Yvonne Tunnat is Preservation Manager at ZBW, Leibniz Information Centre for Economics
During the „Oops - If only... “birds of a feather session led by Paul Stokes at this year’s iPRES in Ghent, we were asked to reflect on former mistakes and possible improvements. “I should have been more calm!” was what came to my mind immediately.
That’s what I would tell myself, if I had the opportunity (due to a time machine, a TARDIS or Hermione’s time turner) to talk to my younger self when I started the job in October 2011: “You have time! It will all move so much slower than you can imagine right now. But you also will have much more time than you can wrap your head around right now!”
When I started the job as the Preservation Manager at our library in the Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (ZBW), I was fresh from university. I didn't even know that I knew next to nothing about Digital Preservation. I thought I had it all figured out: Something with migration, possibly to PDF/A and then somehow archive everything that’s in the library, which I gathered was surely a lot.
I was told Digital Preservation would go live and be productive in October 2011, right after I started my job. Obviously, whoever told me this also should also have been calmer. We did not go live and have productive Digital Preservation until mid-2015, but I would not have guessed that. Actually, I had almost four years to learn about Digital Preservation, my library, its digital content and all the complex workflows possible in our Digital Preservation system, Rosetta.
But I was constantly under the impression we would go live approximately next week. It lasted a very long time until I suspected it might be otherwise, so, during the first year, I was under stress constantly. I found out early that the PDFs in our digital collections were imperfect and about 25% of them would never migrate to a decent PDF/A. But I needed years to learn that that’s the nature of many PDF files in the wild. I was told I should fight for ZBW to be self-sufficient but needed years to learn that we need not be absolutely self-sufficient to do a decent job with our Digital Preservation, quite the opposite. As the digital preservation team at ZBW has always stayed very small, cooperation with two other libraries in Digital Preservation (Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology University Library and ZB MED - Information Centre for Life Sciences) has proved to be the way to go.
I was also told to win arguments, I even suspected I was hired to be cheeky. Retrospectively, though, I guess I could more or less have spent my first two years in this job calmly listening to people without even saying one word. It would have been sufficient to introduce my opinions in 2013, not earlier. I was under the impression that I should do papers and talks at conferences from early on, so I wrote many abstracts, most of them were rejected for the simple reason that I did not have anything to say. What I should have done instead is write Social Media Postings and little Blog Posts to state actual problems I discovered and talk to peers about possible solutions. Later I learned that asking a question on the platform formerly-know-as-twitter often leads to answers which leads to better workflows.
Me, Yvonne Tunnat, during a minute madness presentation at LIBER 2012 in Estonia, photo taken by Inge Angevaare
As I did not know that I would have time and many years to get the job done, I hurried and had a very stressful first year while trying to be heard and seen. The good news is that I was heard and seen and got to know many patient people that still talk to me. In the end, no real damage was done, mostly other people were struggling with the same problems as I was.
“Keep calm and Archive on!” I would like to yell thirteen years back through time. “You do not have to visit every conference. You do not have to try to present something everywhere. Just sit still and listen.”
Of course I had also done some stuff right, maybe by sheer chance - I had done so many things at once, not everything could possibly be totally off track. So I engaged with the German-speaking Digital Preservation Community, nestor, to work on Guidelines to a Preservation Policy, which eventually led to a very good Digital Preservation Policy for my library. I also worked in several working groups, not only with nestor, but with international communities as well, learned a lot and, most importantly, learned to share my knowledge with others. Still, one of the best things about this job in Digital Preservation is: Share the knowledge with others. Spread it widely! It’s too big, too complex for one person or one institution. It’s better to solve its problems within a bigger community.
So I like to share with possible newcomers what I have learned: I bet you could also be calmer. There will be time.