Page 50 - Building Digital Libraries

Acquiring, Processing, Classifying, and Describing Digital Content

planners address access, processing, or preservation issues as early as
possible. Emulation can mitigate the effects of technology cycles, but this
method also suffers from shortcomings, such as possibly requiring users to
be familiar with obsolete technologies, not being viable for objects depend-
ing on proprietary hardware or software, and bringing into question how
the emulators themselves will survive technology transitions.

Outsourcing
The option of contracting responsibility for preserving some resources to
outside parties may seem counterintuitive. However, just as the principle
of access has been displacing that of ownership for purposes of evaluating
library collections, there is nothing inherently wrong with digital reposito-
ries relying on third parties to provide access to certain resources. Conceptu-
ally, this method is similar to purchasing database access in that it effectively
outsources a portion of the collection to an entity that is better equipped
to manage it. Moreover, it is now common for libraries to outsource opera-
tions that were once considered core library operations, and libraries now
frequently turn to vendors to host systems for virtually all aspects of library
operations, including repositories.
Contracting responsibility for providing perpetual access to materials
is appropriate in certain cases, particularly for interactive resources that are
data- or software-driven. As chapter 4 describes, two basic strategies can be
used to ensure that resources will be available when technology changes:
emulation and migration. For a variety of reasons, it is not feasible to emu-
late complex software environments:

• Even in a perfect world where emulators are free and work
perfectly, they may require users to master completely unfa-
miliar tech nol ogy for which no documentation is available.
• Creating emulators is very expensive. Just as formats
become ob so lete, emulators also become obsolete, since the
environ ments they run on change, requiring yet more emu-
lators for them to run in.
• Software environments often contain proprietary technol-
ogy that cannot be replicated or licensed in perpetuity.
• Software environments may be designed to interact with
specific hardware that no longer exists and cannot be
synthesized.
• Knowledge and access to the source code needed to make
modifica tions may no longer be available.
When emulation cannot be used to archive interactive resources based on
databases or services distributed across multiple machines, these resources
simply cannot be migrated.
Relying on third parties does not necessarily require the library to even
pay to have access to important resources maintained. In its simplest form,

35