GLAMs and Climate Change
Scholarship at the intersection of libraries, digital stewardship, and the environment
Digital Humanities in the Anthropocene
Summary
Originally given as a keynote address at a 2014 digital humanities conference, Bethany Nowviskie’s article is a powerful reflection of digital stewardship’s impact and significance within the context of a dying planet. Although over a decade old now, this talk is both a poetic musing about memory and degradation and a compassionate challenge to digital stewards to rethink our perception of history, scale, and progress.
Key Points
Humans have caused irreparable damage to the planet, and we are in the midst of the sixth great extinction of life on Earth - a fate that we in the digital stewardship profession share, even if our profession is focused on everyday technical extinctions rather than the “Big One.”
Nowviskie presents some different collectives and their perspectives on loss: some that advocate letting things go and grieving for things versus those are grapple with intervening and reviving.
Digital humanities and stewardship are responsible for numerous, impressive accomplishments that permit our society to better understand history and live in the present. We could have a place in using our skills in marrying data and memory to support climate efforts.
We need to reorient our profession to support these directions, which requires supporting renewal (and not just newness), an ethic of mutual care, empathy and accessibility, and space for ephemerality.
“We need to acknowledge the imperatives of graceful degradation, so we run fewer geriatric teen-aged projects that have blithely denied their own mortality and failed to plan for altered or diminished futures.”
Ultimately this article eludes being captured by pithy bullet points and should be read in its entirety.
Relevance to Digital Preservation
This paper introduces the underpinnings for a philosophical framework of restraint and renewal in digital stewardship, to help us relax our fixation on progress and perfection and embrace practices that will nurture resilience in the face of an uncertain future.
Source
This article was originally a keynote address, given by Bethany Knowviskie, at the 2014 Digital Humanities conference. It was published in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, an international, peer-reviewed journal.
Full Citation
Nowviskie, B. (2015). Digital Humanities in the Anthropocene. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 30(suppl_1), i4–i15. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqv015
It’s Not Easy Being Green(e): Digital Preservation in the Age of Climate Change
Summary
A contribution to a book of essays dedicated to the late American archivist, Mark Greene, this essay presents a compelling argument for reinterpreting how we uphold archival values in the context of climate change. It provides a candid inventory of our current digital stewardship practices and the environmentally harmful ecosystem that enables them - and urges colleagues to engage in the challenging work of shifting our practices so we are better equipped to actually sustain knowledge for future users.
Key Points
Digital objects accumulate at an overwhelming rate in our modern technological ecosystem, and preservation and access to collections rely on an unsustainable data storage architecture and fossil fuels.
Ever-growing collections that rely on systemic principles of replication, migration, and constant fixity checking are extremely energy-intensive, and archives will not become more efficient by simple building and energy efficiency enhancements - we must shift our collection and preservation practices.
Adapting core archival practice to respond to climate change will ensure a more resilient professional community that can fulfill our future collection commitments
Collecting less will be one pathway to reducing the burden on the environment and increasing our ability to effectively steward the collections we acquire.
Relevance to Digital Stewardship
This article comprises a small but growing, segment of scholarship that focuses specifically on the relationship between the climate and digital preservation. It illustrates the full circle of how digital stewardship influences the environment, and how these effects contribute to climate disasters that, in turn, impact our profession.
Source
This essay was written by Ben Goldman, a digital records archivist, as a chapter for a Society American Archivists publication, “Archival Values: Essays in Honor of Mark Greene.”
Full Citation
Goldman, B. (2018). It’s Not Easy Being Green(e): Digital Preservation in the Age of Climate Change. In Archival Values: Essays in Honor of Mark Greene. Society of American Archivists. https://scholarsphere.psu.edu/resources/381e68bf-c199-4786-ae61-671aede4e041
Toward Environmentally Sustainable Digital Preservation
Summary
A foundational article, written by practicing digital archivists about digital preservation’s impact on climate change. The authors propose integrating environmental sustainability into digital preservation practice and make stopgap recommendations for reducing environmental impact and shifting collection and retention practices to more environmentally responsible and sustainable practices.
Key Points
Authors draw on John Ehrenfeld’s sustainability framework that calls for a paradigm shift in how society thinks about satisfaction and how we fulfill our needs through consumption.
Through the life-cycle assessment (LCA) framework, the authors break down the fundamental ways digital preservation harms the environment through its reliance on Information Computing Technologies (ICTs).
Immediate stopgap measures to reduce environmental impact of digital preservation include:
Altering energy use through scheduling of high-energy and high-bandwidth tasks to occur at off-peak times.
Switching to clean energy sources.
Sustainable digital preservation recommendations include:
Appraisal – see Table 1 for helpful questions to help guide appraisal and reappraisal decision making.
Permanence – see Table 2 for helpful questions to ask when determining acceptable loss, fixity checking methods and frequency, online vs. nearline storage technologies, file format migration policies, and rethinking around redundant copies.
Ready availability of digital content - see Table 3 for helpful questions to ask when determining the need for mass digitization, choosing access storage and how to use it, and delivery of digital content.
It is important to note that the recommendations made by the authors are examples of mitigation of environmental harm rather than adaptation to the effects of climate change.
Relevance to Digital Preservation
This resource is deeply relevant to digital preservation since it details not only digital preservation’s direct dependence on technology that consumes and has a direct impact on natural resources, but points out practices that can be improved to more responsibly undertake the preservation of cultural heritage.
Source
Written by practicing digital archivists working in the cultural heritage digital preservation field. Published on The American Archivist, a peer-reviewed for the GLAM community. While current issues of The American Archivist require a membership fee or access to a database, this article is now open access.
Full Citation
Pendergrass, K. L., Sampson, W., Walsh, T., & Alagna, L. (2019). Toward Environmentally Sustainable Digital Preservation. The American Archivist, 82(1), 165–206. https://doi.org/10.17723/0360-9081-82.1.165
How Have Art Museums Been Impacted by Climate Change?
Summary
In 2022, Ithaka S+R circulated an Art Museum Director Survey, to document strategies and perspectives across a range of issues. This report synthesizes the responses about how museums are impacted by and planning for climate change.
Key Points
In a 2022 survey of art museums, 63 directors reported that their institutions are already experiencing the ramifications of climate change and their effects on things like building damage, power outages, energy costs, etc.
Fifty percent of directors reported that their museums were already planning for climate change disasters, and the survey reflects at what level they are instituting an organizational strategy for responsive measures.
Many institutions reported thinking holistically about:
Their institution’s environmental footprint.
How climate disasters are affecting costs, employees, visitors, and collections.
How they can support their local communities in the face of climate disaster.
Results correlated to geographic distribution of the organizations as well as institutional structure, leading the authors to conclude that there will be no “one-size fits all” strategy.
Relevance to Digital Stewardship
Digital stewards share many concerns in common with other Gallery, Library, Archives, and Museums (GLAM) colleagues, and this survey delivers an aggregate analysis of how a segment of the cultural heritage profession is evaluating present risks, creating adaptive strategies, minimizing their emissions impacts, and increasing community support mechanisms.
Source
Ithaka S+R is a well-regarded research branch of ITHAKA, a not-for-profit organization that supports digital solutions for preservation of the scholarly record.
Full Citation
Dressel, J., & Sweeney, L. (n.d.). How Have Art Museums Been Impacted by Climate Change? Ithaka S+R. Retrieved June 17, 2024, from https://sr.ithaka.org/publications/how-have-art-museums-been-impacted-by-climate-change/
Climate Change Exposure for METRO Region
Summary
A good reference for how to benchmark or evaluate institutional/city/regional/etc. climate action plans and how to draw connections between hyper-local climate change impacts and library considerations.
Key Points
Highlights the lack of adaptation measures and the need for more.
Provides key definitions that we might borrow e.g., adaptation, mitigation.
Relevance to Digital Stewardship
No mention of digital preservation or digital infrastructure, although there is general discussion about workforce considerations.
Source
Memory Rising provides research, consulting, and archival services for cultural and humanities institutions and other organizations. Memory Rising was founded in December 2022 by Eira Tansey. Eira has worked in academic libraries and museums for nearly twenty years, and has been a professional archivist for 15 years.
Full Citation
Tansey, E. (2023). Climate Change Exposure for METRO Region | Metropolitan New York Library Council. Metropolitan New York Library Council. https://metro.org/climate-change-exposure-metro
Dying Well in the Anthropocene: On the end of archivists
Summary
A transdisciplinary meditation calling on archives and archival professionals to confront the realities of climate change and its consequences and implications for the discipline. The archival profession must also transform its principles and practices—in consideration, for example, of other understandings of archivy and memory work from the Global South, non-Western perspectives, and and other disciplines, as well as popular representations of archives and memory in literature and media—to develop strategies for adaptation and resilience.
Key Points
“Western archivy operates from implicit and explicit assumptions of futurity”—future value, future users, future concerns—“However, increasingly dire models of climate risk undermine any casual assurance of posterity and stasis” (3). The archives in the present Western understanding and, by extension, archivists must “adapt or die” (page 6).
“By intentionally contemplating the ‘death’ of archives as we know them, we create opportunities to evaluate the present dysfunction(s) of institutional archives, develop adaptation strategies to mediate the more immediate and violent consequences of climate change, and imagine what new practices might emerge from the fertile substrate we leave behind” (page 5). Adaptation should recognize that resourcing is finite, and can involve practices from degrowth, maintenance theory, and adrienne maree brown’s emergent approach to building communities of practice.
Relevance to Digital Stewardship
Considers whether best practices for disaster recovery and risk management (e.g., records transfer, multiple copies, etc.) are insufficient for a future where limited resources, elevated climate threats, and likely societal and political instability cannot guarantee the integrity of materials and their related contextual information; or the availability of discovery and access systems; and/or the presence of staff, users, institutions, or infrastructure.
Archival principles, practices, and priorities must be redrawn to foster communities of practice that are sustainable, interconnected, and adaptive.
Source
The Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies highlights research that queries and critiques current and prevailing paradigms in library and information studies. It is published by Litwin Books.
Full Citation
Winn, S.R. (2020). Dying Well in the Anthropocene: On the End of Archivists. Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies, 3(1). https://doi.org/10.24242/jclis.v3i1.107