Getting to Know TS Librarians: Heather Buckwalter

1. Introduce yourself (name & position).

Hi, I’m Heather Buckwalter and I am the Serials/Acquisitions Librarian at Creighton University Law Library. I joined the staff at Creighton Law Library in 1996. Although I have been in this position for over 20 years my duties and responsibilities have changed with the evolution of libraries. I have survived two building renovations and two ILS migrations.

2. Does your job title actually describe what you do? Why/why not?

Yes and No. I do manage serials and acquisitions for the law library but I am also responsible for electronic resource management, government documents, collection development, the Law School’s Archives, and I am the Law Library’s liaison to the University’s Systems Librarian. I also work at the Reference Desk 5-10 hours a week.

3. What are you reading right now?

Currently I am reading American Assassin by Vince Flynn. I love thrillers and mysteries and after seeing the movie I wanted to see how well they did adapting the book.

4. If you could work in any library (either a type of library or a specific one), what would it be? Why?

I started out in graduate school to concentrate in Law Librarianship and was lucky enough to work at the Law Library as a grad student. I did toy with the idea of going into preservation/conservation but it seemed I was destined for Law Libraries. I am responsible for the repair work and binding in my library so at least I do a little conservation.

5. You suddenly have a free day at work, what project would you work on?

Wow. This is actually a tough question since it doesn’t happen. I think if I had a free day I would work on data cleanup. With our migration to a new ILS there is lots of data that did not migrate very well. I recently went to a local conference where colleagues spoke about using regular expressions and OpenRefine to clean up data and was intrigued.

Digital Scholarship Guide

One of the project the Labs team at the Library of Congress worked on in 2017 was developing a guide for digital resources. The guide was rolled out in 7 posts this year on The Signal, but is now conveniently available as a single document, the Digital Scholarship Resource Guide.

This document is a fairly comprehensive look at what digital scholarship is and how to get a project off the ground, from digitization basics to file storage and preservation to document analysis and assigning metadata to analysis projects with digital data.

If you'd prefer the original posts, here they are:

1. Why Digital Material Matters
2. Making Digital Resources
3. So now you have digital data...
4. Text Analysis
5. Tools for Spatial Analysis
6. Network Analysis
7. People, Blogs and Labs

Long-term Survival of PDF/A Files

PDF/A is widely marketed and regarded as a preservation file format. However, a recently published article, “PDF/A Considered Harmful for Digital Preservation” by Marco Klindt serves as a prudent reminder that the PDF/A file format is not a comprehensive solution for preservation in itself.  

For digital information to exist in the long term, the data that comprise the information content needs to remain discoverable, machine readable, and renderable for human consumption. If preserving digital content means that we are planning for the potential reuse of data, a computer needs to be able to read and extract this information in the future. However, there are significant challenges to preserving PDF files in the distinction between what the human eye can read and what a machine can interpret and extract.  

PDF/A is intended to serve as the long-term archival version of PDF files. However, as the author notes, while PDF/A is marketed and widely adopted as a preservation format, “comprehensive policies regarding the use of PDF in archives seem to be rare” and “using PDF/A as a container for files complicates preservation workflows and might be considered an additional risk.” PDF documents preserve the visual appearance, structure, and format of the original document, but this comes at a potential cost for the reusability of data. A PDF/A document created at Level A (accessible) conformance is designed to improve a document’s accessibility through the use of tagging to markup the structure and content of a document, which in turn should help support both visibility and reuse. However, in its current version, PDF/A-3 still presents multiple challenges.  

Klindt discusses the risks and shortcomings through observations of existing inadequacies and challenges with the creation and reuse of PDF/A documents. The risks identified here undermines confidence in the suitability of PDF/A for long-term preservation. A few of the challenges discussed include impediments to text and content extraction in addition to information loss during the creation and conversion process. It is worth noting that while the author acknowledges PDF/A validation issues has been largely addressed by the creation of veraPDF, an open-source PDF/A validator, he argues that validation is a “necessary condition” but does not mitigate risks to future reuse of content. 

An understanding of these risks and shortcomings of PDF/A for preservation purposes underscores the need for comprehensive strategies and policies at the institutional level to safeguard digital content within a flawed archival solution. There are a number of useful, previously published resources on PDF/A cited in this article, including the National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA) report on The Benefits and Risks of the PDF/A-3 File Format for Archival Institutions, and a National Information Standards Organization (NISO) Information Standards Quarterly article, “Preserving the Grey Literature Explosion: PDF/A and the Digital Archive”.  The PDF/A-4 standard is expected to be published sometime in 2018. 

Revisions to Legal Requirements and Program Regulations (LRPR)

The current guide for Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) libraries was designed to be an easier to use consolidation of the various rules and regulations as they relate to depository library requirements. Issued in 2011, the Legal Requirements and Program Regulations of the Federal Depository Library Program (or LRPR) has been showing its age. However, with changes to Title 44 on the horizon (see https://www.fdlp.gov/about-fdlp/23-projects/3353-title-44-revision for more information), there has been reluctance to completely rewrite this guide.

Because of this, I was a little surprised to see an email from the “FDLP Webmaster” announcing a revised edition of LRPR. The changes in this 2018 revision are minor, to be sure. They boil down to:

• Rescindment of regulation 10 (tangible item selection requirement)
• Updated FDLP email list information
• Inclusion of regional discard policy
• References to new FDLP decals

None of these changes are groundbreaking, but it always helps to have the most current information at hand when dealing with FDLP requirements. Get the latest edition at https://www.fdlp.gov/requirements-guidance/legal-requirements.