mid-winter
Here in Dallas. The suite kitchen here is fully equipped with everything for baking and cooking and serving an elegant buffet for 14. The toaster is excellent. Or you can dine at an incredibly cheap luxury restaurant. Order off the lunch menu and get a massive dinner with very fine entrees and imported beer for $15. The shower and toilet run massive amounts of water, so the drought must be a myth. I have a magnificent living room with huge bathroom and huge walk-in closet. I am next door to the worlds largest book store and just a block from a huge museum of biblical art with a feature on the King James. Close at hand is a mall of all the luxury retailers. The gated communities are wonderlands of gardens and security.
The rich need not pay much, either taxes or living expenses. They can watch every penny. Meanwhile lest fortunate must pay at highest levels for the least services and accommodation. It all makes sense to those on the very top. I hope I am not being too negative. Happily librarians are coming to town.
churn
From a historical perspective the productive career of the practitioner was once assured by integrated learning on the job. Considering collections care and bookwork where there was an endless period of instruction adapted from craft trades. Increasing specialization for library preservation benefited from this assured apprenticeship.
Career performance was complicated as library media and library delivery service became evermore diversified. As with other trends in media history, multiplicity increased. Gradually the previous generation had less practice to convey to the current. By the end of the 20th century each generation of library and archives preservation practitioners needed a different education.
That trend, of career deviation, as routines and methods of one generation became distinct from those of the previous, complicated productivity. As changing library services and an expanding scope of collection building proceeded, practitioner proficiency was disturbed. This trend has continued and a current working career is no longer coherent. The single generation of practitioners must literally shift careers and retrain multiple times.
The resilience and intelligence needed is great and the work is exciting and challenging, but the momentous trend does need some scrutiny. How can a career of practice move from stable preparation to constant re-learning? What aspects of practice prove most volatile and which are more persistent? These questions are well addressed in Paul Conway’s “Preservation in the Age of Google”.
But, how can the full duration of a working career be best adapted to rapid change? One excellent counter to the churn of library and archives preservation is ancillary book studies. The history of books and the nature of their qualities, both paper and screen display, offers perspective and continuity in a context of disconcerting change. Crafted experience of historical structures and technologies can calm distress over disruptions in the workplace.
churn2
at least three topics spun out of the centrifuge of a three hour cic preservation officers discussion. (1) storage of digital versions of non-paper legacy media, (2) management of legacy media storage, (3) churn of organizational structures for preservation and the increasing overhead of staff retraining.
(1) Hathi Trust has little interest in storage of digital versions of legacy (copies of analog magnetic or film) and internal options are drying up as the size of digital collections increases. Methods for validation and ingestion have emerged but that is not related to storage capacity or legacy media accommodation.
(2) Originals of legacy media cannot be repository stored without item description. Ideally these items would also be digitally transferred prior to storage but that should not forestall their curation and is not likely to be funded. Internet Archive may store legacy film copies. Strategy forward should also factor potential continuing acquisition or growth of legacy media.
(3) Concern for legacy media and born and transferred digital has repositioned preservation practice. This shift is caused and skewed at the same time by drastic library reorganizations, all different. Staffing is improving but at a cost of an increasing service menu. New positions fill in digital preservation practices. Overhead of retraining, retooling and reassigning existing staff is great with intended consequences countered with unintended. “What we must do in the next year is not the same as what we must do three years from now.” (Sherry Byrne)