New York Public Library. Preserving Performing Arts Journals

In response to the Call for Proposals on the archiving of electronic journals issued last year by The Mellon Foundation, The New York Public Library (NYPL) has identified the domain of the Performing Arts and related academic disciplines such as media studies, literary criticism, and historical and social studies as a significant area of exporation. Before I say why that is let me just briefly describe, for those who do not know of it, the importance of Performing Arts materials within our collections. This will better hep to set the context of the proposal

The Library for The Performing Arts, or LPA, is one of four major centers within the NYPL "family" of research libraries. It assumed its individual identify in 1965, when the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts was opened here in Manhattan and since that time it has steadily continued a tradition of adding current materials in published form as well as major collections of personal papers and archives. It has also pursued a vigorous program of documenting live performances in sound and vision. Its collections now include more than 8 million items, covering nearly every aspect of the performing arts, from Greek tragedy, to Renaissance dance, to contemporary pop music in a diverse range of media. It is now possibly the largest and most significant collection of its kind in North America.

Mellon's Call for Proposals spoke of the need to address "the issues relating to electronic scholarly journals" but also of "the likely loss to future generations of scholars of material published uniquely in the electronic medium." This statement certainly sounded a chord with LPA colleagues who already struggle with the challenge of format diversity in written, printed and recorded materials, but it also caused us at NYPL to think about a particular responsibility to future researchers which we would have in this area of our collections; and it made us put a particular spin on the definition of electronic scholarly journals. To be frank, even with the confines of the printed form, Performing Arts Studies offer a relatively small range of scholarly journals, if by that definition one means refereed journals, issued by learned societies or through established publishers so prevalent in the world of STM for example. What is very prevalent however is a large range of material ranging from very well-produced but highly specialized magazines to trash fanzines all full of commentary and review of artists and their performances; all of which is of tremendous importance to scholars and researchers in assessing the impact of artists and their often ephemeral performances on the wider society. Not surprisingly, LPA has collected, and continues to collect, very extensively in this sort of material - and not surprisingly also the multimedia opportunities afforded by the world wide web have proved very attractive to publishers of this kind of content, both because it appeals to their sense of creativity and helps enhance and emphasize many of the points to which they wish to draw attention in the Performing Arts.

So using our existing knowledge of this material and undertaking some further research we established a preliminary list of ninety titles of web publications with value for Performing Arts studies. The list includes peer-reviewed journals and magazines from more popular sources. It contains those born digital, those published in both print and electronic forms, and those published as an online supplement to print titles.

The following are some of the challenges associated with the preservation of journal material in the performing arts.

• The publishers are very often small entities, even individuals, rather than well-established
• The material is delivered to users in a variety of electronic formats and often makes great use of embedded multimedia functions (such as digital sound and video) as exemplars
• Extensive use is made of hypertextuality, in particular links to other pages and presences elsewhere on the World Wide Web; and
• The instant nature of much of the activity in the performing arts places a much higher premium, for future research purposes, on what might be described as ephemera, and a number of titles in the list fall into that category.

We believe that the attempt to establish workable processes for harvesting and archiving material of this nature for the development of usable collections for future generations of researchers presents three highly significant challenges:

• The organizational and legal challenges of dealing with a number of smaller entities and individuals, many of whom are outside the mainstream publishing world
• The technological challenge of handing embedded multimedia, prefiguring an outcome which is not yet fully developed amongst more traditional publications in electronic form
• The hypertextual challenge of examining the feasibility of, and solutions to, the maintenance of persistent links to other web presences within an archive environment.

I would like to suggest that these challenges taken together will give the project the opportunity, which may not yet be so readiy available in other spheres of information provision - namely to examine in some depth how the changing nature of the public information space which is the World Wide Web will impact technologically and organizationally on our collection management activities.

What will happen next - clearly the project officer will begin to work closely with our Information Technology Group (ITG) colleagues to design an appropriate technical infrastructure to support this work and with the help of LPA colleagues will revisit the preliminary list of titles to validate and enhance it to what is judged as a definitive level. However the most important area of work in this preparatory, planning phase will concentrate on building solid liaisons with the producers of this material and working with our legal advisors to build an appropriate process for acceptable harvesting and archiving of the journals. This area will I believe be the most challenging part of the whole project by nature of the diversity of the journal producers. Although we have collected this kind of material in the print environment for many years it has rarely meant any detailed interface with the producers. To work with and reach agreements with them may well become a very time-consuming matter for often they are no accepted publishing companies, with established procedures for protecting their IPR and legal resources to do it (and wish to belittle it). Here however we may well be dealing with individuals or loose affiliations rather than clearly established organizations and the possibilities for establishing detailed and permanent agreements with such people may be frought with difficulty - in the field of the Performing Arts this may prove the greater obstacle than the technical challenges.

return to top >>