Navigating the e-world: Information access and preservation
in the digital age

As the University keeps up with technology, the campus community needs to address an array of hurdles—from the economics of libraries to decisions about what to preserve and how to preserve it—a panel of U-M experts said.

The University needs to navigate this shifting terrain by including a broad array of materials from museums, archives and libraries in its digital archives; working with other institutions to create an economically viable system for making information available to users; adjusting to changes in the world of intellectual property; and recognizing the importance of employing knowledgeable people who can make the process work, panelists said during the
Dec. 16 presentation to members of the Board of Regents and others.

"We are only at the beginning of the process of providing universal access to human knowledge," said Margaret Hedstrom, panel moderator and associate professor in the School of Information (SI). "There are many parts of the puzzle to fill in and very large investments still to be made before universities, libraries and cultural institutions realize anything approaching universal access, and long before society at large reaps its full benefits."

The panelists made their speeches just two days after the announcement of a joint agreement between Google and U-M that will add the 7 million volumes in the University library to the popular Internet search engine and open the way to universal access to information (see story, page 1).

"While the 7 million print volumes that will be digitized through the Google Digitization Project is truly phenomenal, libraries and archives at the University hold at least another 36 million unique items, while the 13 museums on the three campuses maintain millions of scientific, cultural and artistic objects," Hedstrom said. "As the costs of digitization, computation and storage fall, we cannot ignore the human knowledge, skills and resources necessary for selecting, organizing and preserving collections."

Provost Paul N. Courant spoke about the economics of the evolving digital information landscape. He noted that once something is in digital form, the cost of use essentially is zero.

Courant said universities must work together to accomplish the grand task of making information available digitally.

"It is in the interest of no one place to do this work," he said. "It is in everyone's interest that someone do it, so we are going to have to develop a cooperative model to get the job done."

Daniel Atkins, professor in SI and the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department, also emphasized the importance of working together with other scholarly institutions.

He recently led a National Science Foundation blue-ribbon panel on cyberinfrastructure. The panel found, among other things, that preservation and re-use of scientific data is a high priority in many research communities and that there is a growing need for preserving this information.

"Collectively, research universities will increasingly be expected to cooperate in creating and maintaining digital collections—both information and data—and sharing it openly to the extent legally possible," he said.

John Price Wilkin—associate University librarian for library information technology and technical and access services—said the world of information collection and storage at libraries is changing dramatically.

"The way that we publish, evaluate and use information has been changing, and with this we can expect an acceleration of that change," he said.

U-M is a leader in digital libraries and is continuing to stay in the forefront in several areas, he said, including experiments that deal with generating new publications and a new institutional repository for U-M publications.

James Hilton—associate provost for academic, information and instructional technology affairs—spoke about the history of copyright law and changes that have occurred during the digital age. A shift is occurring, he said, between a world that views ideas as things that should be shared freely to a world that views ideas as property.

The University, he said, needs to work through the promulgation of information to begin to change the intellectual property paradigm that is emerging as a result of commercial interests.

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