Digital Libraries
Collaborative Electronic Reviews
Department of Library Science and Instructional Technology
Southern Connecticut State University, New Haven CT

LSC 551-70
Fall 1999

Reviews by:
Karen Ball
Gayle Bogel
Lisa Brenner
Deborah Coretto
Sue Crego
Marilyn Geiger
Mark Gore
Dawn Higginson
Eric Jones
Dianne Lyons
Kathleen Marszycki
Robert Murphy
Kris Piecyk
Jodi Stacy
Amanda Timolat

Lyman, P., & Kahle, B. (1998). Archiving Digital Cultural Artifacts. D-Lib, July/Aug 1998:

Reviewed by Marilyn Geiger

From Digits to Dust in 30 years?

The hallmark of an advanced society is the careful preservation and documentation of the records of human endeavor‹its collective historical memory. Record-keeping is essential to our social order. With the rapid increase over the last 30 years in the creation of cultural records that exist in purely digital forms, a siren has been sounded: important records of our recent past are, for all effective purposes, disappearing. Efforts to preserve those records to make them permanently accessible to future generations are underway.

Anyone who has old documents saved on 5 _ floppy disks, or on the hard drive of a computer running an obsolete operating system, has faced this issue when trying to preserve older work product. As digital technology changes, the hardware and software necessary to access old, archived materials may become unavailable. Magnetic media currently require "refreshing" every ten years to maintain data quality. On a larger scale, the issues are even more compelling. As the author puts it, "What happens to the history of science if we can't read the first data from the first interplanetary exploration by the Viking mission to Mars?"

Cultural artifacts‹newspapers, journals, WWW sites, library catalogs, and the like‹increasingly exist only in digital form. As digital libraries grow in size and influence, other cultural artifacts are becoming digitized, including government publications, classroom lecture notes, and music concerts. How can these be effectively archived as a record of our heritage?

The authors point out that the WWW is indeed an important cultural institution worthy of preservation, describing it as "a medium for publishing. . .written by seven million authors. . .[and] distributed for free around the world." It will not be enough to merely preserve the underlying HTML code; the entire Web‹both text and context‹must be archived. It is a formidable task. Digital documents on the Web are already disappearing‹"going 404." How can they be preserved?

In the past, libraries, museums, and archives have been devoted to collecting and preserving cultural artifacts. In the future, new institutions may be necessary to perform these functions for artifacts in digital form.

The issue is really two-fold. The first issue is technological: Can we develop a more "robust" digital design standard for documents, one which can recognize their long-term cultural importance? The second issue is sociological: Who will preserve, collect, and organize digital culture, and track its provenance in order to guarantee its authenticity?

Some efforts are already being made. The Internet Archive accepts donations of digital materials and archives them, changing the storage medium periodically in order to preserve them from both technological obsolescence and the physical ravages of time. Metadata services are being developed that display, record, and archive "information about the information" on websites.

The authors propose that effective archiving of digital cultural artifacts will require:

• changes in copyright and intellectual property law to encourage the creation of digital libraries and archives;
• improvements in high speed data transmission networks;
• standardization of video formats;
• standardization of web site elements to include elements corresponding to the tables of contents, page numbers, and indexes traditionally found in print forms;
• improvements in tools for storing and data mining terabyte (extremely large) digital collections.

Question to be posted to threaded discussion:

We all talk about the wonders of the digital age, but are we about to become victims of digitization? The rapid obsolescence of technology that is the result of the ever-accelerating pace of change in the technology itself has caused "digital discontinuity." The Y2K problem is just one small manifestation. Should we be fearful about what lies ahead?

Bearman, D. , & Trant, J. (1998). Authenticity of Digital Resources. D-Lib, June 1998:. D-Lib

Reviewed by Marilyn Geiger

Judgements about the authenticity of research sources are an essential element of serious scholarship in any field. Digital documents pose new and unique concerns for the scholar.

In research using traditional materials, judgements about authenticity are made based on the provenance of the material, and the scholar's assessment of its completeness, consistency, and coherence when compared with other documents or artifacts of the same type. If the document or artifact is in its original form, its physical characteristics are analyzed. If a surrogate, such as microfilm, must stand in for the material itself, then the methods of representation used are analyzed and evaluated. The methods of authentication for traditional materials have developed over time and are widely understood and accepted.

Material is judged to be "authentic" by scholars if it can be proved that:

1. it is unaltered from the original;
2. it is what it purports to be; and
3. if it is a representation, it is created according to stated standards.

Digital technology makes "fakery" easy and tempting. Digital information can be altered, and "fakes" can be effortlessly entered into an authoritative information stream. Even unintentional distortions of information can occur when copies are created without a clear understanding of the distortions that can result from specific methods of digitization.

The more sophisticated digital technologies, such as those involving images and audio representations, are especially subject to authenticity problems. Changes of scale, color, and tone are common. As the authors point out, a politician's speech and a music concerto can both be reproduced by digital transformation, but the simulations will be grossly misleading.

Even ordinary text is subject to distortion by digitization. A mark-up performed on text may obscure line breaks or fail to identify other linguistic elements.

Three types of strategies for assessing and asserting authenticity in digital resources are discussed. The first type is the "public" solution, using centralized registration, copyright, and certification of materials. The second type are "secret" methods, such as digital watermarking and digital signatures hidden within the object. The third type, the "functionally dependent" methods, use encryption and other technologies that are embedded in the information source itself.

Each strategy has a role to play in the research process. In the information discovery phase of a research project, the unique, unambiguous identification provided by the "public" forms of authentication are useful. Once information is retrieved, and moved to a private workstation, the embedded authentication methods can be used for verification. Finally, in the information analysis stage, there is no substitute for the scholar's judgment, and his thorough knowledge of the limitations of digital transformation technologies.

Ultimately, the assessment of authenticity of digital resources requires that the scholar use both traditional and new methods of analysis. Scholars must become well-versed in the technologies of digital conversion and creation of materials, so that trusted and widely-accepted standards can be developed.

Question for threaded discussion:

Digital technology allows the undetectable alteration of images and the easy forgery of data of all types. What problems does this pose for us as a society? How secure are our news sources from such tampering? How easy would it be, for example, to manipulate the mass media to create global economic and political chaos?

Kling, R. (1999). What is social informatics and why does it matter? D-Lib, 5 (1), http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january99/kling/01kling.html

Reviewed by Marilyn Geiger

Can't Program Your VCR?

Social informatics is the rather forbidding term used to describe the interaction between people and technology. It has been a recognized field of scholarly study and research for the past 25 years. Social informatics has developed fundamental ideas that are potentially applicable to the design and use of all types of electronic information systems, including digital libraries, intranets, and electronic journals and forums. To put it another way, if VCR designers had a better grasp of social informatics, you wouldn't be staring at that useless, blinking display day after day.

A lack of attention to the social aspects of computerization may be largely responsible for the "productivity paradox," the economists' term for the failure of investment in new computer systems to markedly improve labor productivity in the United States. There has always been a widespread assumption that the adoption of new technology would automatically create social and economic value, but this is not always the case. Social informatics seeks to understand why.

Social informatics seeks to develop a carefully nuanced understanding of the interaction of people and computers in context. Anecdotal evidence, assertions, and forecasts‹"the Internet has transformed the way we communicate"---have no place here. Systematic empirical research is needed.

Social informatics research has shown that the design of information systems that enhance productivity is, to quote the author, "a subtle craft." There are important differences in the way people in different organizations use information technology, and the technology must be precisely tailored to their needs‹to their particular social context. As the author illustrates by several examples, there can be many different social contexts even within the same firm. The authors call this tailoring to specific groups' needs "socio-technical configuration."

Social informatics, for example, can explain why one practice group within an accounting firm rapidly adopted a new communications technology, while other practice groups virtually ignored it. Had a more sophisticated analysis been completed before implementing the system, an expensive problem could have been avoided.

The effective design of information systems depends on a thorough understanding of the subtle interplay among people, hardware, software, support resources, and information structures. The authors suggest a number of "discovery processes" for systems designers, including focus groups, user participation in design teams, prototyping, and workplace ethnography.

Social informatics has important applications not only to the workplace, but to all social settings. Only a complete socio-technical approach can help designers fully understand the needs of the people the system is designed for. The social aspects of information system design must not be an afterthought; but must instead be an integral part of the plan, so that technologies are actually workable for real people in real situations.

Question for threaded discussion:

What experiences have you had with poorly-designed technology? Could these problems have been foreseen by a designer better trained in social informatics?