Pascal's Wager and the Long Conversation: Preserving the Scholarly Record in the Academic Library

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay explores ubiquity and transience in information resources, raising questions about the nature of a work and how researchers and librarians may need to adjust our assumptions about the nature of the scholarly record. In the academic library, keeping up with the accelerating pace of information production and the development of formats has become extremely difficult. While one of the long-assumed functions of libraries is to preserve the human record, the task has reached impossible proportions. Our current environment challenges our basic notions of what constitutes the human record. As information online moves into formats less fixed but more accessible, along with the format shifts have come significant changes in ownership and access models, forcing us to reconsider how we interact with information. Today's information ubiquity helps us see that we have created far more material documenting human experience than libraries have ever captured and preserved, and we may not have been preserving the human record as comprehensively as we have believed. The concurrent transience of information—the increasing pace at which it is changing and even becoming deliberately changeable—points to the difficulty of continuing to believe that content is static and that preservation is what research libraries do. We may need to begin thinking differently about what constitutes the scholarly record and how we create, evaluate, and use it. We may need to begin accepting that our lives and their documentation are more transitory than we have ever wanted to think.