the use. Talking about rights, of course, we have been talking about creation of surrogates of rare and valuable materials, to which the owning institution actually owns the rights as well. But of course surrogates are also created from materials which have low value in themselves,but which contain valuable content, and with these, and even with the rare and valuable materials, the institution may own or hold them, but may not own the rights.And in such cases, rights owners will need to give permission for copying for any purposes other than preservation. With the lower value materials, an institution mayhave many reasons for creating surrogates: microfilming or scanning of large formatmaterials, like newspapers or maps, so that the originals can be kept offsite, or even destroyed; microfilming or digitisation of brittle books to replace crumbling originals;copying materials that have heavy local usage for teaching, etc. Many of these will be compromised because of their age and condition, and therefore are unlikely to present problems in terms of rights. If they are copied for preservation purposes, they are unlikely to cause problems. But if the copying is done of in-copyright materials, and the intention is to make them widely available, then there are serious rights issues thatthe institution has to deal with.

Surrogates may be produced by institutions for many purposes, and different optionsare available for the production of the surrogates. But the surrogates also have to be

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managed themselves, possibly duplicated in some form, made available to potential users, and cared for in the long term in order that the investment made in theircreation can be realised. A cultural institution may find that it has many different formats of materials to take care of over the long term, and whatever formats they are, be they analog or digital, there will likely be a continuing cost in their maintenanceand care that in some cases will exceed, sometimes many times over, the cost of creation. This is of particular importance where the original is unique and possibly compromised, or where the original has been lost, discarded, or destroyed. And one interesting point to make is that good surrogates record a particular state of an original throughout its lifetime, or at one particular moment in its lifetime. If the original deteriorates after the creation of a copy, the copy then must stand in, not just for the object itself, as the object may still exist, but for an earlier state of the object. And if surrogates are taken over a period, it is possible to record some very interestingchanges in that object. A good example of this is the taking of a copy of epigraphicmaterials, especially inscriptions on stones, which are subject to wear and tear through natural forces which often cannot be prevented.

To illustrate this point, I am going to discuss a rather unusual format of a surrogate, a squeeze. A squeeze is a piece of filter paper, ordinary white filter paper, used in the nineteenth century to take an image of an inscription. The filter paper was moistenedand then pressed upon the inscribed stone, allowed to dry, then peeled off. It then represented a perfect copy of the original, with the characters and the depth of inscriptions preserved. Oxford University and various other institutions have manytens of thousands of these surrogate objects. A good example of a squeeze taken from a second century BC inscription at Methymna in Greece can be viewed on the website of the Centre for the Study of Ancient Monuments.ii Squeezes record a particular state of the original, and the filter paper, looked after properly, is highly durable. But the actual process of making the surrogate is destructive to the original, and it would never be done now. And this is a primary source example of a squeeze; though it is a secondary source of the inscription itself. This highlights a number of key issuesaround the preparation and use of a surrogate: whether the production of a surrogate isdamaging to the original, how it represents the original, what you do with thesurrogate in the long term, and what kind of scholarly meaning you then get out of it.

The preservation of surrogates often needs as much strategic planning, investment,and expertise as the preservation of the originals themselves, and the range of materials that a twenty-first century institution may need to hold is extensive. The move to digital has not eased this problem, rather it has exacerbated it, as digitalmaterials are usually added to the formats an institution has to manage rather than substituted for others. Even the institutions that have moved to totally digital captureand supply of surrogates, may have streamlined the process for current materials, butlegacy materials in all formats are usually the lot of large institutions to manage, with all the attendant problems.

Planning and policy issues are of course of crucial importance to institutions in the hybrid world of analog and digital reproduction, and they must also be considered hard when individual projects are planning to create digital or photographic facsimilesof originals as part perhaps of some project with larger aims. Most projects involved in the capture and supply of reproductions of cultural materials are going to be considering some form of digital workflow, but there may be analog products or

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processes also as part of that workflow, and over time the use and production of surrogates may change even within one relatively small project. Projects and institutions should therefore build flexibility and tolerance into their plans so that change can be accommodated. One thing that those of us in the digital world have learnt – sometimes to our cost – is that change in this area always comes faster thanyou think. A good example of a mixed digital and analog project whose goals and products have changed since its inception is the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music (DIAMM) project (http://www.diamm.ac.uk) of which I am principal technicalconsultant. DIAMM started as a rescue mission; the first round of funding wassecured from the British Academy in 1997 for the capture of fragments of medievalpolyphony in British archives as these were felt to be in danger of disappearing. The project was conceived of as an archive, not a delivery service. From the beginning the digital restoration of damaged fragments was part of the project, but delivery of thesefragments was intended to be analog; several printed facsimile volumes in the EarlyEnglish Church Music (EECM) series have appeared. The project has been highly successful in capturing high quality archive images, so much so that two moretranches of funding have been granted from the Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB) for the capture of images from outside the UK and for the capture ofcomplete manuscripts. As time has gone on and the delivery of large images via theInternet has become possible, there have been increasing demands from DIAMMusers for more and more images to be made available to them digitally, and a grant has been obtained from the Mellon Foundation to create an online delivery system forthe images. Will DIAMM still be involved in the production of printed volumes as well? Well, yes, for two reasons: because it is not possible to determine what a usersees on his or her screen, but it is possible to control the printing process, and also because the music is not just the subject of scholarly study, but is part of a livingperformance repertoire. It is not easy for an early music group to sing from acomputer screen! Therefore DIAMM will continue for the foreseeable future to capture high quality archive images, preserve them, and then make them available in both digital and printed form; a good example of a project which is working well as a hybrid.

So to conclude, for any project or institution embarking on the creation of surrogates,many decisions need to be built into the policy framework, for there are complex and inextricable links between preservation and conservation needs, delivery options, costs, staff skills and needs, etc. The decision about whether to use digital, analog orboth can only be made against a background of careful planning. And as illustrated bythe example of the DIAMM project and others, decisions may change over time, and projects and institutions need to be flexible enough to cope with this.

Notes

i http://www.lib.umich.edu/preserv/reformat.html

ii http://www.csad.ox.ac.uk/CSAD/Images/00/Image06.html

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Securing the past for the future: the NEWSPLAN 2000 experience

John Lauder

I thought I would just try, conscious as I am of the time allotted, to address the question that is on the agenda today, which is, why microfilm?

The NEWSPLAN 2000 Project is a preservation programme aimed at saving 1,700 of the United Kingdom’s most unique and fragile local newspaper files held in libraries, archives and museums. The Project is a joint initiative between the Heritage Lottery Fund, the newspaper industry, the regional newspaper industry of the UK, national libraries, local libraries, and NEWSPLAN Regions. The NEWSPLAN Regions refer to the ten committees from the ten areas of the United Kingdom. These committeesare drawn from public librarians, archivists, and meet on a regular basis on committee level. They identify newspaper collections that are rare, fragile, and rank them according to their fragility and importance. Over the years these committees, workingwith the British Library and the other national libraries have produced the excellentNEWSPLAN reports, which identify holdings of local newspaper titles throughout the UK.

The preservation initiative is based on 35 mm archival quality microfilm; it is a partnership with our contractor, Microformat (UK) Ltd. A key factor is the storage of the master negative and for this the project has a specially created store at theNational Library of Wales. The access element to our programme is based upon the supply, free of charge, to local libraries of copies of local newspaper titles identifiedby the local NEWSPLAN regional committee and appropriate to that geographic area; the supply of microfilm readers and reader printers to access the film; the creation of a database on our website to allow holdings to be identified; and indeed the websiteitself. The core aims are to allow very fragile unique runs that are often restricted from public access to be preserved, stored in controlled conditions and given a greater degree of longevity and to improve to access.

In 1999, when we made our first bid to the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF), we identified 4,000 newspaper titles regarded by their local NEWSPLAN committees as being fragile, unique and in need of preservation. The award of £5 million from theHLF will allow us to preserve an estimated 1,700; we hope it will be more, but a careful estimate is 1,700 newspaper titles. The award from the HLF was the largest they have ever made for a preservation programme for the printed word, and one of the very strong strands in our bid to the HLF was based upon the fact that preservation improves access, preserves local newspaper runs and benefits all sectors of the population. Local newspapers are heavily used by a whole variety of people, fromschool pupils to academics, from local genealogists to local historians. We also had tocreate a partnership approach to the initiative, because the HLF does not fund any initiative that it supports one hundred per cent, and our funding base splits roughly 70:30, 70 pence from the HLF, 30 pence from the regional newspaper industry, allowing us to pay for the pound when we spend it. So we must bring in funds tosupport the programme, we must therefore create a partnership approach with an industry.

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One of the key objectives has always been, and remains, to deliver one free copy of every film. The way that the project is structured is that a local library will put forward through its NEWSPLAN committee the titles that it feels are either in its collection, and need to be preserved, or are, very commonly, only available in the British Library Newspaper Library in London, and unavailable locally. And an interesting aspect of our programme has been that quite a lot of the runs that we are filming and supplying are not actually available in Scotland or Wales or Northern Ireland, or in the English regions; they are only available here in London at the British Library Newspaper Library’s excellent collection in Colindale. So by filming them and by moving that film out, we are improving access in a way that has not been therebefore. The website is a major objective, and it is running very well; we intend to catalogue every title to MARC 21 and make these records available online. As I have already mentioned, another key objective is the long-term storage of the masternegatives.

So why microfilm? Well you have got to remember that the project was first put forward in 1998, so we are talking here about a project that was first thought of in 1996, and was planned from then on before it was sent on to the Lottery Fund forconsideration. The key areas for us are longevity of the surrogate once created; the cost-effectiveness of the creation of the microfilm; the reliability of the microfilm as an access medium, for, although it has its limitations, we know that it is reliable, weknow that it works. When we were beginning to structure the bid in 1996 the idea of scanning film and allowing full text searching was an ideal, although now in 2003 it isclose to being a reality. So digitisation is another strand of why microfilm was chosen for the NEWSPLAN 2000 Project. The creation of an archival quality surrogate – microfilm – is internationally accepted, there is a method for doing that, there is a 500 year life for the master negative as long as it is held in controlled conditions. So for usas a body of people putting forward a bid to the HLF, which is rightly sceptical of any bid that comes its way (quite properly, because at the end of the day the HLF is there to spend Lottery players’ money, and therefore must do it as wisely as possible), a key factor was the ability to say with some strength and reliability that the format we havechosen to preserve these newspapers, which are fragile, which are falling apart as they are being used, has a long-term life. Reliability is important when you are proposing avery big complex project to a funding body, we thought anyway, and we still think so. There is also an ease of access to microfilm. It is not an easy format to use, no one would argue that; it takes time and it takes patience. But there is an ease of access in that there is already an infrastructure in libraries and archives to access it, and people are used to dealing with it.

The standardised production process in the creation of the archival microfilm is also very important. Again, when we were proposing the project to the HLF we wereasked some very thorough questions and had to produce detailed documents to show how it was we could make the project run, how it would function. We were asked: how it was we could arrive at the production of 30,000 reels of film, what standards underlie this, is it a reliable format, will you be able to find contractors, can this industry provide what you are looking for? And we are not just talking about astandardised production process through the creation of the film and the qualitycontrol, but a standardised approach to storage, a standardised approach to thepreparation of the physical material before it goes for filming. All of these processes

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were important for us in putting forward the bid, and important to any potentialfunding body.

Now we turn to the issue of cost-effectiveness. The programme breaks down to £7.3 million, £5 million in cash from the HLF, £1 million from libraries as an ‘in kind’ contribution. What that means is that, as each library service prepares its material to be sent to the contractor, we are allowed to estimate a cost for that. And we estimatethat so far libraries have spent about half a million pounds supporting our programme,and that by the end of the programme in July 2004 they will have spent close on the £1 million target. In addition and crucially, the regional newspaper industry is providing £1.3 million in cash support to ‘match’ the grant made by the HLF. I should point out that seventy-five per cent of the newspaper runs we are preserving are supplied from the British Library Newspaper Library’s collections in Colindale. So we can accurately measure the expenditure being made by libraries because we have invoices from the British Library Newspaper Library for the servicing that is going onwithin that institution. Best value, it is a terrible phrase, with myriad meanings, but toNEWSPLAN 2000 it means value for money. If we are going to spend Lottery players’ money, then we should spend it effectively, we should get the most value wecan for it. The HLF offers a one-off funding structure, and that in a big way for usruled out any idea of digitisation, because there would be no funds for any ongoing migration of data once captured and created. The project in its Stage 1 process will run from 2000 to 2004, and there will then be a question mark with the HLF, and adebate with them I have no doubt, about whether we then take the project on to the next stage, because although we identified 4,000 newspaper titles we were only funded for 1,700. So we know there is a lot more to be done. But we were only offered that one-off funding structure, and therefore we had to look again at best value, cost-effectiveness.

We have always been aware of digitisation, and as I have said already, when we wereplanning the programme, and thinking about it, digitising film was already ongoing. Ihad already visited Preservation Resources in the USA (now part of OCLC) and washugely impressed by what they did. So we knew about scanning film. But the HLF was cautious about this area, and it was cautious about progressing to an only digitalsurrogate, and they wanted to see a safer, more standardised approach, whichmicrofilm offered us. Interestingly, and a slight digression, one of the key factors that we ran into once we actually had the grant from the HLF and then went out to the industry looking for cash support funding, was concern by the regional newspaper industry, with what we would do with the negatives. Were we going to digitise all thismaterial, put it up on the Internet? Would it be free? Now, what that meant for us was we had to be very cautious in how we worked with the industry, and the industry was at times concerned that perhaps after John Lauder had left the Project somebodywould take these 30,000 master negatives from the store in Wales, scan them and put them up on the Internet, and allow people to access them. The way the newspaperindustry looked at this scenario was that it would be, from their viewpoint, (and I can understand this) almost a denial of their ability to generate income on what they haveproduced over the years. Now, there is a big argument about that, but, what we had to do to persuade the industry that this was not going to happen, was create what wecalled a Memorandum of Agreement with them, which avoided us having to employlawyers to create a contract, but what it allowed us to do, and the industry to do, wasto see quite clearly what we would do with the film, and what rights they had with the

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film. And to be fair to the industry, they took a very generous approach in terms of copyright, we can make as many duplicate copies of the film as we want, and there is absolutely no problem with that. Any question about digitisation of the film howeverneeds to be run through chief executives. And it may well be that in the long run they will all be quite happy to have some local newspapers up on the internet, but wherethey are local newspapers, even those outside of copyright, that are strongly linked to an existing publishing house, then they will have major concerns about that. So, thatwas an interesting aspect of the magical word digitisation. It was not something thatwe thought we would run into when we began tapping on chief executives’ doors, but it is something that came up, and it is something that I think that libraries need to look at, and consider quite strongly.

So, what is our experience to date? Well so far, we are we are a third of the way there;we have preserved 500 newspaper titles, we have produced 10,000 reels, Microformat(UK) Ltd have produced 6.6 million frames and in the process have saved 6.6 millionpages. The project I am glad to say is on time, it is to budget, it is working very effectively, we are delighted with it. The production process in terms of film is closelycontrolled by the tender for microfilming which we had to produce under European Union rules, and which underpins all the work that is done at Microformat (UK) Ltd We control the preparation of material through our handbook, which gives advice to librarians and archivists on how to prepare material before it is sent for filming, and that is available at the website NEWSPLAN2000.org. Again, we control the movement of volumes by producing a schedule of filming on the website. Theschedule is always running three months ahead, and shows librarians and archivists when they need to get their material to the contractor and when they can expect itback. It also shows librarians and archivists when they can expect a bill for servicingthat has gone on within the British Library on behalf of their institutions, if thematerial is held at the British Library. And that is closely monitored and controlled bymy colleague, Simon Kellas, and it is working extremely well.

So for us in NEWSPLAN 2000, microfilm was the best. It addressed a number of keyissues that funding bodies had, that we had, that librarians had, that libraries holding collections had. It allowed us to say, with some authority, that we were going to transfer a fragile, vulnerable format, heavily used, heavily subscribed, but in poor physical condition, and move it to a more solid and reliable foundation. We canunderpin that by having good storage, to a standard, which we know will give the master negative longevity, and we are creating a format from which there can be a springboard to future developments. And as we have seen today, very, very exciting developments they are too.

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The Burney Collection of Newspapers: will digitisation do the trick?

John Goldfinch

The Burney newspaper collection at the British Library is unrivalled in its holdings of eighteenth century London newspapers. But it has always been a difficult collection to use satisfactorily, and while digitisation seems to offer at last the prospect ofrendering its contents available to users in an approachable and comprehensible way, it seems reasonable here to place the most recent developments in the context of the history of the collection.

In April 1818, a select committee of the House of Commons recommended that £13,500 be spent acquiring for the British Museum the library of the Rev. Dr Charles Burney, the scholar of Greek drama, who had died at his rectory in Deptford the previous December.i

Burney was not at all a dry and dusty classicist. He was the son of the well-known music historian of the same name, and brother of Fanny Burney, the celebrated novelist and diarist. He was also as keenly interested in contemporary theatre as he was in that of ancient Greece, leaving at his death, as well as his classical library, some hundreds of volumes of playbills and newspaper cuttings, not to mention a collection of theatrical prints. As a young man, Burney was lively and sociable (Fanny described him in his twenties as “giddy, wild and thoughtless”, and later on as having no “foresight in events”), and he was often in debt. He lasted barely a year as a student at Cambridge in 1777 before having to leave under a cloud (and of course without taking a degree) having been caught stealing books from the University Library.ii

Nevertheless, by the time of his death he had become a successful and wealthy schoolmaster, and a Greek scholar of note. He had amassed an important library, apparently by legitimate means, which was reported as consisting of some hundreds of Latin and Greek manuscripts together with 13 – 14,000 printed works, mostly on classical subjects (which were were valued for the House of Commons Committee at around £12,000 altogether). But in addition, it was reported that there was “a numerous and rare series of newspapers, from 1603 to the present time, amounting in the whole to 700 volumes, which is more ample than any other, that is supposed to be extant”. It was valued at 900 to 1,000 guineas.iii

After officials from the Museum had travelled to Deptford, and sorted out which of Burney’s books were wanted (despatching the rest directly for sale to Sotheby’s), thecollection arrived at Bloomsbury, and with it the collection of newspapers that still bears his name.

It must be said that the Museum Library seems hitherto to have been wary of newspapers. They had turned down the chance in 1812 to buy John Nichols’collection of seventeenth and eighteenth century newspapers, on the grounds that they had plenty of their own already, despite the fact that the Nichols collection contained much not in the Museum (the Nichols papers eventually found their way, a generation later, to the Bodleian Library, Oxford). The arrival of the Burney papers however seems to have focused somebody’s mind on the problem, as the Museum took steps to

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carry on Burney’s files of London newspapers by arranging for the acquisition of current newspapers via the Stamp Office.iv

The Museum also decided to use the Burney files as a basis for a wider collection.There were some newspapers already in the Museum (some go back to the library of Sir Hans Sloane, the chief founder of the Museum), and these were used to fill deficiencies in Burney’s holdings, starting a process of extension of the collection which has meant that the 700 volumes received from Burney have grown to the 1,250 odd that we have today.

Along with the newspapers came of course the problem of what to do with them. Burney had arranged most of his papers, not in files of individual titles, but as achronological series, meaning that several papers of any one week can be found together, regardless of the title. This is, of course, of considerable use to the historian (who may not be interested in what newspaper titles are available but wants to get to grips with the story), but it is a serious inconvenience to the library cataloguer (who wants to be able to construct a catalogue entry for a particular newspaper title) and also to the collection curator trying to determine how much of something is actually in the collection.

Burney kept his own catalogues of most of his library, and thankfully included thenewspapers. But whereas most of his catalogues are really now only of antiquarian interest (they are to be found today in the Library’s Manuscript Collections), becauseof the nature of the arrangement of the newspaper collection, his newspaper catalogue continued in use, and has done so right through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the original handwritten copy only being withdrawn from reader use in the 1970s, andthen only to be replaced by photocopies. These photocopies, today in the Rare Booksand Music Reading Room at the British Library at St. Pancras, still provide the chief means of accessing the collection. Figures 1-2 illustrate typical pages from this catalogue, showing a volume made up in Burney’s original order, and also notes of later additions made to the collection. Figure 3 shows the attempt by the British Museum General Catalogue to make a sensible entry for The Morning Herald. But, as only a general pressmark “Burney” can be given in the entry, an intending user has still to go to the manuscript catalogue for the details.

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Fig. 1

Fig. 2

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Fig. 3

The notion that the Library ought to be able to do something better than this has been around for a long time. In 1946 it was reported that “a special catalogue of the Burney newspapers is in preparation by Mr L.W. Hanson, of the Printed Books”. Now Lawrence Hanson made major contributions to the bibliography of the 18th century, but, departing to take a post at the Bodleian in 1948, a Burney catalogue was not beone of them. What did happen at this time however was that a card index was made of the titles listed in the handwritten Burney catalogue. It is probably symptomatic of thewhole history of the handling of the collection that the cards have subsequently vanished, although two sets of photocopies made from them survive, one kept for the use of readers.v

By the 1960s, the potential for the automation of library catalogues and functions wasactively being explored, and the British Museum Library was fully involved in this (a role to be inherited by the new British Library in the 1970s). Much of the Museum’sparticipation at the practical level at this period was in the hands of the late JohnJolliffe (later to be Librarian at the Bodleian) and it was Jolliffe who saw theimplications of automation for trying to sort out the difficulties of the Burneynewspapers.

In 1970 Jolliffe, together with Julian Roberts, made a proposal to compile an issue-by-issue listing of the collection on computer (this was to be input using punched paper tape), enabling sorted outputs to be produced providing a catalogue of the papers with shelfmarks, a catalogue by dates with shelfmarks and a shelflist.

Jolliffe devised a method of indexing the papers to capture the basic informationnecessary, including a code for the newspaper title, the issue number, and both normalised and as-printed dates [Fig.4], and a pilot project was carried out under which some 200 volumes from the collection were indexed in this fashion. It was estimated that it would take two-and-a-half person years to complete the task. I do notknow why the project was not completed: but no doubt the departures of both Jolliffeand Roberts to Oxford had something to do with it. All we have now are a few

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extracts from this index surviving, and we probably could not do much with the original data even if we could still find it.

Fig. 4

This example of Jolliffe’s index also shows at once one of the difficulties inherent in dealing with this material, especially for the first half of the eighteenth century. InEngland before 1752 the new year began officially on March 25th, and newspapers vary in whether they follow the official practice or else the creeping fashion of using January 1st. Burney himself did not always manage to get his papers in the right order; Jolliffe hoped that by recording the issue number and the day of the week it would be possible to spot where things had gone wrong. There are also well-known problems to do with such things as rival papers bearing the same titles and dates, as well as later, sometimes altered, reprints.

By 1973, it was the condition of the collection that was causing concern. Burney’s method of arranging the volumes made many of them inherently unstable, as papers of different sizes were bound together, and the heavy use that the collection wasgetting made it urgent that something be done to secure its future, as well as to try and make it easier to use. The shelving arrangements used at the time for the collection were also far from satisfactory – volumes were stored upright, but there was no meansof supporting volumes if one, or indeed several, had been taken away to the reading rooms, or for repair; and the shelves themselves were prone to collapse. An activeprogramme of repair and rebinding was undertaken, but the real problem was theheavy use being made.

At much the same time, serious consideration began to be given to microfilming(indeed Julian Roberts had suggested this at least as early as 1971), and also to doing it in such a way as to enable positive films to be sold on a commercial basis. TheAmerican microfilming company Research Publications (later Research PublicationsInternational and Primary Source Media; now incorporated into the Gale Group)expressed interest in 1972, although nothing was then to happen for some years (these years being of course those in which the new British Library was being established).

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It was not to be until 1977 that filming finally began, and was carried out on the basisthat the idea would be to produce film of runs of particular titles rather than to replicate the existing arrangement of the volumes. Originally it was hoped to rearrange the collection after filming by splicing the film, but it was soon realised that this was too impractical to be carried out, and the decision was made to work through each volume as many times as was necessary filming one title at a time. These filmswere then supplied to RP who began the publication of their series Early EnglishNewspapers by distributing film of runs of titles, usually in six-monthly chunks. Where the Burney collection did not contain a comprehensive run, or held only sporadic issues, RP refrained from publication in the hope that runs could be made up from other libraries (the Bodleian was the principal source for this). By this means, a large proportion of the collection was made available in a reformatted form, but it should be emphasised that although the commercial set contains material not included in Burney, much Burney material remains unpublished. Film of the partial or sketchyruns has never been issued, although in many of these cases Burney’s imperfect run is all that there is anywhere of a particular title. The experience of the RP publication has brought home to us just how much of the Burney collection is apparently unique.

Nonetheless, access was considerably improved by this means, and by 1981 or so, a complete film of the Burneys was available in the British Library’s Bloomsburyreading rooms, and a useful set of film of early newspapers was available morewidely through the RP product; although anyone who has wrestled with the index volume RP published to accompany the film will understand that finding what youwant within the collection is still far from simple.vi

After this flurry of activity, the matter rested for a number of years. Users of the material became increasingly accustomed to the use of the microfilm (certainly if the British Library’s files of reader complaints are to be trusted; perhaps users just gaveup complaining, but it is also true that, although handling microfilm as a user is adifferent experience from handling an original, in the case of early newspapers it can be much easier than handling a decaying and fragile original), and the level of stresson the files of original papers had been mitigated. Copying is made easier than is the case with the originals by the provision of microfilm reader-printers. And as thepositive films in the reading room become worn, damaged or lost, new copies can bemade from the master negative. So microfilm has proved its worth in supporting the preservation of the collection without impeding access to the information within it.

Matters have improved slightly in recent years since it was realised that there was sufficient shelving in the St. Pancras Rare Books and Music Reading Room to accommodate a set of the Burney films, and they were placed on unrestricted openaccess to British Library ticket-holders for the first time a couple of years ago.

But to look back a little, it was in 1992 that the Library was in one of its experimentalmoods, and obtained a Mekel microfilm scanner in order to experiment with thedigitising of microfilm. The Burneys were an obvious place to start.

A formal project, led by Hazel Podmore, was set up the following year, and, alongwith a small number of other items, Burney papers from the period 1789 to 1791 werechosen. The Library’s concerns at that time were as much to explore alternatives to microfilm for preservation as for access, and the project was given the acronym

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DAMP, for “Digitisation of Ageing Microfilm Project”, despite the film being less than fifteen years old at the time. The principal findings of the project were that it was indeed possible to produce useful digital images from the Burney microfilms, but that the resulting image file sizes were (for that time) unmanageably large, and that theinconsistency between images on the films (often relating to the conditions of the originals) meant that a great deal of manual intervention was required at the scanning of each image. It looked at one stage as if it would take years to digitise the wholecollection, although upgrades to the kit managed to reduce this projection to a morereasonable eighteen months. But the problem of the size of the files, and their storage,remained, as did the whole question of the level of indexing that would beappropriate. In the early 1990s, we must remember, storage was still expensive, and the Library had no means of looking after, much less making available, such large quantities of data (21 gigabytes were produced by the project).vii

Once again the question languished. The Library was I suppose distracted by the logistical exercise of transferring the Bloomsbury collections and services to the newSt. Pancras building, so it was not until 1998 that things had settled down sufficientlyfor it to be possible to look seriously at what we should be trying to do next.

By this time the then Head of the Library’s Early Printed Collections, Graham Jefcoate, was determined that there should be a wish-list of projects for digitisation, and, knowing of the results already achieved by Hazel Podmore’s project, Burney wasfirmly on the list. And it must be said at this point that, only five or so years after theDAMP project, the Library could find no straightforward way of enabling the imagescaptured by the project to be made available for public use. The Library still had insufficient data storage (the images were stored on our behalf by the University ofLondon Computing Centre), and the costs involved in recovering them and developing an access system appeared to be greater than could be contemplated at the time. The microfilm, of course, continued, and continues, to be available.viii

Interest in the Burney collection is not, of course, confined to this side of the Atlantic.The events and attitudes chronicled in the London press of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries form a part of the history of North America as much as they do of the British Isles, and of course this was why RP had been so determined to be able topublish the papers on microfilm. There had been keen interest from Americancolleagues in the DAMP project, and Graham Jefcoate’s desire to pick up the Burneyproposal again (presented at the IFLA General Conference in Jerusalem in 2000) wasreceived with some enthusiasm in the U.S.A. We were given to understand that, were we able to put together a new project proposal, then money would certainly be forthcoming not only for an attempt to capture images of the entire collection, but also to try to get searchable text available for at least part of the collection.ix

The fact that the Library had been encouraged to go for U.S. funding stimulated moreinterest in Burney, not least from the digitisation industry itself. A number ofcompanies and organizations had been developing skills and a reputation for the handling of difficult early material, and others seemed keen to give it a go. Samplereels of the Burney films were sent to those expressing interest, and this helpedconsiderably in firming up the technical requirements and desiderata for the project, as well as generating cost estimates.

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On the strength of all this, we were invited to become involved in a bid in 2001 to theNational Science Foundation, Washington D.C., under its Digital Libraries Initiative, which we did with the assistance of Henry Snyder of the University of California at Riverside, who as Head of the ESTC/North America for many years has long been apartner of the British Library’s (not being a U.S. organisation precluded the BritishLibrary from bidding directly to the NSF itself).x

The NSF made an initial grant of $400,000, the first part of which has been used to duplicate the Library’s master negative of the Burney films, and then to produce digital images of each filmed page, along with a simple page-by-page index of thecollection. This part of the project began in late 2002, and was complete by the autumn of 2003, by which time the Library had received over a million images, and an accompanying index file providing basic metadata for each image. Figure.5 shows a sample page-image captured by the project (which shows incidentally the challengefaced by any OCR engine), and Figure 6 some sample index entries.

If nothing else, the dream of a proper inventory of the collection has at last been realised.

Now I have simplified a lot here as anyone involved in such a project will know what a time-consuming and at times frustrating experience it is knocking proposals to and fro across the Atlantic, drawing up tenders and contracts acceptable both in Britainand the U.S., not to mention working through technical issues, and not forgetting thepossible approaches to the material itself. This has had both good and bad effects – I claim no technical expertise, but seeing the way that the picture of the kinds of things that are possible changes as a proposal like this winds through the variousbureaucratic procedures has been as fascinating as it has been frustrating. When wefirst talked to NSF, it looked as if the project would be lucky if it produced the imagesand a bit of indexing for the money, and mounting on a website was left to the future. As things stand, we should be able to achieve more than this, although how muchmore is not yet clear.

There are two major areas where we have found things to be significantly different since 1992/93. In the first place, digital storage has got much cheaper, but it still seems to me that we have not got much better at managing it. Hardware and software go quickly out-of-date, and institutions are not always as fleet-footed as they reallyhave to be in a digital world at making sure that systems are properly migrated when updating is taking place. And it seems to be an all-too-common experience that thecosts of this are underestimated, and that issues of long-term maintenance and sustainability not properly thought through. And there is the problem of dealing with the sales-pitches that always come with new ideas. To my mind, there are real risks in getting tied into things like proprietary software where the future can be completelyunpredictable. This is inherent in all technology, and one cannot always get the right answer. We know, for example, that microfilm is a tried and trusted technology – we know what it does and what to do with it. But it can easily be forgotten that even micro-formats have had their own blind alleys – there are still libraries (including theBritish Library) having to deal with publications on microcard and ultrafiche.

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Fig. 5

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Fig. 6

The other change since 1992/93 is rather more pleasing, and it is to do with scanning technology. The kit used by Micromedia at Bicester, who obtained the contract to produce the scanned images, has dealt successfully with many of the problemsencountered by the DAMP project which required manual intervention. This is not to say that manual intervention was not required, but many of the problems to do withorientation, varying image resolutions on the film and so forth were successfully handled automatically, enabling a much faster throughtput of work than had proved possible before.

Now we also ran into surprises, some of them embarrassing. I think I can admit herethat the most embarrassing so far was on our side, when we found that we had grossly underestimated the size of the collection. No record had been kept of the number offrames when the papers had been originally filmed, and at the time of drawing up theproposal we did not really know how many volumes of papers there were, let alone how many pages each contained. We knew the number of microfilm reels, but we also knew that some reels were very long, and some very short. We also knew that somesmall-format papers had been filmed as double-page openings (and that the imageswould therefore need to be cropped and divided), whereas others had been filmed assingle pages. Whatever, we did our sums wrong, and our original estimate of 650,000 pages has turned out to be 1,050,000. That is quite a difference, and it is a tribute to our partners in this that they have taken it on the chin!

Well, what now? We are now into the next stage of the project, which is to try to takethe images and the index and put them on a website with searchable text. In simpleterms, what happened was that we sent a sample of the images and the index out to the companies who have expressed interest, and asked them to propose a totalsolution, and to quote us a price, so that an evaluation process could begin the end of 2003. It was clear from the responses received that while a usable product could be provided from the NSF-supplied grant, a much higher level of searchable text could be achieved with further funding.

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The picture now has to be extended as other proposals have come onstream. TheLibrary was successful in late 2003 in securing agreement from the UK Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), under its Digitisation Programme, to a proposal to digitise two million pages from its nineteenth century newspapercollections. The Library and its funders are keen to see that whatever happens to theBurney papers is consistent and compatible with the solution that will be used forpresenting the papers from the later century, and so all is on hold while the two projects are aligned, and while further funding is sought to enable a better result to be obtained from the Burney images.xi

What might we get? Well here I have to say that I am really not sure. All the parties involved have tackled difficult material, and all have achieved some degree of success. While would love to see a fully searchable text file for the whole collection, the difficult nature of some of the images makes this unlikely. To see what has been achieved already with eighteenth century print, the on-line version of the AnnualRegister from ProQuest, and the more recent Gale Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), together with its Times Digital Archive show what can be done.xii

And we still have to remember that all we are looking at at the moment is to produce a solution and mount it on the Web. From somewhere we have still got to find the physical means, and the money, to keep it available once it is mounted, and to makesure it stays available. After all, the film is still going strong 25 years after it wasoriginally made, and the papers themselves are still here a couple of hundred years on.One of our challenges is to get a decent lifespan for the digital version.

But that is the next chapter.

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Notes

i Where no source is quoted, the information has been taken from internal memorandakept at the British Library. On Burney, see P.R. Harris, A history of the British Museum Library 1753-1973 (London: The British Library, 1998). pp.37-38; E. Edwards, Lives of the founders of the British Museum (London, 1870) pp.436-442;‘Memoir of the Reverend Charles Burney’, The European Magazine 75 (1819) pp.195-205.

ii R.S. Walker, ‘Charles Burney’s theft of books at Cambridge’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 3 (1959/63) pp.313-25

iii ‘Memoir ... ’ op. cit

iv Harris op. cit. pp.31, 35

v A. Esdaile, The British Museum Library: a short history and survey (London: Allen & Unwin, 1946), p.210

vi S.M. Cox and J.L. Budeit, Early English newspapers: bibliography and guide to the microfilm collection (Woodbridge CT, Reading: Research Publications, 1983).

vii H. Podmore, ‘The digitisation of microfilm’ in: Towards the Digital Library: the British Library’s Initiatives for Access programme, ed. L. Carpenter, S. Shaw and A. Prescott (London: The British Library, 1998) pp.68-72

viii See, for example, M. Alexander, ‘Digitising the Burney collection’ in:NEWSPLAN, Millenia and the Grids: the digital challenges. Proceedings of the 3rd national NEWSPLAN conference, Durham, 1998 (Newcastle upon Tyne: InformationNorth, 1998), pp.59-62

ix G.P. Jefcoate, ‘The Digitisation of the Burney Collection of Early Newspapers at the British Library’, in: Newspapers in international librarianship, ed. H. Walravensand E. King (München: K.G. Saur, 2003; IFLA publications 107).

x H. Snyder, ‘Digitizing the Burney collection of English newspapers’ in: IFLA Rare Books & Manuscripts Seciton Newsletter (Winter 2002) pp.8-11. The funding award is NSF Award Proposal 0114435 (https://www.fastlane.nsf.gov/servlet/showaward?award=0114435)

xi http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=programme_digitisation

xii http://www.il.proquest.com/products/pt-product-annual-register.shtml http://www.galegroup.com/EighteenthCentury/ http://www.galegroup.com/Times/

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Managing the life cycle decisions for the long-term use of original collection material and surrogates

Helen Shenton

I learnt a lot from John just now, and I particularly liked the description of Burney as having no foresight for events. It made me think that in preservation and conservation we aspire to having some foresight for events.

I have been asked to give a strategic talk about managing the long-term, life cycle decisions around original collection material and surrogates. Firstly there will be a little bit of scene setting about the British Library’s current thinking on surrogates,and its preservation policy towards digitisation and microfilming. Secondly, I will link this to work on one of the major strategic objectives of the British Library (BL),namely the life cycle management of its collections; so I will explain what it is, why we are doing it and describe some of the emerging findings for analog collections. And then thirdly I will explain how we are applying this life cycle approach to the BL’s digital collections, particularly our digitisation programme and our current thinking on the retention of digitised masters.

Preservation policy regarding preservation and digitisation

The British Library policy at the moment is that it does not regard digitisation as a preservation medium per se, in the way that archival microfilm is regarded as apreservation medium. Digitisation is seen principally as a means of giving access to material, with potential preservation dividends (such as the possible reduction of useof the original item) but it is not seen as a preservation tool in itself. Archival qualitymicroform remains the preferred option for a long-term surrogate medium. This isbecause, with accelerated ageing tests, archival quality microfilming is estimated tolast 300 years, whereas we cannot, as yet, guarantee such longevity for digitisedmasters. Digital images would normally supplement rather than replace microform by providing service copies that are more convenient to the end user than microforms.

In a few cases, there is a positive preservation value in digitisation. This is particularly true for analog sound recordings, where the collection only really exists in the moment of hearing, and digital copying is regarded as a preservation technique. Digitisation technology is also important for the accurate capture and reproduction of fugitive colour values in photographic items. But overall, the policy is that digitisationis primarily an access medium. This policy is being kept under review at the BL as thetechnology and our understanding of it develops.

The state of the BL’s thinking on digitisation is closely linked with the work on preserving digital material, because once there is confidence in the solution for thelong-term storage of electronic material, it will be safer to judge digitisation as a preservation medium. The BL’s strategy on this falls under the umbrella Digital Object Management Programme.

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Strategic objectives of the British Library, the life cycle management of itscollections

Life cycle collection management is one of the strategic objectives of the BL and was started as a project about 18 months ago.

What is it? Why do it?Who might use it and how can it be used?What has been done so far?What findings are emerging?What are we going to do ?

What is it?

Life cycle collection management is a way of trying to take a long-term approach to the responsible stewardship of the British Library’s collections. On the one hand ourfunding is governed by political short-termism, of say a three-year funding cycle, whereas our collections have been built up over hundreds of years and our responsibility for the majority of them is in perpetuity.

It defines all the different stages in a collection item’s existence over time. It seeks to identify the costs of each stage, in order to show the relationship and economicinterdependencies between the stages of a collection item’s management and how they change over a long period. These stages range from selection, acquisitions processing, cataloguing and pressmarking through to preventive conservation, storage, retrieval and the deaccessioning of duplicates [Fig.1]

Fig. 1

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In this way, it aims to demonstrate the long term consequences of what the British Library takes into its collections, by making explicit the financial and other implications of decisions made at the beginning of the life cycle for the next 100 plus years.

So you start by selecting an itemThen there are all the costs associated with processing that acquisition. You catalogue it You press mark it and label it and stamp it You put it on a shelf It might have some initial preventive conservation, like putting it in a box You store it In time, after use, it needs some interventive conservationYou might move it You might make a surrogate You might de-accession a duplicate copy in time

And all these stages are interdependent

Then there is the external dimension, over and above the British Library’s internalmanagement [Fig.2]. There are relationships on a national level, with collaborativeagreements for specific activities, from collection development to cataloguing. In the UK at the moment, the implications of the RLN (Research Libraries Network) arebeing defined. And then there is the third ring, namely the international dimension,with collaborative agreements and so on. Fig.1 shows the BL-centric model, mirroringall types of collections, the ‘Centripetal Model’ suggested by Brian Lavoie. Thisnational and international model reflects more the ‘Centrifugal Model’ (again for all types of collections, not just digital).

Fig. 2

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Why do it?

There are practical, economic, governance and political reasons for taking thisapproach.

The practical reasons are to document and, if possible, benchmark with other comparable organisations, the links between the stages of the life cycle.

The economic reasons are to establish that resources are most logically apportioned. For example, that the proportion assigned to acquisitions at the beginning of theprocess, is appropriately proportionate to the amount spent on cataloguing, so that there are no backlogs of inaccessible items waiting to be catalogued. And that this is similarly calibrated with the amount spent on housing and caring for the material overtime, so that items are not inaccessible because they are too fragile and waiting for conservation.

For the purposes of governance, it needs to be demonstrated that the British Library’s statutory and legal obligation to manage its key intellectual assets is being done, consistent with best practice and in the most cost-effective way, now and for thefuture.

For political reasons, we need to know what resources are necessary, for example, tomake accessible and look after in perpetuity the approximately 150,000 legal deposit paper-based items received every year and the 90,000 electronic titles that have been received under voluntary deposit.

Who might use it and how can it be used?

Firstly an individual curator or selector can use this methodology For example, a curator being offered a collection by donation can evaluate the real long-term implications over, say, 100 years of that intake.

A couple of examples in the BL in the last decade illustrate the point. A medievalpsalter bought in very good condition, with a purchase price of say £1 million, couldcost a modest amount over time; for example, the storage of a single item is quite little. On the other hand, a collection of nineteenth-century papers that were bequeathed to the Library, carried no ‘purchase’ price as such, but being several boxes full, required a lot of cataloguing and initial preservation to stabilise them and so worked out at over £50,000 over time.

Secondly, at a library-wide strategic level, we can ensure the optimum calibration of resources. Life cycle collection management can be used for predictive long-term financial modelling. It can be used to make external bids for the resources to reflect the implications of long-term responsible stewardship of the BL’s additional intake of traditional and digital collections over time.

At this point I should put in a strong proviso about using this for political lobbying for additional funds. It could very well be a double-edged sword. Rather than having shown how much it costs to really look after material for the long-term in order to argue for resources, a government, ministry or other funding body could turn around and say, well, if it costs that much, don’t do it at all.

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What has been done so far?

External reviews

Before settling on a method for life cycle collection management, a number ofexternal reviews were undertaken to see if anything was applicable from other fields.

We looked in the library, archive and heritage sectors. One possible model was a whole-life cycle costing approach in the built heritage sector to manage historic buildings in a sustainable way. The most relevant work was carried out, interestingly, in the BL in the late 1980s, which defined a blueprint for the phases in the life cycleof tangible collections and was re-used as the basis of this project’s formula work.

In the specifically digital arena, the majority of work is currently being done in the areas of research and practical projects in digital asset management and digitisation life cycle costs. For example, the TASI project (Technical Advisory Service for Images), Beagrie/Greenstein (for the Arts and Humanities Data Service(AHDS)), Hendley (for the BL), Russell/Weinberger (for the CEDARS project) and someinteresting business models are emerging from projects such as the EU PRESTO project.

Furthermore, a broad review was carried out of economic, commercial and non-heritage fields, for example eco-life cycle management (in particular environmentalimpact analysis) and toxic waste management. We looked at areas where the concept of life cycle costing is known to be used, namely product development and defence procurement. Overall there was little translatable.

One of the original objectives of the project was to benchmark, if possible, life cycle collection service and resourcing dependencies with other comparable institutions.Oxford University Library Services has recently embarked on an activity-based accounting exercise and the Deputy Librarian joined the stakeholder panel.

Whilst work is being done in the digital arena, especially with digitisation projects, we found that no one seems to have taken a joint approach – trying to combinetraditional paper-based and digital to reflect the totality of a library’s collections.

Internal

In the initial phase the project concentrated on the traditional paper-based monographs and serials that are legally deposited with the BL. This is because it comprises a large proportion of the collection and we have a legal responsibility in perpetuity for it as the national published archive.

Having defined the phases that comprise the life cycle, we devised a formula, and put figures against each phase using the Library’s finance system in conjunction with performance information for the year 2001/2.

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Digital life cycle

The project also aimed to determine whether the life cycle model for traditionalmaterial could be used for digital life cycle.

Three types of digital material currently being produced or acquired by the BL were defined and analysed in parallel with the work on traditional formats. The threestrands of digital activity were:

Firstly, digitised masters. The BL has a number of substantial digitisation projects underway which are producing a large number of digitised masters. A formula wasdeveloped from the traditional, paper-based material and applied to large BL digitisation projects such as ‘Collect Britain’, funded by the New Opportunities Fund.

Secondly, the approximately £1 million collection development figures spent on purchased electronic publications last year was analysed.

Thirdly, the UK has had voluntary deposit of electronic material since January 2000. Figures from an impact study were extrapolated together with data emerging from areal-time, live pilot to manage voluntarily deposited electronic material were used.

So, concurrent strands of traditional paper-based and digital activities were pursued, with the aim of eventually drawing them together, in order to reflect the totality of theBL’s collections.

Traditional life cycle

I will use the example of traditional paper-based material to illustrate what we did. Alot of thought was given to the time span of the life cycle and three key “life stages”were identified. These were Year 1 (when many initial collection management costs are incurred), Year 10 (when a first review or technological change may incur costs) and Year 100 (as a useful indicative time-scale for forecasting downstream costs). Given that the BL has to look after the collections for which it has a legal obligation, in perpetuity, 100 years was chosen as a symbolically long time. There is a wholeissue as to whether we countenance ‘death’ at any stage, which was a great source of debate.

The project reviewed collection management activities and subsequently defined the phases in the life cycle management of the collections.

The life cycle costs K(t) over time for monographs are defined as:

s = Selectiona = Acquisitions processing (excluding the purchase price) c = Cataloguingp1 = Initial preservation (such as archival enclosures) h1 = Initial handling (including pressmarking, labelling and placing) p(t) = Longer-term preservation, including conservation, over timecs(t) = Collection storage over timer(t) = Retrieval and replacement over time

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Annual costs were then calculated for the phases:

In the first year excluding the purchase price, the ratios of the amount of money spent of the life cycle cost are:

selection acquisitions cataloguing 1st Preservation handling preservation storage retrieval14 10 21 0 4 0 2 1

These are the proportionate amount spent in year one as shown in Figure 3.

By Year 10, the amount spent on each activity as a proportion of the total costs for those 10 years has changed [Fig. 4]. So, for example, the amount already spent on cataloguing stays the same as that spent in Year 1, but it is a smaller percentage of thetotal costs over 10 years.

By Year 100 the amount spent on each activity has changed again [Fig.5]. As a proportion of the total amount of life cycle costs over 100 years, selection is now relatively small. It is the same amount as in Year 1, but is a smaller proportion of thetotal over 100 years. Storage, preservation and retrieval have become moresubstantial.

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Fig. 3–5

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What findings are emerging?

“It's a way of thinking”. This was a phrase coined when the project was first aired and it is noticeable how often ‘life cycle’ is being used as a phrase, albeit with multiple meanings.It is a very complex subject with many practical, financial and strategicinterdependencies.The most significant variant is time. Over time, the costs shift from staff costs inthe activity-intensive first period, to overhead and maintenance costs. It is early days for the availability of reliable, data in all the areas of the digital arena.Generally, it is the phases of archiving and access costs that are the most difficult to quantify now. Experience with the management of digital objects received under voluntary legal deposit at the BL, using Digitool, a product of Ex Libris with whom we are developing our Integrated Library System, will act as a real time pilot.A lot of very interesting comparisons are becoming possible in the early stages,for example between the first year life cycle costs of a traditional monograph and those of an electronic monograph, or a telling example is between the costs of selecting a paper title and the costs of selecting an electronic title.I would like to mention here a recently published paper by Stephen Chapman, inwhich he compares the costs of storage of traditional analog collections in highdensity storage at Harvard and digital collections in digital storage at the OCLC Digital Archive. This is one of the first pieces of work I have seen that compares,like for like, the same phase (storage) of the life cycle of digital and traditionalmaterial.The lack of reliable digital storage, preservation and access costs made it premature in the first year to elide the strands of e-life cycling with traditional lifecycling, and is an objective for next year.

What are we going to do?

In year 2 of the project, within the BL we are going to develop a tool kit to entrench the life cycle approach and develop a life cycle predictive data model as a practicaltool. We intend to use this approach for current live issues, such as web archiving, and think through alternative methods to managing the collections with pilots such as a ‘just in time’ approach instead of ‘just in case’. We are working with colleagues in the U.S.on comparing digital versus paper formats for non-profit making journals.

All this will all have an impact on one of the key analog versus digital issues the BL faces, namely can we afford to acquire serials in more than one format, that is, print and electronic? And at what point do we make the decision to transfer, and with what degree of confidence, from paper to electronic?

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Application of life cycle approach to digitisation

So, how is the British Library applying this life cycle approach to the management ofthose parts of its collections that it creates, namely digitised masters?

The BL has both preservation microfilming and digitisation surrogacy programmes.Preservation microfilming is part of the BL’s preservation programme.

The British Library has been digitising parts of the collection since 1993 and has a number of projects underway and planned. Over the last ten years or so, we have completed 13 projects, 18 are underway and 33 are planned. This will amount to nearly 3 million images. Given the enormous size of the BL, this means that only about 0.2% of BL’s collections have been digitised.

The core funding which the British Library receives from the UK government does not specifically include funding for the digitisation of the collections. Therefore, digitisation projects have to be mainly funded from external sources (commercial, governmental, quasi-governmental and educational) with a plurality of collaborative partners, both nationally and internationally, which leads to a variety of business models.

As a generalisation, the majority of the collections being digitised at the BL fall into two very broad categories. Firstly, those projects that mine the rich seams of the Asia, Pacific, African collections, manuscript collections, map collections, and sound collections. And secondly, broadly speaking, newspapers.

To reiterate, digitisation is not seen currently as a preservation medium per se, but in amongst the various reasons for doing it, are the preservation and conservation dividends. The reasons for digitising range from:

Virtual reunification; for example the International Dunhuang Project, that reunites scrolls and paintings material from the Dunhuang caves in China, now in the Bibliothèque de France, the National Library of China, the British Library and other institutions.

Virtual conservation; for example the revelation of concealed text on fire-damaged manuscripts

Maximising access – minimising handling

Reuse of microfilm – digitising from microfilm is not only cheaper, but there isalso the possible preservation dividend of addressing the legacy of microfilm on cellulose acetate.

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To give a couple of examples:

Firstly, the virtual conservation of a manuscript damaged by fire in 1731, causing embrittlement and heat damage to the edges of the leaves [Fig.6]. The leaves weremounted in paper frames in the middle of the nineteenth century, which prevented further damage from handling to the edges of the leaves, but obscured many letters. Digital imaging has enabled the text to be ‘restored’ without interventive conservation- the obscured capital letter H on the left has been revealed using fibre optic backlighting and the ultra violet shot at the top shows erasure of the text.

Secondly, Turning the Pages, which maximises access whilst minimising handling.[Fig.7]. Turning the Pages is an award-winning idea developed by the BL, whereby an item is not just digitised but has added functionality such that the leaves can be turnedon the screen, or on the CD or now on the BL website. It thereby overcomes that perennial issue of displaying monographs and manuscripts in an essentially static manner, with only one opening available. This is both frustrating from the point of view of access and is limiting from the preservation angle of minimising light exposure. The preventive conservation bonus is that the item can be ‘virtually’ handled by anyone, whether a member of the public or a scholar, wherever they are.

The British Library currently holds an estimated 10 terabytes of electronic material. It comprises digital material from a number of sources, ranging from what it has purchased and received under voluntary legal deposit ahead of the legislation that received Royal Assent in October 2003, to pilot projects to collect e-correspondence and literary e-manuscripts, as well as digitised masters it has created. Of all thedifferent types of digital material that need storing in the BL so far, over three-quarters of that estimated 10 terabytes, comprise digitised masters. Until the umbrellaDigital Object Management Programme is in place, the policy is that losslesscompression should be used and as an interim solution, that the masters should be stored on DVD-R, with a simple tracking mechanism.

Using the formula from the traditional, analog collections, the phases were adapted to be applicable for the life cycle approach to digitised masters. This was partly to help with the decision making about whether we should retain digitised masters.Comparative, international best practice says that a digitised image should be captured at the highest possible quality and retained. This approach is based on the economicsof converting once (or, at least, only once a generation) and producing a sufficiently high-level image to avoid the expense of reconverting at a later date when technology advances. This economic justification is particularly compelling given that the labourcosts associated with identifying, preparing, inspecting, and indexing digital information far exceed scanning costs.

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Fig. 6

Fig. 7

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The total cost of a digitised item over a period of time can be summarised in this formula:

K(t) = s + ipr + cons + r + cap + q + m + acs(t) + p(t)

K(t) = the total cost of digitised item over a period of t yearss = the selection cost ipr = the cost of checking intellectual property rightscons = the conservation check and remedial conservation costs r = the retrieval and reshelving costs cap = the cost of capture of digitised masterq = the cost of quality assurance of digitised master and production of service

copiesm = the metadata creation costacs(t) = the access cost over timep(t) = the preservation and storage costs over time

Different projects have different costs. The time spent on each activity in relation tothe total time spent will vary. For example, picking out two particular activities forcomparison from recent digitisation projects [Fig 8]; in one case(A), three quarters of the time was spent on selection, because it was very specialised material whereas in another case(C), nearly a quarter of the cost was taken up by the manual checking of intellectual property rights. The key point is that the costs of digitisation are so muchmore than the scanning of an item.

Time

A B C selection 74% 0% 3%ipr 0% 0% 24%management 7% 7% 2%preparation 4% 1% 4%digitisation 12% 41% 42%

Act

ivity

metadata 4% 51% 25%Fig. 8

The Technical Standards for the BL’s major ‘Collect Britain’ project state that a good baseline to creating a long-lasting digital file is to Scan Once for All Purposes – thismeans that all the complex and expensive preparation work will only need to be done once. Moreover, there are sound conservation reasons for scanning only once to avoid re-handling any material for copying, and not just fragile items

Therefore, given the real costs of digitisation, the BL has taken the decision thatdigitised masters should be retained, due to the investment in their creation, their future use as part of the Library’s digital collection and due to the significant costs of re-digitisation at a later date.

Part of the justification for this was the application of a life cycle collectionmanagement approach.

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References

Beagrie, N., Greenstein, D. A strategic policy framework for creating and preservingdigital collections, London: British Library, 1998 Research and Innovation Report 107.

Chapman, S., Counting the Costs of Digital Preservation: Is Repository Storage Affordable?http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/?vol=4&iss=2

Hendley, T. Comparison of methods and costs of digital preservation, London: British Library, 1998 Research and Innovation Report 106.

Lavoie, B.F. The incentives to preserve digital materialshttp://www.oclc.org/research/projects/digipres/incentives-dp.pdf

Russell, K., Weinberger, E. Cost elements of digital preservation.http://www.leeds.ac.uk/cedars/documents/CIW01r.html

Shenton, H., Life Cycle Collection Management, LIBER Quarterly 13, no.3/4 2003 http://liber.library.uu.nl/

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A question of cost: choices on the road to digitisation

Simon Tanner

When looking at digitisation there are a number of choices to be made and manyproject-defining decisions are based on financial choices. These choices are required to deliver the maximum resource and information benefit in the most cost efficientway possible. However, the preservation context provides a range of constraints and opportunities to the digitisation process that have both financial and technical impacts.This paper will describe those constraints and show how they may become opportunities to ensure digitisation is embedded into the preservation life cycle. The paper will present comparative costs for various digitisation approaches.

When considering a digitisation activity there are factors that always hold true in making and implementing plans to create digital images from physical objects. The factors to be balanced and resolved are:

the nature of the original materialsthe information goals for the digital resource createdthe balance to be struck between costs, technology and benefits

For most cultural heritage institutions the preservation of the original artefact(whether manuscript, painting, photograph or other format) is likely to be a key element in their relationship with that artefact – closely followed by the provision of access – enabling research, study and education. Digitisation is a means to providenew approaches to research, to enable a wider potential audience and to present a renewed means of perceiving our cultural and information heritage. But digitisation is not a free lunch without consequence or limitation. Rather it is an activity that requires the most rigorous planning, financial management and workflow design to be seen as a value added expenditure on the road to access.

With careful planning and consideration of the whole process, from movement and preparation of the original materials through to the eventual imaging and delivery of digital resources, digitisation can become a valued part of a preservation continuum.There are certainly, at present, more sources of soft funds for digitisation projects than there are for straightforward preservation activities but this does not mean that preservation should have a lesser role. Rather, by emphasising the role of preservation and conservation activities as part of the whole project, funding for both may be achieved.

The Retention Intention and Digitisation

For digitisation projects, the constraints of preventing physical degradation of the original artefact are numerous and require the skilled input of conservators and advice from suitable agencies such as the National Preservation Office. Many of the safeways of handling the original will either not be possible in the digitisation process orwill be prohibitively expensive. This is where surrogates such as microfilm or photographs may come into play as part of the digitisation process. But before considering the use of surrogates it is important to have a clear view as to theretention intention for the original materials. Are they exam papers with a useful

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lifespan measured in years, are they rare manuscripts whose importance is hoped to be measured across the centuries, or is it an invoice whose physical existence is seen as an active nuisance but a record of which must be kept for legal purposes? In each of these cases the retention intention is the key to unlocking the most suitabledigitisation mechanism: for exam papers high volume automated scanning is possible; for the manuscript nothing but the highest quality digitisation process with the mostprudent handling is acceptable; for the invoice it does not matter as long as it is very cheap and the solution takes up as little room as possible i.e. microfiche or very low resolution scanning. This issue on its own is a complex one and it is not within thescope of this paper to discuss at length, but has been addressed by many projects and in particular by Cornell University.i

Without having a preservation policy in place or knowing the retention intention then the remaining digitisation questions are mute – because they will then be subject to potential variation, whim and error in terms of:

acceptable transport from storage to digitisation mechanism.conservation questions – to digitise and conserve or conserve and digitise? suitable preparation of the originals for scanning e.g. cleaning. acceptable handling of the original items.selecting the least damaging route to a digital image.suitable levels of insurance in transit or within the digitisation process.

Possible solutions may also be discarded out of hand as too risky without actuallymeasuring that risk against the preservation practice and policy. For instance, glass plate photographs are prone to damage through shock but are pretty robust with regard to heat and light from a scanner. It is thus important to give far more attentionto the transport and handling of the glass plate than the light source of the scanner. For glass plates, the risk of shock to the original may make transport over any distance disadvantageous and thus suggest in-house digitisation solutions where the materials may be controlled very stringently. Whilst there are very reputable organisations doing scanning from glass plates this will remain a specialist activity and thus be relatively expensive because of the transportation and handling issues. However, those fortunate repositories which over the years have had their glass plate collections photographically copied (onto 5” x 4” copy negatives for instance) will find that scanning from the copy negative is easier, cheaper and the risks are minimal.

Selecting Alternative Digitisation Routes

Once we understand that it is not always necessary to scan from the original to gain an acceptable digital image for providing access we are able to consider a range of possible intermediary stages between the original and the scanner that may aid the preservation intention of the collection and enable lower risk and cheaper digitisation.

There are a number of obvious surrogates to the original which may be considered as possible intermediaries towards digitisation. These could be produced by:

photographymicrofilmingphotocopying

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Whilst photocopying might seem an incongruous addition to this list, it has been possible for many years to gain a boxed photocopy set made during the disbound stage of book conservation and rebinding. Scanning from the photocopy may be an acceptable, cheap and simple means (although hardly of high visual quality) of providing access to content when the original is not accessible. However, if you can get to the original during the disbound stage of conservation and create direct digital scans at that point then the image quality will be better at low cost – in other words ifyou build conservation into your digitisation activity you might actually be able to push down overall project costs at the same time!

Microfilming is an extremely well understood preservation copying mechanism. It provides the dual advantage of delivering a copy which may itself be a true preservation surrogate to the original whilst providing an intermediary format fordigitisation. As demonstrated by many projects – not least The Old Bailey SessionsProceedings (http://www.oldbaileyonline.org) and the British Library Online Newspaper Pilot (hosted on a KCL server at http://www.uk.olivesoftware.com) – this can be an effective means of gaining access for digitisation to content that wouldotherwise be impracticable to work with in the original format. Scanning from microfilm remains limited in terms of only providing a greyscale image at best andrequires the highest investment in scan equipment to gain visually superior results (c. £50,000+ for Sunrise brand microfilm scanning equipment).

Photography is also very well understood and many cultural organisations will have facilities or experience in this area. Whilst contemporary analog photography isgradually being overtaken by digital photography (the Museum of Modern Art in New York (http://www.moma.org) now uses only digital photography and the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music project (http://www.diamm.ac.uk) employs mainlydigital techniques) there is still a large amount of activity in analog photography and alarge number of collections of analog photographs. Of course, the photograph itself could be the artefact as in my previous glass plate example and further surrogatephotography may be an advantage for fragile items or volatile nitrate formats. In other cases though many photographs are taken of artefacts as part of the recording of items, events or installations and are thus available for scanning when the originalmight not be. Photography for the purposes of digitisation has been done effectively in a number of cases, most notably for the CHILDE project (http://www.bookchilde.org) which has taken illustrations in children’s literature from across Europe and made them accessible on the Internet. The main reason for usingthe photographic surrogate is because it is likely to already exist and thus remove thecost of creation.

What must be made explicit is that not all solutions produce images that are of visually equivalent quality. Using the concepts of “forensic” and “representative” will give a guide as to what level of visual fidelity is being aimed at. Aiming for a“forensic” image is attempting to reproduce not just the content of the original but asmuch of the experience of the original as possible (such as paper grain or brush strokes) and is characterised by 40+ Mb file sizes. It is unlikely that a surrogate will be adequate for this level of information capture. In these cases direct digitisation from the original may be the only acceptable route to the image fidelity required. However, for very many digitisation projects what we are discussing is “representative” imaging, where the key goal is to capture all the content as accurately

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as possible to allow that content to be accessed and adequately used. In these cases it is likely that surrogates may sometimes be acceptable as intermediaries and thusenable digitisation. These images may be of a very high standard and be equivalent to images produced by direct digitisation in all but the finest detail and that difference may never be viewed by the average end user.

Costs and Possible Routes

At this point you may be considering using surrogates for digitisation but need to know when it would be a good time to use them and when it would be inappropriate. By addressing the cost versus preservation versus image fidelity axis we can get a better idea of what will work for individual projects.

Microfilm and Scan

In this option the original is microfilmed and then scans are made from the microfilm.This is particularly useful for materials in difficult formats where microfilming has a good track record. Originals such as bound volumes and large format items such as maps and newspapers are particularly appropriate. It is generally cheaper to microfilmand scan from microfilm than to scan directly using a book scanner or digital cameraset-up. As a bonus there is at the end of the process a microfilm for long term preservation.

However, scanning from microfilm suffers from the following limitations:

Results will be bi-tonal or greyscale thus losing any colour content in the original.If the microfilm is scratched or otherwise damaged then this will become a significant blemish in the digital image.Only 35mm microfilm will deliver the best results.Microfiche is not recommended as is relatively expensive to scan, is generally of poor quality and fiddly to automate.Older microfilm may not have been created to a suitable quality to produce acceptable images.You need to know the reduction ratio of the film or the physical dimensions of the original to make high quality scans from microfilm.

When looking to microfilm, whether for preservation needs or to digitise from, thenplease refer to the National Preservation Office’s Guide to Preservation Microfilming,an indispensable guide.

Assuming bound broadsheet newspapers and aiming to produce at least 300 dpi B&W or greyscale digital images.

Microfilming costs – are in the range of £0.04 – £ 0.15 per frame.Scan from microfilm – range from £0.05 – £0.45 per frame (high end indicates greyscale).Direct scan – range from £0.75 – £2.00 per page side (high end indicates greyscale).

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Photograph and Scan

Photography for the purpose of scanning is very useful for large format items, itemswhose content is not on a flat surface, event or time based content, or when the original is fragile. It is mostly used to enable colour content to be reproduced. If the photography is done by an experienced professional and the resulting negatives ortransparencies are scanned using drum scan technology then the results may be better than are possible using even the highest quality digital camera. For some though thismay not be a viable solution. The cost benefit for fresh analog photography over digital is much more finely balanced and the only area where it really wins on cost is where photographic material already exists. In many places this may already havebeen done for preservation purposes and thus provides a ready stock of items to be scanned. Of course, this may in itself present some preservation issues as these photographic surrogates may have taken on an importance in their own right. Preparation issues such as appropriate cleaning, indexing etc. may also add to the complexity of dealing with existent collections. However, scanning from a photographic surrogate is usually cheaper than direct digital capture for a similar levelof image fidelity.

It is not possible to give a relative costs scenario because there is too wide a choice of possible formats and processes to be easily factored into ranges. It must also be noted that the volume of items has an effect upon pricing with higher volumes of photograph scanning (volumes over 20,000 items) gaining significant price reductions. However the following indicative costs have been experienced by several digitisation projects:

Professional photography ranges from £6 per shot for large shoots to day rates of£550 plus consumables.Direct digital photography in colour ranges from £4 – £25 per shot depending on materials, resolution and bit depth. Drum scanned 35mm transparencies at 4500 dpi 24-bit colour at ~ £8 each. 35mm slides scanned in slide scanner at 2700 dpi 24-bit colour at least £1.75 each. 5” x 4” transparencies – scan costs ranging from £1.50 – £3 depending on resolution and bit depth. Glass plate photographs – direct scans at >£8 each for 1200 dpi greyscale.

Making Decisions

Using this information it is possible for projects to work out the most effectivemechanism for their digitisation needs. The steps to take and questions to ask are thus:

1. Ensure that there is a clear understanding of the preservation requirements forthe original materials to be digitised.

2. If those preservation requirements would limit or constrain the digitisationmechanisms that you are considering then look at the surrogates available tothe project.

3. If microfilm or photographic surrogates are available is their fidelity to the original and their condition good enough to enable imaging to a suitable standard to meet the objectives of the project?

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4. If surrogates are not available can they be procured from elsewhere (such as another library or archive)? If so, do you have permission to digitise fromthem?

5. If no surrogate exists, what are the costs and benefits in creating surrogates for the purpose of digitisation? Are the preservation benefits of having a physicalformat surrogate enough to justify this process?

6. Once surrogates have been identified will the digitisation mechanism produce adequate images for the project at a competitive price?

7. Are the surrogates well enough organised and indexed to make digitisationeasy?

8. Will the digitisation from surrogates (such as from microfilm) have to be done by a commercial bureau therefore requiring visible financial commitment from the institution?

9. Is your plan good enough to cope with the additional work elements required to digitise from surrogates?

Retention Intention Revisited

In conclusion, there is an item of reading I would like to recommend because it askssome of the most searching questions about digital and analog retention and repositories. This seminal paper by Stephen Chapman of Harvard University, published May 2003 concludes:

Managed storage costs are not fixed, but arrived at collection-by-collectionby judicious decision-making. The choice of repository, the scope of service, the repository pricing model, and owner’s decisions regarding formats,number of items, number of versions, and number of collections to deposit: all are potential variables…These variables apply equally to traditional and digital repositories, and in both cases one potentially finds that some formats(content types) are more favored than others.ii

I quote this paper and name this section retention intention revisited because I want to emphasise that the detailed micro level decisions we make about the digitisation of collections must start with the preservation issues for that collection. Choices for the most suitable mechanism should be defined and guided by macro level retention policies and practice. These will be affected by format, fragility, number of items, thelevel of indexing, storage, staffing and a range of other issues, but at the hub of all this is the preservation activity.

So my concluding message is to put preservation at the centre of your digitisation project and planning, integrate it and value the benefits it brings. These are notexclusive activities but part of a bigger continuum of responsibility – to preserve the collection and make it accessible to all.

Notes

i http://www.library.cornell.edu/preservation/index.html

ii Chapman, S., Counting the Costs of Digital Preservation: Is Repository Storage Affordable?, 2003, http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/?vol=4&iss=2

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