Edward Coderre is the CEO and creative director for The Digital Ark, a digital-preservation firm which Coderre founded with his wife Diana in 2005 in Newport, partly because of the city’s extensive preservation community. Before founding The Digital Ark, Coderre owned and operated a media-design firm on the West Coast. Coderre, who is a RISD graduate, recently talked with Providence Business News about his company’s work and the future of preservation in the United States.

PBN: How did you get involved in digital archiving, and what do you do at The Digital Ark?

CODERRE: The first archiving project in which I was involved was for the Yosemite Photographic Survey in 1990. Unfortunately the technology was inherently slow and expensive, and the project was not able to secure proper funding. However, the hundreds of photos we digitized and the resulting database we created substantiated the worthiness and need for such projects. Fourteen years later, as digital cameras became ubiquitous and the need for archiving became obvious, we decided to form a company to help cultural-heritage institutions to preserve, organize and distribute their collections. The services we offer assist our clients by removing the technical “road block” from the archiving process. We also help them to “monetize” their assets in an effort to create a sustainable archiving program.

PBN: What have been some of the most interesting projects you’ve worked on so far?

CODERRE: Every project we work on presents unique challenges. One of our first clients was the Redwood Library & Athenaeum in Newport. During the renovation of the library in 2005, we were contracted to digitally photograph their painting collection before it was re-hung. Because the paintings are hung high on the wall of the library, many of the details of the paintings cannot be easily studied. With high-resolution images, the paintings can be scrutinized without the need to physically handle the fragile and valuable artwork. It also offered the library a way to document the condition of the paintings for conservation purposes. We continue to digitize assets for the library. Recently, we have been digitizing maps from the American Revolution and distributing them on disc and online to their membership through the Cartography Cartel.

Currently, we are digitizing 40,000 slides, negatives and glass plates for The Steamship Historical Society of America. This is a wonderful database which chronicles steamships dating back to the late 19th century. The database is a useful collaboration tool for collecting vital information about the images in their collection from their members and the public. The same database also drives an e-commerce store which allows the public to purchase downloadable digital files and fine-art archival prints from their collection. (READ MORE)

PBN: What led you to specialize in digital preservation?

CODERRE: The development of the Internet is really what made our business a reality, because it offered an economical means for our clients to distribute their collections. Having graduated from Rhode Island School of Design in 1984 – “the year of the computer” – I consider myself an early adopter of technology. It only seemed natural to combine my love of history and art with my technical expertise. The field is tremendously rewarding. Making history and art that was previously tucked away in a storage room, available to the public, makes it live on. And the community we work with truly cares about what they do.

PBN: Archivists often talk about the risk we face of losing a lot of our 20th-century media artifacts because of deterioration and a lack of preservation. How does the situation stand now?

CODERRE: There is a sense of urgency, but also a profound amount of hesitancy. The digital preservation field is new, and we are still in the “digital dark age,” as a recent Inside Higher Ed article put it. The lack of standardization in file formats and operating systems makes some institutions reluctant to commit to an archiving program. But simply put, isn’t it better to digitize an object then to loose it to decay?

There needs to be an open-source development of these standards, and they need to be federally mandated. Many of our clients are nonprofit organizations, and there needs to be more federal Funds made available. Initiatives such as Preserve America are good starts, but I think we need more than $10 million a year to preserve our heritage. Part of our business is to help our clients develop an archiving plan and assist them with grant writing, but there is a tremendous amount of competition for very few grants.

Sadly, this country loses assets daily to decay and oxidization. Many organizations do not have the room or finances to properly store their collections in climate controlled rooms. The greatest challenge is trying to decide which assets to digitize first. As of March 2007, the Library of Congress had 46 million non-text, undigitized holdings and estimated that it would take over 500 years to complete their digitization. Clearly there is a lot of work to be done.

PBN: What sort of impact and influence do big initiatives like the Google Books Library Project have on the country’s attitudes toward preservation?

CODERRE: A large part of our business is educating our clients in the archiving process. Projects like Google Books bring archiving into the mainstream. As people see the value and importance of these online collections, hopefully they will financially support their local organizations in their digitization efforts. I am confident that as the “digital generation” comes of age, they will be insistent that our national treasures be made available to them digitally. The fear of copyright infringement also prevents many institutions from digitizing their collections, and Google is definitely challenging the gray areas of copyright law. Hopefully, we can evolve the copyright laws with the pace of technology in order to prevent historical and creative assets from being lost forever.

For more information, visit thedigitalark.com.