Toward a rational and sustainable division of labor for the preservation of knowledge

The purpose of this paper is to propose a rational and sustainable division of labor between national libraries and the information industry for the preservation of knowledge.

The paper is a based on remarks presented by the author at the 25th Anniversary Conference of the National Repository Library of Finland, held in Kuopio on May 21-22, 2015.

Crafting a useful new role for libraries will require imagination and curatorial rigor, capabilities that the industry has found in the past, and can summon once again. No templates for such a role exist, but must be newly invented by the current generation of librarians. This is a tall order in an era of diminishing public funding for libraries and archives. But it will be essential if libraries are to continue to be key institutions of civil society.

There are formidable challenges to ensuring a rational and sustainable division of labor for the preservation of knowledge and many of those challenges will not be solved by new technologies alone. But the discussion needs to move beyond dated, late twentieth century strategies like mass digitization of books and “web archiving”.