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My Professional Philosophy

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It's one thing to stand guard, but it's another to make something indestructible by giving it freely to everyone who wants it. Teaching people will protect the knowledge so many have worked so long and so hard to accumulate.
(Odom 2005, p. 258)

Before enrolling in the San Jose State University program for Masters in Library and Information Science, I know more about the history than the present reality of libraries. Except for a semester of internship during my undergraduate studies in the local history room in Fairfax City Public Library VA, I never worked or volunteered in libraries. But, I loved books, so it seemed natural to want to work in a library. How I evolved from clueless book lover to a competent information professional, is described in detail in Reflections on My MLIS Education.

I entered the program with the idea to work in a public or academic library, but the class in Archives and Manuscripts made me realize that special collection libraries and archives would be a more natural outlet for my particular set of competencies. As my education progressed, I become more and more immersed in the issues of digitalization and the new possibilities of providing access to unique collections using the Internet. In a process, my interest moved from information containers – books and documents – to information they contained and the ways to organize and access this information on the Internet. From the perspective of the users as well as information professionals, the digital technology combined with the Internet opens not only completely new ways to discover and access collections, but also who can have the benefit of access and, ultimately, the privilege of interpreting the facts.

While the basic mission for most of public libraries is to “enriches lives by fostering lifelong learning and by ensuring that every member of the community has access to a vast array of ideas and information” (San Jose Public Library System [SJPLS], 2007), and is therefore closely focused on the users, the mission of archives professionals is to “select, preserve, and make available historical and documentary records of enduring value.” (Society of American Archivists [SAA], 2005), and therefore is more focused on documents. The documents and records are often quite unique and the variety of the media presents particular challenges in cataloging and organizing. Collections in the same repository are processed and cataloged individually, and, until recently, it was quite difficult to combine them together in electronic catalogs that would enable cross-repository searches.

Although the Code of Ethics for Archivists (SAA, 2005) states that archivists “promote open and equitable access to their services and the records in their care without discrimination or preferential treatment,” the nature of the collections – rarity, uniqueness and very often fragility – de facto makes access restricted and exclusive. If one could not afford to come to the archive’s premises and afford the time to study collections, one could not access the collections. Until the arrival of computers and digital technology, there was not much that archivists could do to level the access playing field.

However, digital technology promised to provide the solution. With appropriate hardware, digital files were easier and cheaper to create, reproduce and transfer to users than the earlier practice of photographing documents. At first, it also looked like it will provide the permanent solution for dealing with documents on acid paper, particularly newspapers and other printed ephemera. Unfortunately, as Rothenberg (1999) pointed out in the article about issues related to the longevity of digital information, there are some inherent problems with the digital data. The biggest of them is that to retrieve it, one needs particular hardware and software and the knowledge to operate it. One possible solution would be to periodically migrate data to a new format, but a serious limiting factor to this solution is, as always, finances and human resources.

Further development in digital technology, but most of all the development of the World Wide Web and HTML encoding, brought new dimensions to digitalization and ways the information was accessed. High resolution color scanning, digital photography, and the development of the relational databases, all made possible to put together and make searchable complex collections of photographs, multiple page documents, three-dimensional objects and associated metadata. Once uploaded on an Internet server, these collections could be linked with databases of other collections or repositories, and through search engines could be open to anybody with computer and the Internet connection. The result is not only improved information discovery and research possibilities, but also the democratization of access.

This new technology and its embrace by the public through various social or file sharing networks, like Facebook, YouTube or Flickr, also changed the nature of information. As Kelly (2006) proclaimed in his iconoclastic article, the book – as something that has a beginning and end with content and purpose determined by the author – is no more. Things published on the Internet are only just the work in progress:

“…[documents] get their initial wave of power when we first code them into bits of text, but their real transformative energies fire up as ordinary users click on them in the course of everyday Web surfing, unaware that each humdrum click 'votes' on a link, elevating its rank of relevance. You may think you are just browsing, casually inspecting this paragraph or that page, but in fact you are anonymously marking up the Web with bread crumbs of attention. These bits of interest are gathered and analyzed by search engines in order to strengthen the relationship between the end points of every link and the connections suggested by each tag. This is a type of intelligence common on the Web, but previously foreign to the world of books” (Kelly, 2006).

The power of link and tag, but most of all, the virtual nature of information opens new opportunities for libraries and other information repositories, like archives or special collections. It is not any more necessary to physically have a particular document; a patron could be provided with the link to an electronic, i.e., digital copy of the document regardless of his physical location. Therefore, by making the effort to digitalize their collections, archives are finally true to their mission of providing “open and equitable access” to their collections.

The added bonus of the wider accessibility of original sources in digital format, is that by making it free and widely available, the information would be preserved much better than if would be locked in a vault. As Eisenstein (1999) emphasized in her book about the effects of printing on wider social development in the late Medieval Europe, the technology of printing not only provided the multiple identical copies of the same books, which provided the foundation for serious scientific work, it also prevented that one accidental or deliberate act of book burning could eradicate the work of generations. And, not the least, the availability of printed books removed the exclusive power of interpretation of the facts from hands of King and Rome, and enabled the intellectual progress of the whole society.

As I realized through my research about the Armenian Tradition of Illuminated Manuscripts, the power of digitalization and the Internet is not only in providing the access to archival collections per se. The Internet and digitalization opens the unique opportunities for numerous cultural groups or small countries to provide access to their own cultures, on their own terms. When I tried to do the similar research about the little known history early printing of Glagolitic books in Senj, a town on the Adriatic coast, I fully realized how important are digitalization and presence on the Internet for cultural emancipation of small cultures. If I did not know the language and have opportunity to physical access sources available in the National and University Library of Croatia in Zagreb, I would never be able to put together the research. To somebody, who would like to know little bit more about early printing in Croatia and is not residing in Zagreb, I could offer almost nothing in lieu of original or even second hand documents. For most of the information provided on the web site, one needs to trust truthfulness and quality of my interpretation.

The Croatian archival and librarian community is aware of the power of the Internet and are intensively working to digitalize their heritage and make it available to a wider audience. I hope that one day I would be able to contribute the knowledge and competencies that I acquired through the MLIS program to a better understanding of the history and culture of the country where I was born. In the meantime, I hope to do my best to provide open and equitable access to the records and historical documents of other cultures of the world.

References:

Eisenstein, E. L. (1999). The Printing revolution in early modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kelly, K. (2006). Scan This Book! New York Times electronic version. Originally published on May 14, 2006. Retrieved on April 1, 2008, from: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/14/magazine/14publishing.html?ex=1305259200&en=c07443d368771bb8&ei=5090

Odom, M. (2005). Lord of the Libraries. New York, NY: Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

Rothenberg, J. (1995). Ensuring the Longevity of Digital Documents, Scientific American, 272(1) (January 1995), 42-47. Retrieved on April 1, 2008, from: http://www.clir.org/pubs/archives/ensuring.pdf

San Jose Public Library System [SJPLS]. (2007). Mission, Vision, Values. SJPLS web page. Retrieved on April 1, 2008, from: http://www.sjlibrary.org/about/sjpl/vision.htm

Society of American Archivists [SAA]. (2005). Code of Ethics for Archivists. SAA web page. Retrieved on April 1, 2008, from: http://www.archivists.org/governance/handbook/app_ethics.asp