The book is an icon. In liturgical art, university heraldry and commemorative sculpture the form and image of a traditional book adds authority to the depiction. The book is frequently shown at a central opening. With or without indication of the text at the opening, the suggestion is a location deep within content. To some extent, the opened book conveys mastery of content.

It is possible to consider the computer terminal as an icon. However its physical form does not imply content and a blank screen field may even suggest a lapse of communication. A keyboard suggests elicited, not conveyed, knowledge. Now combine the two icons together, book and computer. Perhaps an opened book in the position of a keyboard or an image of an opened book on the screen. Even iBooks tented like books! Such a composite presents an icon for authoritative, persistent content. A content transmitted on request. A content detached from physical media. This is a suggestion for a University seal!

These casual observations reflect symbolism of the transmission of knowledge. The book/computer icon also suggests the future role of the library to manage knowledge based in different media. Library books are now used as an accessory to document delivery systems. But a new migration of content from books to delivery copies does not end their persistent role as source originals.

Books as Originals

The role of the original is to provide a reliable source, as bibliographers suggest. It is important to note how effective the book is in this role; the most dependable of all archival media. Aside from characteristics of content immutability the dependability has to do with its protective, compact form that aspirates slowly and damps external energy. There is the permanence of paper that extends, in terms of copying, beyond any loss of strength. The inked image is also dependable. Books preserved and buried in jars for almost two thousand years have returned to germinate new disciplines and new libraries. Books can reliably convey content across centuries of neglect yet be available for immediate use. And, unlike digital counterparts, books are machine and eye readable as separate, redundant modes.

As library services cross a bridge to digital research and digital text delivery we should cross the same bridge back again to assure the continuing role of the original. Unfortunately, the fundamental relationship between original sources and copies does not lead automatically to the retention of originals. While arguments for conversion of originals often emphasize their importance, little consideration is given to their continuing role. The unreasonable concept of the “one-time capture” is an invitation to discard the old, dirty original.

Linking Originals and Copies

A text delivery system that strategically interlinks originals and copies is the use of photocopiers in libraries. Before discounting this “system” it is important to realize that it is fully developed and installed, responsive to users and self funding. Photocopiers also offer a pathway to digital delivery from paper collections. Then as copiers themselves produce digital delivery products the source collections will still be paper. Such an analog system would flourish beneath the digital library movement. As content is distributed to various reading modes a link is traced in reverse to the source original.

Paper library collections cannot now be operated without photocopiers. Previously each reading and study time would subtract from the availability of an item. Such inaccessibility, shorter or longer, impairs the use of libraries. Reader enthusiasm is evident in the number of book pages produced by copier which exceeds other delivery modes, including microform and electronic, by a magnitude of a thousand to one. Fifteen to twenty thousand copies per month per copier is not unusual, and there are fifty to two hundred machines in each university library system. Thus the book-to-copier interface delivers millions of pages within each university library system each month.

A Capture Obstacle

There are obstacles to copier based delivery of content from books. Copying a book face-down conflicts with its design for face-up use. Copying equipment is designed for face-down work in response to the large market for single document duplication. The required flipping, positioning and pressing to the flat platen is usually damaging and always time consuming. Missed exposures, obscured text and loss at the gutter are assured while working blind. Face-down copying is a genuine obstacle to access of bound materials.

The other option of face-up equipment would facilitate copy from bound books. Exposures would be presented with normal reading manipulations while the book is secure on an easel. The operator would inspect and adjust each opening as it is copied. Look down configuration also facilitates use of digital cameras with depth of focus. This permits imaging across dimensional surfaces including not only the opened book but copying of other dimensional collections including the immense specimen collections in natural history and material culture museums.

A Delivery Obstacle

Another obstacle of copier transmission is that capture from a given original must occur over and over, on-demand. But take a positive view here. The whole analog/digital threshold justifies the continued operation of libraries to transfer content from various paper and film based media to various delivery states and reading modes. This is not just an activity to overcome an obstacle, but a service to meet each query with a useful response.

A fashionable solution to this obstacle is to imagine an electronic query searching a whole text library in digital form. One-time, clean sweep conversion from print-to-digital libraries is visionary, but unlikely and unnecessary. Economics alone will prevent such conversion, and the print collections continue to grow. If they are desired, digital versions of print will grow as the original collections grew; over time, title by title as a normal acquisitions activity. Such digital books could be accessed from the on-line catalog and from there leak to appropriate web sites.

Unfortunately the engine of book-to-copier access and “Document Express” is not the apparent source for an accumulation of digital versions of books. Because of the mismatch of query units with full text books, document delivery services will purposely avoid accumulation of digital versions of print realizing the rarity of a second request for the same order. Scanned copy will be discarded soon after it is transmitted to the reader. It would be useful to identify any segment of the document delivery community devoted exclusively to full text capture, but they are rare. Services that provide shelf replacement hard copy, “preservation photocopy”, or on-demand re-publication of out of print books might become full digital text suppliers. Their bound hard copy product is already a helpful accessory for reader photocopying in libraries.

The Leaf Master

The leaf master is a paper original retained primarily for production of copies. Such a defined status for the original acting as a standard for image resolution and an immutable source for text, could assist the development of imaging standards and diminish fears of the inadequacy of analog media. Such change of use for paper collections is already occurring in research libraries. The leaf master role is inherent in patron photocopying and document delivery services and can now be injected into plans for digital access and delivery systems that will depend on paper sources.

The change is also related to the diversification of library media, to advancing technologies of delivery and duplication, and to changes in reader needs. Emergence of the leaf master status is apparent in the withdrawal of paper materials to remote storage facilities and in increasing restrictions on their use as a security measure. The change in status converges with the inevitable limits of physical use for valuable and deteriorated items.

Consequences of the Leaf Master

A challenge for the field of library conservation will be the protection of leaf masters during the process of image capture. The ideal of “one time conversion”, wherein the initial copy will always be adequate for every subsequent access need, will be reconsidered as the urban myth that it is. Originals are continuously queried for new meaning and the technologies of image capture and output continue to churn. At the same time digital lending from paper sources, as demonstrated in interlibrary loan, document express operations, and patron photocopying continue to grow.

Dealing with the leaf master role for original holdings in relation to copy media requires new advocacy and strategy by the conservator. Support is needed for development of storage facilities and delivery systems that enable the survival of originals. These include efficient non-damaging image capture work stations at collection storage depositories. In the future the technologies of access will have at least as great an impact on the survival of originals as will the technologies of conservation treatment.

The emergence of a leaf master status for original paper collections has important preservation consequences. Within paper collections it focuses attention on the distinct roles of originals and copies, on content loss as a result of reformatting, and on the relation of a knowledge base to its transmission medium. The leaf master idea implies a continuing role for originals within access and delivery systems.

Ironically the availability of high resolution digital capture and delivery technology brings a focus to loss of content resulting from conversion. What standard resolution should be applied to minimize loss of visual content, what forms of visual content suffer in conversion, and what qualities of the original evade duplication? Such questions are now important. The ultimate evaluation of preservation duplication will ascertain if communications media are really interchangeable.

In the leaf master scenario, knowledge base transmitted in print media and the knowledge base which is emerging in electronic media will not merge, and preservation strategies based on conversion of paper collections are flawed. With print, the conceptual work cannot be completely separated from the physical medium of its transmission because content, quality and image resolution issues are defined by the original, not by copies. This is important because access systems must relate to undelivered content; that is, they must retrieve content not yet defined at resolutions not yet specified from massive and constantly growing collections.

Another surprising implication of the leaf master is the possibility of the use of access technologies to assist preservation. To some degree the spread of options for production of high quality service copies, including color and high resolution microfilm and photocopier produced facsimiles, enables the withdrawal of originals. Meanwhile, in the immediate future, paper service copies can increasingly take on the brunt of patron photocopy use, in so far as they stand in for original materials in the open shelves. Libraries generate a revenue stream through photocopying but as with other industrial processes, an exploitation of resource is involved. The linkage should be made to allocate one to two percent of patron photocopy revenues to the preservation of the leaf master stocks that stoke this engine.

Can the leaf master premise sustain itself as access and delivery systems proliferate? From an archival perspective there is more than nostalgia in the attraction of the original paper document that will be both eye and machine readable centuries into the future. Physical condition of the paper is of minor consequence when careful capture handling replaces uncontrolled circulation. Experience with capture work from hundreds of thousands of embrittled volumes proves that even the most deteriorated can be successfully copied.

Conversion of paper collections to a virtual preservation library in electronic form may not be the strategy for management of the brittle book problem or the preservation of knowledge. Identifying paper originals with a leaf mastering role is an alternative starting point that leads logically to scenarios for access, delivery and preservation. Conversion processes which prematurely discard originals should not quickly be termed “preservation systems”.

A related, though exotic, issue is the relevance of knowledge based in eclipsed technologies of communication. Incised Paleolithic time notation on bone, Neolithic ceramic token accounting, manuscript and printed text are not merely precursors of future media, but the mechanisms of separate knowledge systems. In our transitional period the interactive and research range of electronic text can be built on the persistence and authority of printed library collections as leaf masters and sources for digital “content”. But in the long term libraries are left to seek a “deep archiving” for the print media knowledge base, perhaps to sequester these collections.

Yet it is likely that the print medium and its paper based physical expression will persist to support a particular knowledge base which can exist only in that medium, hence the widespread application of digital technologies to print production and, in the library world, the use of digital scanners and their output devices for production of paper copies. There is also the need to distribute important primary research materials to all reading modes. In the past important paper items were microfilmed for further access. Their current conversion for digital distribution is just as inevitable.

These looming issues suggest that the preservation field should link the development and use of access and delivery technologies with the preservation of originals. In the context of the paper collections the preservation worker should interlock the roles of originals and copies and plan for a continuing dependency on originals. The concept of the leaf master, both as a status for paper collections and as principle for the interaction of different media, can be useful. It may also help to clarify the future of library preservation.

Role of Preservation

The preservation department must play a role in text delivery from leaf masters. This role includes a focus on the conservation of content, on the continuing role of the original in the context of text delivery systems and a use of electronic conservation treatment technique.

Work of the preservation department will continue to include migration of content from fragile paper collections. Here preservation becomes part of document delivery and inter-library loan operations where library or university staff operate the counterpart of self-service copying. These services, include production of paper copies of reserve and non circulating materials involving color, oversize and half-tone reproduction. These operations use advanced, production copier/scanner equipment and are poised to deliver searchable digital copy. In this environment the preservation department must act to diminish loss of the original content, including its medium and artifactual features.

Book Content

Book content can be lost. Migration of content to a different media or transmission mode of a delivery system inevitably results in lost content. The conservation technician converting originals to copies and restoring copies to legibility must also not distort content. Skill at computer assisted image manipulation could create a genre of clean documents. Initially, the intent to improve legibility, followed by an irresistible urge to “de-speckle” and clean-up shadows, stains or vandalism could result in content distortion. This risk increases as the technology for image manipulation and the skills of the technician improve.

A linkage between “image enhancement” and “image integrity” is needed. As an example, digital imaging of papyri involves enhancement techniques using multspectural imaging and image processing software. Obscuring overlays, palimpsests, poor ink/background contrast and un-inked, incised texts are modified to enhance legibility. Digital time stamping to verify the source and state of an image should include verification of any such image enhancement. This linkage must be developed by the preservation field, enabling the technicians involved with image enhancement to work within guidelines that assure conservation, not modification, of content.

Digital conservation, the computer assisted restoration of copies, converges with irresistible technical and social forces. Both capture and delivery systems are already capable of image modification. Modification to despeckle, change contrast or adjust color is a routine element of digital conversion projects from colonial archives, to sheet music, to colored maps. Future options may include electronic in-fills, software assisted re-assembly of fragments or interactive re-collation of archival images. In addition to preparing document images for library patron use, digital conservation practice would also include conversion and restoration of sound and video collections.

From a reader’s perspective, images delivered at a computer may be derived from an original, but the reader will not be aware of the copy generations or if the original physically survives. Still less, will the reader be aware of policy or programs to retain originals as sources. The on-line reader will lose any sense of deterioration of source originals. The desired content will either be available or unavailable. The provenance of the originality of the original is lost.

The identity of originals can vanish completely when all delivered text and illustration, including originals, are assumed to be disposable copies. This aberration is already apparent in photo, artifact and document collage exhibition techniques and in the increasing vandalism of library books. At the same time electronic content and image manipulation reinforce the idea that mutability, not authenticity, is an inherent quality of library materials.

A digital transmission, or any copy, from a paper source should generate queries concerning its relation to the original. Questions of image resolution, legibility, depiction of physical evidence such as page edges, color or annotation or the relevance of negative results from electronic searching should spring up. As a result the library enters into a negotiation with the reader that would not be engendered by the delivery of the original. The positive influence of the process is to drive copy delivery services to higher standards of accuracy, but other effects include inevitable reference to originals and a costly negotiation process that does not necessarily improve the readers’ research or library efficiency.

Book Medium

The book medium can be lost. Content should be sourced from a medium of the period of its production. This suggests the idea of an initial transmission medium. Such a preservation precept leads to sequestered originals, defines resolution in terms of the original and counters fears of media obsolescence. This precept of working from period media also makes libraries of mixed media relevant even after document delivery systems are fully digitized. The assumption is that media such as the paper book are not simply stages in the history of communication or a transitional form of content. Instead the paper book embodies a specific knowledge system; information, structure, image and text, that cannot convey fully to another medium.

Loss of the book medium, loss of its credibility and usefulness, is possible. Due to an increasingly specific electronic query the text delivery systems must react on-demand at the page, paragraph or word level with precise extracts. Reader attention is then paced to fragments and webs of information. Request of a complete book unit is considered unnecessary. In this environment the paradox of book preservation is retaining formal conceptual works for fleeting, fragmentary access! The mismatch of book delivery units and electronic queries challenges the book medium.

In a fifteen second TV ad for the Encarta CD two kids are playing, in two adjoining rooms, while they talk back and forth. One is glancing through six different entries in the encyclopedia (i.e., viral infection, Italian art, tropical marine fishes), each augmented in various media. The kids are interrupting each other without conversing. The girl at the computer says; “Wow Look at this!”
Book Artifact

The book artifact can be lost. Prevention of theft and vandalism of library collections, though not initially the responsibility of preservation departments, is their concern. The lost portion of the collections is forever beyond the compensation of conservation treatment. Lines between special collections and circulating collections are drawn with security risks in mind, but all source materials, rare or routine, face the same annihilation from theft or vandalism. While theft of valuable books makes the library news, the lost and willful damage of circulating materials is as apparent to the librarian.

The advent of digital accessibility to library collections, whether via loan operations, preservation reformat or collection conversion, adds another element to the security issue. On the dark side, the library now invites users to steal and vandalize collections albeit surrogate collections! This harmless invitation could mature into a more serious disregard for the source collections.

On the bright side of digital delivery a more exact line can now be drawn between “special” collections and “circulating” collections. With remote, digital access of the collections, the (special) source originals can receive more effective security while the (circulating) surrogates are freely given away. This distinction suddenly engages the threat of vandalism and theft. Incrementally, source originals are withdrawn from circulation and access to them is better controlled and yet, increased.

Trends in collection storage, digital lending, stack closings, and remote readership, converge with this reconception of the special and circulating collections distinction. An attribute of the concept from a preservation view is a shift to greater control of on-site reading and an increased status for source originals. Across all library media, the source collections would merit greater security particularly materials that have never been reformatted.

This larger dynamic of the original to copy transaction so fundamental to digital delivery of library collections could be leveraged by the preservation field to assure the better protection of source collections. Even more surprising, increased library use featuring “stealing” and “personalizing” digital collections, could occur while the source collections are carefully sequestered.

EndNote

A popular view is that books and computers, old and new networks, are disrupting each other. Libraries indicate otherwise as they assist readers by connecting one medium to another and by accurately conveying content from source original to delivery copy. Paper libraries linked to copier delivery is an example. This engine of reader service is taken for granted, yet its ability to deliver digital versions of print materials may make it more apparent.