FIS 1311 Article Review

Article Review: “The Digital Preservation of e-Prints”
D-Lib Magazine, September 2003


The article, “The Digital Preservation of e-Prints” discusses the question of whether e-prints should be preserved along with other digital artifacts. The authors of the article, Pinfield and James (2003) promptly and appropriately define e-prints, for use in this article, as electronic copies of research papers or articles, usually stored in an online repository for scholarly use. This definition is important in order to contextualize the term and to limit its scope—in this article, what is being discussed is not journal or other online archives. With the ease of online access, large volumes e-prints are being collected and stored and are open for public access without metadata standardization. Easily searchable, a collection of e-prints can offer a great deal of information, quickly and easily. However, without thoughts to standardization and preservation, these digital collections could be lost with the next generation of hardware and software. In this article, Pinfield and James (2003) illustrate many of the main issues that must be addressed when discussing the viability and longevity of e-prints.

Pinfield and James (2003) begin this article by addressing the two main sides of this issue: that of the digital community, which would like to preserve all things digital, and that of the e-prints community which would like to place more emphasis on building the repositories rather than on preserving them. They use this discussion as a back drop to emphasize their point of view, that the most important part of e-prints is open access to a large collection. If there is nothing in the repository than there is nothing to search, and even more, there is nothing to preserve. From the e-print perspective, collection, not preservation, is the focus of the endeavor. On the flip side, many in the digital community believe that these information rich repositories should be preserved for future use (Pinfield and James, 2003). Only by preserving e-prints, can you also preserve the open access of e-prints. Open access is important because the repositories are often cited, and if they are allowed to decay, this information is no longer viable to future users (Pinfield and James, 2003).

In order to personalize their perspective, Pinfield and James (2003) draw largely on two people to present these differing viewpoints: a leading advocate for e-prints, Steven Harnad and a member of the digital preservation community, Peter Hirtle. The authors frame these viewpoints as a discussion rather than as a black and white issue. For example, Harnad does not say that e-prints should not be preserved, he just mentions that the primary focus right now is on collecting, not preserving (Pinfield and James, 2003). Hirtle is also a moderate voice. By choosing individual moderate voices, they ensure their discussion of the issue is much more reasonable and valuable. The authors suggest that although many in the digital community would suggest that to set up such a complex system of retrieval and not preserve it is doing an injustice to the digital preservation community (Pinfield and James, 2003) but these are not the voices they choose to highlight in this article.

At first, it seemed unacceptable to use such informal sources and the use of Harnad and Hirtle without reference to published articles does reduce the academic value of the article. For example, Pinfield and James cite discussions with Harnad and one editorial from Hirtle as their source of reference. Though the article is formal in tone, they do not cite their sources from appropriate academic resources. Though these viewpoints are accurate, they do not carry enough authority and, from an academic point of view, the article would carry more weight if it cited other academic articles. However, this article does not seem to be intended as an entirely formal resource. It has the tone of a discussion and blends many points of view. The use of specific discussion by specific people actually narrows the discussion from complete generality to a more specific nature. It is an effective way to present the argument and is easy for the reader to follow. The magazine in which it is published, D-Lib, is a magazine entirely devoted to digital library research and development (Wikipedia, 2006) and the tone of its articles are largely exploratory in nature. Pinfield and James (2003) strike an appropriate tone for the medium in which their article is published.

The sourcing of this article can be questioned by the reader. Most of the sources are from 2001, and with the growth of technology, that is simply out of date. A search of more recent articles on e-print preservation, such as an article by Simpson and Hey (2005) suggest that not only are article repositories gaining more popularity due to ease of access, they are becoming more reputable, but that they still have issues with what to preserve and how to preserve it. Where they surpass Pinfield and James lies in their use of examples of preservation initiatives, but this simply makes sense: as it becomes a more prominent issue, more people are addressing it. Although this article was written in 2003, the issues it discusses are still current. Pinfield and James quite successfully encourage people to think about an issue, years ago, that is only becoming more important today.

What this shows is one of the strengths of Pinfield and James’ article: it is written in such a way that the issues it discusses are broad enough to still be pertinent. Because the article was not a technical solution to the issue, but a large discussion of it, this generality is acceptable. This generality also leads one to believe that the article was written to provide information for information professionals and to raise questions, rather than to offer concrete solutions. Pinfield and James (2003) do use two examples of initiatives that are trying to bridge the technical and organizational difficulties of preservation. The first is a standardized metadata protocol called the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) Protocol for Metadata Harvesting which aids in searching more than one repository at a time (Pinfield and James, 2003). Secondly, is the UK SHERPA (“Securing a Hybrid Environment for Research Preservation and Access”) project, already in existence and functioning, which list the creation of OAI-compliant e-print repositories and the preservation of the content of these repositories as its two main mission statements (Pinfield and James, 2003). These organizations are both still in operation today, as well as other similar projects. The existence of these projects attests to the fact that the issue of e-print preservation is still relevant in the world of digital preservation today and Pinfield and James (2003) have effectively given the reader a history of the issue that is still applicable today.





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Works Cited

Anonymous. (2006). “D-Lib Magazine.” Wikipedia. Accessed on 03 Mar 2006 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-Lib_Magazine

Pinfield, Stephen & James, Hamish. (2003). “The Digital Preservation of e-Prints.” D-Lib Magazine. Accessed on 05 Mar 2006 from http://www.dlib.org/dlib/september03/pinfield/09pinfield.html

Simpson, Pauline & Hey, Jessie. (2005) “Institutional E-Print Repositories for Research Visibility.” Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science (Online) Accessed on 05 Mar 2006 from http://ioc.unesco.org/oceanteacher/OceanTeacher2/03_InfoMgtPrinc/07_Managing%20Internal%20Information/Simpson_Institutional_rep2.pdf