>> SPEAKER: Okay, so, we're starting our second batch, and I'll just turn things over to Katherine
to moderate the panel.
>>Kathrine Skinner: Fantastic.
Thanks so much.
I'm Katherine Skinner.
I’m the Executive Director of Educopia Institute, and I want to start with just a tremendous
thanks, especially to IMLS, for hosting this event, and I hope it will be as influential
as the one was last year, as many people have noted.
The conversation that we had here last year was a rich one.
It went in some directions that really needed to be spoken out loud, and it did have an
effect, and I think that's fantastic.
So, the core question that this panel has been asked to discuss is gaps in distributed
national digital capacity.
So, where are they?
Do we seek to eradicate those gaps?
Do we seek to bridge them?
If so, how?
In my work, I've had the pleasure of convening and joining a lot of cross secotr conversations
about this topic of late, and some of those conversations have been with libraries, but
across library types, so the public libraries, the special libraries, the academic libraries,
and usually the archives as well in that context.
Others have been with groups that cut across other related fields, including a lot of cross
sector gatherings of libraries, museums and archives many of which IMLS has provided the
basis for, and then still others have been with groups that are focused on core content
type, and one that I'll call out in particular is digital news preservation, where the Reynolds
Journalism Institute and Educopia have been partnering with NEH support to enter in the
conversation with journalists and publishers and technologists and press associations and
archivists and librarians, historical societies and researchers in order to really solve the
conundrums around born digital news preservation which we’ve barely even scratched the surface
of yet.
Then the most recent was just yesterday, when I joined the Global Summit of Internet II
and heard the perspectives of college presidents, CIOs, technologists, and also some community
leaders that work with groups like K12 education, and public libraries, etc., through the Youth
Camp Program, and across all of those different groups, the concerns that we have and that
we're talking about today in regards to gaps in our national digital capacity are shared
by many, many others in this extended environment, or ecosystem, if you will, in which we operate.
I also want to raise two important questions before I turn it over to this able panel,
ones that I know all of us will be discussing over the next hour.
The first is, is our national digital capacity hindered by gaps in infrastructure or is it
hindered by gaps in infrastructure, or is it hindered by gaps in relationship, knowledge
and facilitation, and I’ll share my hand on this one.
I believe it's the latter.
I worry about the cliques that we have in our environment right now.
I worry that we aren't nearly polyamorous enough, to borrow from Dan and also from Jim,
and an important word that I have yet to hear today and that I want to encourage us to talk
more about is facilitation, because facilitation, active facilitation is absolutely necessary
for alignment.
It doesn't happen by magic.
So, system wide change might happen without it, but it won't involve the myriad voices
and perspectives that we need in order to build a platform that actually serves our
national digital needs.
So, let me say that again.
System wide change may happen, but it's going to privilege the loudest, most prominent voices
unless active facilitation of extended communities is part of this picture, and that brings me
to the second question, how does our national digital capacity relate to our business and
to our mission?
I don't ask this lightly.
As some of you know, my background is in sociology and American studies, and my research interests
have always tended towards the inception of new fields and the transformation of existing
fields, how do those processes happen, how do innovations come and have an impact, and
how do networks of people bring those from the fringes to the center of a field and are
there ways that we can actually use that set of techniques to our advantage.
I'm going to turn to a canonical example today, one that was researched in Harvard business
review more than half a century ago, but it's still extremely relevant today.
It's a piece called Marketing Myopia and it was by Theodore Levitt, and in it, he asked
why growth industries stop growing, and he challenged the notion that it's because a
market becomes saturated.
He says really simply that growth industries stop growing because the top players in the
industry forget or they mis-define their mission and their market.
As a poignant illustration of this, he points to the railroad industry and claims that the
railroad industry didn't lose its prominence in the field because of a decrease in the
need for passenger and freight transportation, those things actually grew.
Instead, it declined because the field became saturated with cars and transfer trailers
and you know all the other types of planes etcetera.
Instead it declined because the railroad industry stopped filling the need that was there.
They let others take away customers from them because they assumed that they were in the
railroad industry, not the transportation industry.
They defined their industry too narrowly, and if instead of believing their business
was railroad, they had recognized that their business was transportation, they would have
expanded to meet the customer demand that was clearly there.
So, what is our business?
What are we building national digital capacity for and who will it serve?
Libraries, archives and museums, is that what we're here to talk about?
Or users?
And which users?
Scholars?
The public?
Who?
Our panelists will begin today by talking about the need for better stakeholder investment
and coordination, better understanding of our goals not just at the institution level
but at the system level.
They will discuss and they will shed light on gaps at multiple sites and levels, so gaps
in function, where are the tools that are missing, what content types are lagging behind,
gaps between tools, so maybe we’ve got Big Curator and Archive Matica and Archive Space
but how do we actually link those together, how do we use those to build real work flows,
gaps between institutions, how do we build more networks, less silos, gaps between fields,
so how do we work with others in similar spaces, especially museums and archives, which I know
Seth will especially talk about.
They'll also talk about what opportunities arise when we work to fill those gaps.
So, let me now transition to introduce those panelists, mostly for the benefit of our extended
audience because I don’t think any of these people need any introduction in this room.
Clifford Lynch has led the coalition for network information since 1997 CNI.
Mike Furlough is the executive director of Haughty Trust, and he's also the author of
the Un Furlough blog, though I don't think he has enough time to work on that so much
anymore.
Seth Chan is the director of digital and emerging media at the Smithsonian Design Museum in
New York, and he's also the co-founder of Cyclical Defrost, which, if there are any
music fans out here, you should really check out his past music history, and he's also
a longtime blogger, and Karen Cariani is the director of WGBH Library and Archives at the
WGBH Educational Foundation.
So, join me now in welcoming these panelists and we are going to transition to Cliff and
we are going to go down the row.
>>Cliff Lynch: Okay, well, thank you.
It's a pleasure to be here, and I want to start with just a couple of words about how
I think about this whole question of national platform.
The term makes me, as some others, a little uneasy because it has overtones of centralization,
and really, what we're dealing with here is more of a program or a portfolio of services
and of organizations that deliver and support those services, I think, and the magic here
is how we make that portfolio reasonably comprehensive, and above all, coherent and cohesive to allow
these various services to compliment each other.
I think when you think about it like that, you recognize that there really is an enormous
wealth of services, some of them quite technical, some of them really operating at a higher
level, although they may imply technical infrastructure that need to be part of this world of managing,
preserving and providing access to all of the material that we're interested in, and
I'm just going to throw out, you know, four or five examples really quickly to get people
thinking about how diverse these services may be and some of the places we perhaps haven't
been thinking enough.
I do want to also note by way of framing that one of the other things we see is we've got
a lot of capabilities that are parked inside of institutions but that we don't reuse well
as a community because people can't find them or they're not setup to provide services to
others, so there's a great deal of replication that seems to happen, and I think part of
the strategy here is to build on expertise rather than attempt to replicate is all over
the place, because it's just too expensive.
So, here are just a few examples.
We clearly need a lot more management of names and identities of all kinds than we have today,
institutional identifiers, archival names, the sort of work that Dan Pity and his colleagues
are trying to bring forward with the snack project, names that cross between performing
arts, museums, libraries and the world of text.
That is an enormous collective enterprise which has been stove piped horrendously and
is now starting to converge, and we need to figure out how to collectively contribute
to that convergence.
There's a tremendous amount of orphan material that we're all trying to deal with, things
that are maybe in the public domain, maybe we can't find out who owns the rights.
We actually have some institutions with great expertise there, but we haven't somehow opened
up this process very effectively.
Related to that but actually going far beyond it, there are a number of things that lend
themselves to crowd sourcing, everything from proof reading of OCR to identifying photographs
and tracking down rights on things, we don't have a mechanism that's very good for talking
to the public broadly, for asking for help and saying if you take up challenges from
these particular places, this will contribute to the whole infrastructure and the collective
cultural material that's available.
Archiving on demand for small places, brokerage of where can I put things for preservation,
who helps to take care of things like this for institutions, who can't, very important.
Last one that I'll throw out, and this is, I think, really important, institutions have
banded together in the physical world, to some extent, to do disaster recovery.
When there is a flood or a fire, people come together and work on that, try and recover
precious materials that may have been damaged.
We need sort of an emergency response team for digital disasters, and digital disasters
come in many flavors, ranging from, you know, security problems, where you lose control
of content, to economic problems or just stupidity problems, where someone decides to shut down
a site because they're tired of it or can't afford it without looking into who's going
to take success or responsibility or might like to for the site.
The Internet archive has done some wonderful work in this area.
I'm thinking of, you know, the Geocity's problem, for example, and archive team's response to
that.
We need to do this on a national scale, and this is part of dealing with the digital world.
So, my point, particularly in mentioning that one, is that that is an organizational thing
as much as anything else, but it's vital to have these in our portfolio of services that
make up this national platform that we're speaking of.
I’m done.
>>Mike Furlough: So we need to fill the gaps of stupidity.
(Laughing.)
>>Mike Furlough: Response to stupidity, right.
So, I want to talk a little bit about restricted access to materials, materials that, for some
reason, may not be fully accessible to as many people as we might like.
At Audi Trust we do have a deep commitment to public good.
We've benefited from funding from IMLS for years, we’ve undertaken rights determinations.
We've opened about a quarter million volumes, found them to be in the public domain.
All very, very important work to do, but there are, we need to find more ways to lawfully
and productively work with materials that have restrictions of some sort.
This is stuff that we might not be able to redistribute beyond a particular user community
for various reasons, and there are a lot of challenges in addressing this in 5 minutes,
because there are a lot of different reasons why you might need to restrict access, and
there are a lot of technological, cultural, and policy issues at play here, so I’m just
going to try to highlight a few things.
Restricted access might have to do with copyright, one we're all fairly familiar with.
We know that the 20th century is increasingly harder to study because of the inability to
get access to cultural artifacts of the 20th century.
There are certainly exceptions to this in libraries that we can make, but we have to
know how to use them intelligibly.
We know that we live in a world of licensing now.
This is not likely to change.
Publishers are going to be continuing to aggregating significant amounts of content and making
it accessible to libraries further users for cost, not always the terms we would want.
There are also other reasons, gaps in knowledge, right?
So, in special collections, and I think Susan brought this up last year, we may have gift
agreements that do not clearly document the providence of a collection or what was intended
for the contributors of the collection.
It may be materials that are documenting the lives of living people, and which might need
some restrictions upon them, and that brings us to one more, which has to do with privacy
of sensitive materials, that we are increasingly seeing users in our universities generate
material that may have, may contain sensitive information that might be protected under
law or just simply for ethical reasons.
So, all the uses we want to make of this stuff or all the uses we would want to make of anything,
preservation for future use or simply reading and viewing, or access for populations with
special needs such as the users which have print disability or are visually impaired,
but there's also emerging needs, such as computational uses of material that we might label non-consumptive
and we can talk about that later.
There are, it's not the case that we can't work with this stuff now, we know how to do
it in some limited circumstances, libraries license electronic collections all the time,
we have authentication systems to grant access, we might only provide access in specific locations
or to specific IP ranges, but for material that we have in our collections or that we
are collecting ourselves or creating ourselves, we don't necessarily have good capacities
to manage that material, and not just manage it in the sense of store it and stick it away,
but make it useful to individuals.
So, there are technological solutions that are in the space that already are deployed
towards this, right, and identity management, authentication, encryption or emulation, but
this isn't really necessarily about creating new technologies so much as it might be about
scaling capacity to use them.
So, there are a few other issues I'll highlight here.
User experience issues, how do we make material accessible and useful in these kind of curtailed
environments and convey to our users meaningfully the terms in which they have to operate.
Expertise issues, knowledge of these issues in our library or among our users.
Consider in the humanities, for example, linguists who may wish to use audio and video recordings
for linguistic analysis, recordings that may actually have been conducted, recorded for
social science experiments under a very particular research protocol and were never envisioned
for reuse by other users down the path.
So, that brings us to one more.
Institutional policies.
Our institutions have to balance multiple legal regimes and risk analyses here.
It's not just copyright, but in higher education, you're talking about FRPA and in a lot of
cases you’re talking about HIPAA as well.
We have, in universities, a lot of experience in mitigating disclosure and risks for student
data or for other data that we collect for business purposes, or for research studies
with a very particular research protocol but we don't have a lot of experience thinking
about preservation and then reuse of that data, and at least our universities, I think,
don’t in that context, and then lastly, I'll just highlight one more issue, the need
to balance the protection of privacy for our patrons with the need to securely identify
a user with particular privileges.
Passing attributes through authentication mechanisms is something that is often necessary
to do, but it makes us uncomfortable if we're passing certain kinds of mechanisms and how
does that material get stored.
I think in libraries and archives and museums, we're often conflicted about the role of collecting
this personal information, and many of our conversations on this are limited by a lack
of nuance, and, so, I hope we can find further ways of doing it.
So, the last comment I'll make here, no question our digital infrastructure needs to be developed
and designed around principles of openness and linking and sharing.
Our advocacy has to be focused on broad access and on issues such as copyright reform, but
developing infrastructure for services using restricted content is not about building barriers,
it's not really about breaking them down so much as it is about making them permeable
for legitimate reasons.
So, to better support all users in this conversation, we have to think about impact, not simply
as how many eyeballs or how much stuff can we deliver, but how much or rather who or
what could be served that we're not meeting right now.
So, I’ll stop with that.
>>Sebastian Chan: I guess I'm coming from the museum space, and I'm coming from a museum
that's been closed for the last three and a half years.
We opened in December, and in that period, we had to think about what it would be like
to have a physical space whilst everything should be available digitally, and I think
it's important that digital platform doesn't ignore the physical resources that we have
in our communities, and we perhaps the need to reconfigure those resources, those, you
know, public library building to better work with the digital platform.
Some of the work in Australia that's been going on around that in the local government
space has been to merge the archive, the museum, the public library and the art gallery in
regional areas into a single building, where the library brings the regular audiences in
and the museum and the contemporary art space provides that content and those experiences
to library patrons, and it forms also a digitization hub in local communities, so that sort of
sense of having a physical presence for the national digital platform that's visible to
citizens is incredibly important, I think.
You know, I think some of the other stuff we've been doing at Copper Hewitt has been
looking at the ways we can build out the work we're doing on the web as a simple set of
tools for others to use and really trying to extract, manipulate and transform data
from, you know, proprietary systems so that it can play well with others, but, actually,
the biggest change we've done within the Copper Hewitt probably isn't this interactive pen
that you might have heard about in the press, but it's in fact the licensing and policy
shifts that have occurred beneath the surface.
That means that everything is on loan of from another museum or on show for Modana, is available
on our website forever as long as you visit the museum first, which speaks to my excitement
about the identity piece and that sense that the national digital platform also needs an
identity piece that needs to be thought about.
Some of the other work we've been doing has been about thinking about as the content that
designed the content that designed museums collect, as it moves away from physical stuff
into media and moving from media into services, how do we collect preserved media, how do
we collect preserved software.
We've done some initiatives releasing the source code on the assets of the collection
pieces we have into get hub for exposing the difficulties of preserving them to the communities
we are preserving them for, but we're also starting to think about, and I think the national
digital platform should think about 10 to 20 years out from now, about what it means
for libraries to collect and preserve services, what that actually means, we need to talk
more about, but I think, increasingly, we're not talking about texts as even solitary pieces
of media, but as systems that rely on many other moving parts to be experienced, and
we see some of this with emulation going on now, but we need to come up with collective
ways to address that challenge, and that's probably about it for now.
>>Karen Cariani: Okay.
Hi.
So, I'm just back from a week of hiking in the smoky mountains, where all I had to worry
about was putting one foot in front of the other and not fall down.
I kind of feel that way every day at WGBN in this digital landscape.
So, I'm going to start by laying the landscape, if you will, for audio/visual challenges that
hopefully will step us forward.
The analogue material is deteriorating quickly, particularly video tape, all analogue formats,
and some of it's 60 years old, some is only 10 years old.
When it does, it will no longer be able to be seen or heard, and there's significant
volume of this material that is our heritage for the last 60 years.
Since even the newer analogue video tape formats are no longer being created and equipment
is becoming scarce, the older content needs to be migrated to a digital file.
There is a gap in this migration and digitization.
It's not happening fast enough.
It's expensive, it's somewhat complicated, it needs expertise technicians to do the best
capture possible since it might be the only opportunity to capture it, and often, the
content holders don't even know what's on the tape until it's digitized because otherwise
they can’t see it.
Second, born digital media is even more volumous and complicated.
The formats are numerous.
The technical data to track it is complicated and the files can be really big.
It's hard to manage.
The technology to create media, the cameras, are moving faster than the technology to manage
and store it, at least that's what we're finding.
Cameras are created and used with new file formats, higher resolution, different file
organization and naming conventions with the big files processing time consuming.
It takes time to ingest a big file and move it from one storage space to another.
At GBH we figured out that for all the content we create in a year, it will take us a year
of processing time to ingest it, run the check suns, create proxies for viewing, and lay
down onto storage tape, and to do everything we have to do with it, and then you need to
migrate, you need to do all those things for media files for preservation and accessing,
and then you need to migrate, which is another year.
In the volume of files, even the small ones need better tools for adding descriptive data
that isn't so time consuming.
Descriptive metadata is one way to discover this content, but if it takes too long to
attach it to the files, it won't happen.
If you have to make a descriptive record for every single file that you create, it's just
too many, it won't happen.
We need tools for batch ingested mini files and folder structures and batch edit attachment
metadata to those large numbers of files.
Third, preservation issues.
With digital files, you need to migrate and check the file every time it’s moved to
make sure it's still good and it’s still viewable.
The cost of long term migration of digital is expensive, and it needs a high capacity
infrastructure.
Smaller institutions are not setup to manage this, and the tools and software out there
are mostly vendor based and it’s expensive to maintain, and evolve or keep up with the
new tools and formats.
I think smaller institutions tend to go with a vendor based solution because they think
everything will be taken care of for them, and the solution for long term digital preservation
really hasn't been tested yet.
We don't really know what it will take.
Many copies, constant checking files, always migrating, it's complicated.
Finally, digital media gives us better, more universal access.
You can see it on your computer, you don't need special equipment.
You can see it on your computer.
You don’t need special equipment like a video deck but the rights issues prevent us
from being able to allow universal access.
So, although we have something, and it may be well described, you have to physically
come to our facility to see it.
Working on being able to allow broad access for just viewing, regardless of the rights
involved would be fabulous.
Be It is a library and archive for scholarly access.
Really pushing the fair use rights for universal access.
Those rights are one barrier to sharing and why owners want control over their materials
as opposed to collaborating with others.
Public media stations, I think, are at the crossroads of the academic community and commercial
media.
I personally would love to see more collaboration across all public media in the space of open
source development of technology.
Public media technicians and engineers know the issues with managing media, but they don't
have the resources to build management technology.
We no longer have the bandwidth to really experiment in that area.
They need training.
We like to generally collaborate, and we have great connections into our public community,
and the public media knows the importance of preserving our history, we just need help
doing it, because it's not our foremost mission at the moment.
I'm hoping that the American Archive of Public Broadcasting can really help bridge that gap,
and be the conduit for that collaboration in this space, but collaboration means building
trust, and that's hard.
Convening, face to face meetings, communication is key, and that's time consuming and also
expensive.
Open source solutions like Hydra are very, very promising, but right now, it's still
complicated and tech heavy.
We're looking forward to the Hydra out of the box and I’m hoping that there's a really
good media solution with that.
Building a community solution is really promising.
Hosted services as collaborative projects are promising.
Collaborative long term storage would be fabulous for media.
It will take the larger institutions helping the smaller ones to really solve these issues.
Money for the smaller institutions to participate in that community is also important.
Breaking the work down so they can participate is important and giving them simple tools
to use that they can manage.
Simple tools, if you think it's simple, make it even simpler, because that's going to be
really important.
>>Katherine Skinner: All right, so, transitioning out, I want to go ahead and transition to
you guys and let your voices become part of the conversation.
And so, I will go ahead and open up questions.
>>Marley Kennedy: Hello.
I’m Marley Kennedy and I work at the New York Public Library.
I think this is such an important topic which gets the gaps and clearly there are many opportunities
for us and I expect for generations to come though will be continuing to be opportunities.
I’d like think about, because I know we’re thinking about, but I know many other people
are thinking about how we engage the community and the prioritization of these gaps and how
we think about how we collaboratively work with a community to meet the needs they’re
feeling right now.
My sense is we have to work at this from both sides, both a base of what tools do we have,
how do we work together to create a collaborative tech environment, but more importantly for
me is a difference that I’m going to be able to make in our communities lives today,
or at least within some reasonable amount of time so that they’re around to support
us when we have a really big investment to make and they have the patience to deal with
the kinds of conversations we’re having today which are critical, but no one other
than the people in these rooms may understand them, and so I’d like to put a call out
for us to figure out who are our target audiences, where are the target needs in the communities
that we work in.
How do we open up a conversation with a community in order to prioritize what we need to do,
so that together we’re actually focused on the goal of improving their lives.
>>Speaker: Thoughts from any of the panelists?
>>Cliff Lynch: A couple thoughts on that.
One is, this came up in the earlier discussions but this national platform, this portfolio
of services actually is actually for two audiences.
One is the memory organizations.
The other is the public, and actually, one of the things we really need to in the digital
world, I think, is to find a better way to have a conversation with the public, and in
particular to bring materials that are held by the public into the memory organization
in a collaborative kind of a way, and Brewster, I'm picking on Brewster today a lot, but he's
done so many wonderful things, gave a fabulous set of examples of how the Internet archive
has worked this with some of the music world, by bringing in materials and making them available
and collaborating with the bands and with the people who tape the bands.
We tend to focus a lot on the material that goes through commercial channels and how to
deal with that, partially because it's easy.
I mean, it's not easy to make the arrangements we need to make, but the material is fairly
well identified and, you know, moves into commercial channels, but so much of what's
happening is happening beyond those sort of narrow commercial boundaries and figuring
out how to have that conversation and how much of it should be local and how much of
it should be facilitated through some sort of a national service are just central problems
right now, but those things, if we can solve them, will make a real difference on the ground
to the public in a short period of time.
>>Sebastian Chan: I think one of the things is, you know, public libraries have a fabulous
public library network, and every public library branch should make visible digitization and
preservation.
It should make visible to local public library users what is actually going on.
>>Mike Furlough: I just wanted to echo what Cliff was saying there.
I think, what are the problems that your community has that actually don't look like library
problems might be another way of thinking about this.
I think last Friday the personal digital archive and conference was held in New York City.
This is a problem every one of us in this room has, right?
We don't, all of us, in spite of what our jobs may be, we're not necessarily good stewards
of our own material, our own life in digital form, and I do think there are roles that
libraries, public libraries, can play in helping communities with that, so I would just kind
of echo that and shout out to Brewster and the way of bringing in personal material into
the libraries, and actually the museum community too, not just an afterthought there, I think
there's a lot of very interesting work about community life that can be brought forward
in a museum context as well.
>>Cliff Lynch: Just to pick up on that a little more, I happened to be at the personal digital
archive meeting Friday and Saturday, and you heard mentioned in the welcome, this work
that's going on here on the DC punk scene and the way the library is trying to build
up a collection and document that, and there was an extended presentation on that there.
This is a, you know, perfect kind of model of the kind of interaction that a library
can have with a community to really do something significant and reach people.
>>Bradley Dagel: So, hello.
I'm Bradley from the University of Virginia, and I wanted to follow up and expand a little
bit on, I think, Mike's excellent points about restricted access and I think the question
a little bit around and start having us think about nuanced access rather than restricted
access, because there's a knee jerk response to the word restricted, and what we’re really
talking about is having a nuanced access so that the appropriate people have access in
the appropriate ways, and one of the main elements that I'm seeing as another use case
that's causing me a significant amount of heartburn is this culture of risk mitigation,
where you have organizations who are taking the physical media that are producing today
and tomorrow's art, creative, any kind of creative expression, and they are turning
to solutions of risk mitigation, such as grinding the computers down, rather than allowing them
to ever find their ways into archives, unless you're a very good personal steward, which,
again, admittedly, most are not, but that kind of data's not, so we need environments,
nuanced environments, where we can put terms where we don't even know if they're restricted
or not, or nuanced in any way, but we have to park them somewhere where they can be preserved
and they can be held in some kind of stewarded environment that when we do have the resources
to get to them, we can in the most appropriate way, but right now, we're lacking both the
policy and the methodology to do that across any of these ecosystem, so it's happening
a lot in isolation, but I think the collective loss is going to be much greater when these
disk images and things that are yet, you know, remaining in co-ed from haven't had the chance
to be made available.
>>Karen Cariani: So we've been looking really hard at the idea of a password protected access
for scholars, so if they find an item on our website that they are interested in, that
is digitized or not digitized, that they want access to, that we allow access to that singular
scholar for a given amount of time under a password, but copyright law doesn't exactly
allow us to do that, so our legal team is constantly looking at it, looking at it, looking
at it, and trying to figure out what we can and can't do and what the risk factors might
be.
The really interesting thing is, is that making a DVD of that video and sending it out to
the scholar is okay, but for some reason, streaming it online I guess potentially because
of the hacking ability, maybe, seems more risky.
I’m not sure why, but that’s a really good nut to crack, and I think if legal teams
voices could speak up about that, that would be really great.
>>Sebastian Chan: And also, just perhaps a heretical, somewhat heretical thought that
we may need as we bring in more content, particularly commercial content, from the people who need
to make a living from it, that we may need to run some services similar to YouTube that
provide payback to creators and artists in some monetary way for providing the access
while things are still in copyright and we need to come into terms.
I don't think the public necessarily differentiates between seeing a video, archival video streamed
on YouTube with ads vs one streamed from another site, they just want to get access to it,
and in fact, now, getting it from YouTube, we did a great exhibition on the, you know,
popular culture of the 1980's at the Powerhouse Museum where I was in Australia before I moved
to New York, and a huge amount of that work that the curators did on that exhibit they
did on that exhibit was with the community, but also was sourced from materials on YouTube,
because that's where the stuff was, that's where the community put it because that's
where they found it easy to put, and it's also potentially where there is some payback
to the rights holders.
>> Tom Scheinfeldt: Tom Scheinfeldt.
I, Karen, I appreciate your drawing our focus to issues of digitization, and I think audio/video
is a particular problem, but I think at the very smallest organizations, you know, even
two dimensional archival materials, getting those things digitized is still a huge problem.
You know, in working with local historical societies and stuff, I always come across,
we've got all this stuff, you know, we can't get it digitized, and the national and even
state and local funding organizations sort of made a joint decision in, you know, the
late 90's, early 2000's that, you know, we're not going to fund digitization anymore, we
are not going to fund mass digitization, and that was a, I think, a good decision for the
time.
The rationale was that this should become part of the operating budget of the institutions,
that this should be rolled into just the normal annual budget, the operating costs of the
institutions, and I think that was smart.
The problem is it hasn't happened, right?
So, we've been 10 years, and it's not true everywhere, but in a lot of institutions,
there is no operating budget for digitization, and we've been 10 years without grant funding
for it, expressly for it, I mean, and you can, I've done plenty of this, you can work
in digitization into your budget by other means, through funding for projects and things,
but I do think there's a gap there between just money for just that, you know, very boring
kind of rote work of kind of getting things digitized at all levels, up to a big audio/video
archive like WGBH, but down to the photography collections of the local historical societies,
so I'm wondering how a digital platform, and maybe it's not a technological solution, but
maybe it’s a social solution, how the national digital platform and the funding agencies
that support it can help with that gap between our kind of expectation that this will just
become part of the function of institutions and the reality that it, for a lot of institutions,
hasn't happened.
>>Kathrine Skinner: Tom and others on the panel, what role might transparency play in
that process?
One of the things that I wonder about as I'm hearing you talk, Tom, is how visible are
those libraries that are making it, or libraries, archives, and museums, that are making some
of these digital file functions part of their budget, and how much are we sharing that information
between institutions so that we can see ways of making this possible.
You know, is there room to study that, is there room for some transparency around that
that may help.
>>Cliff Lynch: Well, I think, actually, first off, I think you're basically right.
There was this assumption that it would be part of the standard operating budget and
then it never happened in many, many institutions, especially public ones.
There are a couple things that I want to mention.
One is there is a little help on the way, I think, in terms of things like the hidden
collections program that Clear is moving ahead with, which now is re orienting to include
digitization as well as description, and I think that's a significant step, and getting
more resources behind that would be desirable, but there's another thing that's starting
to happen, which is I've seen a number of institutions, notably Indiana University and
the New York Public Library, who are starting to do analyses of their digitization problem,
often with particular emphasis on material that is really imperiled, so there's both
an access and a preservation side to it, and trying to get a price tag on really dealing
with the problem.
Once you do that, I think you can fundraise for components of it, and it becomes sort
of a finite thing with a genuine deliverable, it's not just, you know, fundraise to our
operating budget, help support us, but if we can raise this much money, we can preserve
and make available this collection, and we can even attach to it a list of people who
paid to help make it available, and I'm not, I have not historically seen a lot of fundraising
for targeted digitization, but I think that we're starting to approach an inflection point
there perhaps.
>>Kathrine Skinner: Can I point to one relevant example of that, which is happening right
now in digital news, which is that the University of North Texas has just partnered with NBC
5, their local affiliate, and they've brought in not only collection, they're kind of pioneering
on a couple different levels, they're making sure the donation agreement actually gives
access rights embedded in that areement, and they're planning on making those agreements
public so others can hopefully model after it, but the other really important thing that
they're doing there is they are engaging in fundraising, and the news channel is actually
helping them do that, and it's been a really important example that's just come up in the
last couple of months, and it’s worth everybody paying a little bit of attention to.
They've already raised enough money to digitize a tremendous amount of the content that they
are acquiring from this NBC universal affiliate, you know, KNX5 I think is what it’s called.
>>Mike Furlough: This will not be a particularly original idea, but I think, thinking for a
second about the DPLA hubs model, right, the model of aggregation of content or metadata
at least within a particular geographic space that then feeds back up into DPLA, it strikes
me that those libraries that have had capacity and have invested in the ability to digitize
collections have done it primarily for the benefit of their collections, and there has
not been a move beyond what I think Internet Archive attempted to do in the last decade,
to really kind of create what I would think of as more of regional scanning facilities
or cooperatively owned scanning facilities, and that's going to be so critical when it
comes to the issues of audio/video, right, and I think I might in fact be wrong, since
someone’s waving at me over here.
>> SPEAKER: Could I give a very quick shout out to the great State or the Commonwealth
of Massachusetts, which has the digital commonwealth, which has digitizing facilities, both a Brewster
lab, as it was called in the day, to digitize books, and the fancy lab, which would digitize
all types of materials, and they began trying to digitize for any institution in the state,
they got funding to do that.
They said you can send us up to 5,000 objects and we'll do it for you for free.
Then they figured out that nobody knew how to create the metadata to get their stuff
ready, so they started using mobs of students from Simmons from the guest list school there,
which they called metadata mobs, that would drive out to the Calvin Coolidge archive,
sit down, crack out a spreadsheet and say this is how you start creating meta data.
They didn't do it for them, they didn't train them in a classroom, they sort of showed them,
and that worked, and they were so successful that several of the small institutions that
used to hate the massive Boston Public Library that soaked up all of those state resources,
which was how those little institutions viewed those big institutions back in the day.
They became believers, and they started talking to their legislators and saying we love this
place, please support this project, so they now have a separate funding line in the state
budget that has nothing to do with state funding for libraries but is specifically to support
that kind of state wide digitization.
Now, maybe it works because it's a small geographic area and, you know, you have a public library
with a public mission that is also a research library, so it made sense for them to have
these digitization facilities.
I'm just saying this is something that we're also very interested in and, you know, want
to hear more about.
Thanks.
>>Dianica Marthra: They need to do media.
They need to be able to service media digitization too.
So, I think I have the microphone now.
I’m Dianica Martha from Ithica SNR and I'm responding to Tom's comment because it is
an important issue for me.
We expect so much of our funding agencies, and they can do a lot, have done a lot, but
it's also up to us as leaders of organizations to transform them and not just keep adding
on activities, but thinking a little bit about what do our users actually need, so what should
be our priorities now.
If digitization of our collections is a huge priority for our communities or user groups,
we should be finding ways to make that a priority for our operations and not think that we'll
always have to go find new money.
We have to rethink the way we do our jobs.
My plea.
>>Jack Martin: This is Jack Martin, Director of the Providence Public Library, and I had
a response to Tom too, because as he was talking, and all these conversations about funding
for digitization, funding to make all these service visible.
If you think about how much money public libraries spend every year supporting the publishing
cycle, I mean, if we took, like, one quarter of that money and put it towards something
like this, I mean, we could easily jump start something off the ground, but I personally
feel that public libraries spend so much time, and not just buying books, but, like, moving
books through the system and moving books around, that we don't have the bandwidth to
do anything else, so we have to figure that out.
>>Brett Bobley: Hi.
This is Brett Bobley from the NEH.
First of all, if anyone needs money for digitization, just meet me near the coffee table after this,
and I'll cut you a check.
I wanted to note, actually, Cliff, I liked your recasting of the national digital platform
as the national digital portfolio, and I'm happy, if we want to rename it, I can start
saying national digital portfolio.
I wanted to talk about gaps for a minute, because that's, I think that's really important.
You know, it's interesting how a lot of people have pointed out that they're really excited
about this new Hydra in a box project that’s happening.
It seems the example where everyone knew there was this gap there, and now it looks like
some key players are working together to try to fill that gap, and it seems to me that,
you know, today on this panel, you guys have surfaced a number of gap areas that we could
work on, but it would be really cool, and maybe it’s just because I am a funder and
I think this way, but it would be really cool if we could have a convening, maybe led by
CNI or DLF or something to actually create like a hit list, like here are the top 10
things that the national digital portfolio needs to work on, here are the top 10 gaps,
so that way, we can kind of spark everyone's imagination.
We can get teams of people working on those, and the funders can get together and say,
you know what, we're really interested in making grants that attack one of these top
10 priorities that the community as a whole has worked together to identify, but in a
more specific way, like we actually can say, oh, this is worth looking at item number 7,
let's see how we can attack that.
That would be an interesting next step, I think.
>>Kathrine Skinner: There are a lot of models in kind of the social realm right now, in
sociology, business, economics, especially on the kind of social goods side, that describe
things that are very similar to that, that basically take an arc approach to, you know,
establishing a direction for the field and really, you know, figuring out how to use
tools and facilitation to drive some decisions at the field level and then create ways of
measuring progress towards those goals on the part of all of the different people that
are involved in the system, and then the funders are able to use that as part of their roadmap
for funding.
I think that's a really encouraging picture that you're painting for us right now.
>>Todd Carpenter: Todd Carpenter with the National Information Standards Organization.
So many great ideas and thoughts coming out of this panel, I have trouble focusing on
just one, but I will take it chronologically and go back to, Katherine, your point at the
start of this.
As someone who grew up in Rochester, New York was Kodak was based, a company that forgot
the business that it's involved in, what is the key business that libraries and archives
and museums are involved in?
What is the problem space that we're trying to solve here?
Is it discovery?
Is it delivery of content?
Is it preservation?
And understanding what the core mission is will help address some of the needs and what
the implications of this platform will have to be.
>>Kathrine Skinner: Absolutely.
Any ideas on the panel?
>>Mike Furlough: I tend to think of the role of the library, the ones that I've worked
in, to facilitate the creation of new knowledge.
I think to me, that was the business that I was in and the work that I was doing to
develop services, to fund digitization, to create meta data, etc., etc., was all in the
aim of helping users do something with that stuff and create something new out of it.
So, for me, that does not help necessarily bring back to some very specific issues, right,
but I do think that's the core business and that’s probably one reason why IMLS is not
talking strictly about national digital platform, but also talking about STEM, talking about
other issue around the country.
>>Cliff Lynch: Yeah, I think I that’s basically right, although I’d broaden it a little
bit.
It’s really about the stewardship of culture and knowledge, both access to historical and
current, you know, culture and knowledge and the facilitation of creating new things in
those areas, and I think it's very important to recognize that it spans, you know, a very
substantial range of human activity when you look at archives, museums and libraries.
I think there has been a bit of a tendency, particularly in the library world, to view
it as something that is largely symbiotic with publishing, and in fact, you know, the
mission is quite a bit broader, and we're seeing, you know, some serious rethinking
of that now in various settings as, for example, research libraries in academia recognize that
they're going to end up playing a significant role in the stewardship of research data,
just as an example, or as we start looking at all of the largely noncommercial material
that still represents a very significant expression of culture and the fact that a great deal
of that is, you know, in danger of becoming highly in ephemeral.
>>Kathrine Skinner: Any other thoughts?
>>Michael: Again, Michael from a bunch of places.
I've been listening this morning and watching online and watching Twitter, and I'm remembering
something that Nick Pool said, he’s the CEO of the Collections Trust in the UK, and
back when the UK had a lot of lottery money, they did a lot of digitization, and they got
done with it and then the economy fell apart, and the UK has had terrible budget cuts to
the cultural sector, 30 percent cut to the museum budgets, horrible, horrible, horrible,
and Nick observed, and Nick is one of the biggest proponents of digitization that I've
met, and he observed that we spent 285 million pounds digitizing, but we didn't create any
value for the public, and when the apocalypse came, the public, not surprisingly, wasn't
there to back us up, and I'm also thinking about, so that's a public driven change model
there.
Another aspect of it is, I'm aware of a big institution in the northern hemisphere that
has a very ambitious digitization program, over a million dollars to digitize a big collection,
but they can't convince their own staff that it's worth working on.
They can't get the registrars, they can't get the art handlers, they can't get the kind
of rank and file staff to believe that it's worth improvising or changing, or kind of
coming in, in the morning, and solving those problems, and that's another kind of user
who has to believe in this ultimately, and I'm also thinking about something that Brewster
told me once, and I proposed a drinking game online, that every time mentored mentions
Brewster, we should take a shot, and the consensus is we can't possibly keep up with that.
I'd like to try, but Brewster said, kind of as a bottom line, and I repeat this in almost
every talk I give, that without users, our shelves are empty at the open library, and
that's, you know, that's kind of the litmus test, that when I see organizations and platforms
and movements that survive all of the horrible ambiguities it takes to bootstrap something,
it's the one that have that eye level relationship with their real users every day, and who kind
of live or die by that, that are going to weather the inevitable storms that come with
trying to start something new.
I can probably turn that into a question, but I probably shouldn't.
>>Kathrine Skinner: It's a really helpful comment, and, you know, just bridging it back
to the conversation that we've been having here, it really does come back to what is
the mission and how are users factored into that mission and who's missing from the conversation,
and even looking around this room today, you know, there are groups that are missing today,
and one of those groups is significantly the user community, and I don't know how to mend
that, I don't know how you bring in, you know, the public figures to speak to what they want
from libraries, archives and museums, but I will at least remark that it is a bit problematic
that we're all coming into this environment without that group kind of front and center
in our conversation.
>>Sebastian Chan: Yeah, I think it's only possible at the local level.
I think it's most effective at the local level, and I would suggest that perhaps we need to
think about balancing digitization of the collections we have with the efforts to collect
the digital born materials and services that we should have from the present, because we
will never get a chance to get those back in the future, and those aren't necessarily
covered by copyright, or just copyright, but by license agreements and complex system structures
that are not easy to replicate.
So, I would caution against doing, spending all the money and resources on digitizing
the past and forgetting that the present is probably more relevant to our existing users
right now.
>>Kathrine Skinner: Well, in coming back to the gaps in the national capacity, I wonder
again where Karen was going with all of her remarks, a lot of her remarks around digital
preservation, and so that responsibility level of having the capacity to handle what we're
digitizing or to handle what we're bringing in in a born digital fashion as well.
Sorry, Cliff.
I didn’t mean to cut you off.
>>Cliff Lynch: I was really just going to underscore what Sebastian was saying.
I think we need to be careful with our language here, because we tend to talk about digitization,
and that puts a very large focus on what's essentially retrospective digitization of
existing collections.
Now, there are some cases where those collections have, you know, major physical problems, and
dealing with that basically is going to be a driver for digitization in the very short
term, but I think that, you know, what we're seeing and what we really need to deal with
now is as much a challenge of born digital material coming at us from every angle as
just looking at these, you know, massive physical collections, some of which are, you know,
okay and can probably stay as physical collections just in terms of, you know, priorities for
limed resources.
>> SPEAKER: I know I'm standing between you and lunch, but as we look at the gaps, I think
it's important, and Maura made me think of this as well, I think we need an inventory
of what's going on at the local level.
I mean, I'm in Connecticut at Connecticut State Library.
We have a lot of things going on, we're taking in user content, we're experimenting and all
these things.
State by state, and as I represent the chief officers, I think that's something that the
state librarians could help with, whether it's with our historical societies or local
museums.
You know, here's been a lot of talk about, you know, how we can help these folks.
There's a lot going on, and I think we need to get a better understanding of what is going
on and what's holding those projects back or where is there more synergy and how can
we created and how do we do that, but until we really have a good inventory of what's
going on out there, I think we're going to be, you know, not addressing the issue quite
the way we could.
>>Mike Furlough: That goes back to an earlier comment, I think in the last panel, about
scanning the perimeter, right, and in identifying gaps, it's very likely there are gaps that
folks are trying to meet that are not yet full blown central or core solutions.
I think that's an excellent point.
>>Karathin Mulsen: Sorry.
Karathin Mulsen again, AV Preserve.
I agree with a lot of what's being said about the need to focus on born digital, but also,
the digitization point is really important, especially what Karen brought up, and I want
to reiterate, I don't think everybody is taking this seriously, that magnetic media is disappearing
very rapidly, and those projects that were mentioned about, you know, from New York Public
Library, Indiana University, those were AV focused projects, because they recognized
the risks, they took stock of what they had and they’ve made plans to move forward.
Experts agreed a couple years ago that we had about 2 years, or 2 years ago, that we
had about 15 years left before it was really scalable to digitize magnetic media, so let's
call that 13 years left, okay?
So, we don't have a lot of time.
Getting all that done is not going to happen overnight.
We really, really need awareness of this.
We need to stop digitizing paper right now.
We need to focus on magnetic media, because we don't have that much time.
So, I just want to bang that drum a little bit louder.
I want to support what Karen was just saying.
I also want to point out that, you know, from the national platform point and how do we
connect globally, in Europe, they took this on about 10 years ago under the Presto Projects,
they, you know, they funded at an EU level and at national levels the digitization of
their AV media, and they're still doing it, but, you know, they're much, much farther
along than we are.
We're not Europe, we do things a little bit more, you know, differently, but the creation
of Europeana was one of the major catalysts for that effort.
They said, well, we really need to get our stuff in Europeana, and Europeana pushed audio/visual
with some of the other sub projects under it such as EU Screen, and they really got
that going.
I don't see that happening in this country.
I don't know if there's an awareness at the national level, but we will experience major
loss if we don't do something, and, so, I'd like to suggest to the funders that if you're
going to fund digitization, fund the things that are really disappearing, that cannot
be viewed with your eyeballs.
Okay, so, you need machines to view these things, you need machines to play them back,
you need experts to do this kind of work.
We don't have that much time.
There was recently a blog post about an OCLC meeting I think, I might be misrepresenting
this, but there was a little summary that said AV is a problem, but researchers don't
have that much of an interest in AV, and it was kind of shocking, because most of the
Internet is video these days, so don't, you know, it's kind of ludicrous to say that there's
not a strong interest in video.
You know, what's being produced and put out there by users is video, so there's obviously
a strong interest in video.
The problem we have is it's locked away on obsolete media in stoarge, nobody even knows
what they have, so if we don't do something about it, it's going to be gone.
So, we either accept the loss or we do something.
>>Kathrine Skinner: I think we have time for one more question or one more comment.
>>SPEAKER: Mike, thank you very much for bringing up the copyright issue and restricted access
to things.
I love that it's also during the distributed national capacity for a reason.
We've tried some things quite centrally.
The Google books project, ended up with a bunch of lawsuits and stopped.
It proposed what was essentially an extended collective license, a new organization that
would own and control the orphans.
Tomorrow, Maria Palenty will be speaking on the orphans at a Congressional hearing, and
thankfully, actually, I read her statement, it didn't look like she was really trying
to propose an extended collective license going forward.
It comes around timing around laws and how it affects our library field.
We have not fielded well in the area of law changes, and I think that we want to go forward
with radical distributed capacity.
I talk to many that are doing private distribution of digitized works within their campuses or
whatever.
They just say, well, we're just doing it and it's working, don't tell anybody.
That's happening a lot.
I suggest we encourage and keep that moving forward, that we don't go and depend on the
national platform for solving this for us, because I think we'll get it wrong if we do
that.
If we consolidate particularly the law and policy things on a couple Haughty Trust looking
like things, we will end up with the wrong solutions.
So, I'm suggesting we not do a section 108 committee anytime soon.
I suggest that we have radically decentralized approaches to the copyright issues, and by
the time this stuff comes around, there's best practices that have evolved.
Laws are best made in retrospect of practice as opposed to in hypotheticals, and if anybody
would be interested in radical decentralized approaches to this and help along those lines,
I'm always game.
>>Kathrine Skinner: Great.
>>Mike Furlough: Can I make one comment real quick?
I think that's an excellent point.
I think there's some things you can do, let's talk about risk management, or willingness
to take risk that you can do in a local context, the more you aggregate up the issue, the problem,
right, the less likely some folks are willing to take those risks, right, because the risk
becomes larger and you become a bigger target, so there is something to be said about that.
On the other hand, I will also say, there's also something to be said for taking big risks
in a very large way and at least making some motion forward, if not in the written law,
perhaps at least in the courts.
>>Kathrine Skinner: Great.
So, on that note, we will disband and go to lunch.
Please join me in thanking the panelists.