Session 4 (access)

Symposium Chat - Session 4: Access, Saturday 10.45- 12.30pm

Proposals

• Westbrook
• Schmitz
• Matienzo
• Kirschenbaum
• Shaw
• Farr

Notes on meeting:

Shaw – This is a huge topic. Experience with the IT audit at Duke. The auditors determined that the IT security was insufficient, due to ease and speed of dissemination.  Question: How do you encode restrictions? One has the PREMIS rights elements, but are they more regarding copyright / rights management rather than restrictions.  Additional question – how do you provide access to restricted materials to certain researchers / patrons.  Some potential donors have legitimate concerns about privacy, so how to restrict for 75 years (for example), and how to manage restrictions? Is it enough to have a local access copy with a locked-down terminal, or is that not

Wilson – asked who are looking at single stations onsite (about 8 people are looking at the locked-down model)

Daigle – UVA has motion media that cannot be disseminated

Watterworth-Batt-- looking at  virtual machine environment where material can be accessed in a controlled environment

Shaw – Duke is also looking at that solution

Daigle – Users with LDAP access can get access but others without access have to visit onsite.

Farr – for Rushdie at MARBL looking at tiered access so that some materials are accessible remotely.

Ferrante – discrepancy between reference staff’s concern about born-digital material, but not about digitized material.

Shaw – a lot of discussion about Duke about making copies (cameras in the reading room), vs. the institution putting materials online for free access.

Daigle – two issues – copyright law section 108 for Fair Use easily covers copying by researchers but it is not as easily covered for born-digital material; and long-term management issues.

Hobbs – Interested in what people are asking their donors for

Daigle – asking for copyright

Shaw – asking for license.   Creative commons, non-commercial, no-derivatve (exception for preservation copies) request over the long-term.

Wilson – each negotiation is different with each donor.

Shaw – need to have a standard agreement, with flexibility

Westbrook – agreements boil down to open; or closed for a finite period of time.

Shaw – question of open to who? Sometimes the access has to hinge on the permission of the donor

Wilson – in the UK if you grant access, you grant access to everybody.  Example – MPs papers can’t be closed to one biographer.

Laudeman – we have durable power of attorney where the institution can make the access decisions

Schmitz – interesting to see the various types of institutions deal with access and rights issues.

Daigle – If you’re not providing access to the content of the materials, can you provide the metadata to that content?

McKay – We cannot at Michigan

Shaw – can provide very basic abstract information and extent.

Watterworth-Batt-- if you have a restriction on access, you have to provide a justification of it (as per DACS). UConn has a best practice where they feel obligated to make it clear to the researcher.

Westbrook – we make the metadata publicly available, if the content is not (pictoral).

Shaw – question of student’s dissertation papers – accessibility vs. promiscuous accessibility. Uses  the same Creative commons license with an embargo for a certain amount of time, if desired.

Kirschenbaum – Publishers will consider an electronic dissertation to be the first publication and could be a detriment to the graduate student. Farr said it’s the same with the Rushdie papers, where Rushdie’s memoirs were restricted while he’s still working on it. Other examples with a Duke donor photographer, who doesn’t want his raw or “bad” photographs open to the general public.

Catherine H. – how are people searching for personal identification?

Shaw – there are tools, such as “findssn” that can scan for PII’s.  But the discussion should begin with the donor during the interview, to ask if there is personal credit card numbers or other information that should be redacted or just to look for. Other argument is the disk image which includes private information like financial (Quicken) information.

O’Meara – appraisal of disk imaging is an interesting, but Matienzo we need a type of tool because the issue is scalability. 

McKay – better and more practical to do it at the point of request, although it means the archives and reference staff don’t have the skills to do the imaging and determination of private material at the point of request. Has to go back to the digital archivist.

Matienzo – at Yale, made the proposition that a skilled paraprofessional could be fulfilling these requests, to take the burden off of the professional staff, but there is a lack of trust.

Thomas – at the Bodleian, we have a lot of work to do. In speaking with researchers, by and large the user studies are not that helpful yet

Kirschenbaum. – When you find something that you find useful, as a researcher, there are questions about how you cite born-digital material. And with more digital journals, can there be crosswalks between publicly-accessible born-digital collections that link to the digital journal article about the collection? 

Schmidt – for Rorty, about half of the users are archivists or librarians, but have anecdotal information about use of the files.  They’ve used full-text searchability and find that very useful.  Mining the digital data is extremely useful. 

Farr – some derived pdfs are pretty crappy – are users satisfied with the pdfs at Rorty? Rushdie used every conceivable software program for word processing?  Every collection is going to have some quirk.

Schmitz – were lucky in that the formats are very simple and consistent.

Matienzo – until you’re faced with the body of work and see the unintended consequences of migration, it’s difficult to anticipate these problems.

Thomas – Planets has  (should have) a testbed

Forstrom – anyone using Plato, (Wilson) planning tools that migrate various formats in a testbed with a suite of 3^rd party tools to find the best tool for dealing with the formats. The current version is buggy, and no one has implemented it yet.

Chan – right now there is a very limited amount of formats that you can try.

Wilson – encouraging sharing of plans – so that every institution isn’t reinventing the wheel. It starts with a mindmap where you put in all your criteria, wish to

Daigle – tangible next step for the group --adding  obsolete digital formats to the testbed and sharing experiences (successes and failures) to Plato.

Matienzo – problem of varieties within formats in a baffling number of ways.  Difficulties of first scanning for varieties of macros for example. Is uncomfortable declaring that they will accept certain types of formats. We can inform the creators but there is still an element of how the creators use and manipulate those formats.  Need to be flexible, emulation is not sufficient either.  But relatedly, what are users expecting?  Are we turning over original files, environments, and how do we assess who these research communities are?  Researchers in his experience are not sophisticated enough, but at the Beinecke are more sophisticated.

Shaw – initially, researchers want the quickest access to the content, even if it’s not the most complex

Farr – early feedback at Emory. “Rushdie is our Cadillac.” Not every collection is going to be getting the same treatment. Different tiers of presentation.  Also, the feedback with Rushdie is they like to start with the emulation first and then go to the searchable database.

Kirschenbaum – we seem to be dependent on whatever emulators are available; there’s no permeability between different virtual environments. Emulators seem like an underripe technology.

Broderick – is anyone involved with researcher training?  Worry is that the researchers aren’t equipped to use the workstation.

Farr – one particular researcher couldn’t wrap his head around the concept of an emulated environment. Another had never worked with a Mac and was so frustrated he went back to paper.

Catherine S-P – refer the person to a researcher-for-hire

Redwine – worked with five different researchers. Just because they’re not comfortable with technology doesn’t mean they don’t dream big. There has to be a balance – building tools for all levels of researchers, but how.

Shaw – at what point to we meet the researcher?  There has to be a willingness to spend time exploring the materials.

Hobbs – the trajectory is for more savvy donors and more savvy researchers, so the work is more important to have on the appraisal end. 

Farr – to researchers – this is just another methodology, like paleography.

Redwine – this is an opportunity to build interest and research, so it is worth extra time to teach the researcher.

Wilson – investment in training is worth it but the lack of case studies is problematic for now.

Kirschenbaum – once the scholarship comes out with breakout literature about use of digital collections, the floodgates will open and people will really start to take advantage of digital collections. Same pattern as in the field of science, and the need is to widen the field of access.

Watterworth-Batt – if you have a writer who is composing in various places (blog, twitter, email), that’s the kind of context that needs to be captured as best we can.  Crucial to have the interview with the donor.

Shaw – that’s because part of the context is the provenance.  Donor example has two blogs, two facebook accounts, and two twitter feeds. Archivist has to have several solutions but base arrangement by the platforms on which it’s based.  Attempt to use EAD finding aid to describe how these different platforms differ from each other.

McKay – sometimes the donor’s information during the interview is not correct – you have to take it for what it’s worth.

Schmitz – there’s a precedent in archival theory about defining series by format (blog different from other formats) and to let the researcher do the work to make the connections.

Matienzo – there’s a tyranny of archival description that tries to shoehorn records into a prescribed form.  Hierarchical arrangement starts to fall apart. We can identify a primary arrangement, but digital materials don’t fit well

Catherine – can create lateral arrangements within a collection, doesn’t necessarily have to be hierarchical.

Chan – tagging and labeling is a way to create lateral arrangements.

McKay – FTK is an essential functionality for researchers and archivists to arrange

Melissa – Scholars are taking her XML files to create different arrangements

Daigle – researchers are taking XML files and using them for data mining. They get a data dump from various repositories to data mining and then do analysis on the content.  We’re the facilitators of the data, and pushing the access threshold.

Matienzo/Gueguen/Chan – depending on who the scholar is, we can really work on reaching out to the creative scholar and encourage use of the metadata for different uses. In terms of email and other large data sets, it is necessary to talk to scholars. It’s hard, though to have the time to come to this balance. How does one get the institutional buy-in to allow them to get the time to devote to this kind of work?

Laudeman – the SOLR / blacklight/ fedora people are interested in file-level granularity, so groups in the UVA scholar’s lab can go through and harvest huge quantities of stuff.  Wait for mashups to occur. An example is Google Maps, which was open to all and proliferated in the business and other communities.

Broderick – don’t have the same community as those in academia.

Matienzo – depending on your institutional context, how is the work of the archivist viewed? If we want to engage with researchers, there needs to be a valuation in that set of skills required by the institution.

Gueguen – at ECU there was a faculty member who was interested but she didn’t have time to help. Interested in how UVA / Harvard got a community started

Kirschenbaum – organization called CenterNet, a consortium of 200 digital humanities centers. They do outreach, have a listserv.  It’s a good place to start.  What is worrisome is the extent to which scholars will and won’t be able to do is driven by the idiosyncracies of the institutional environment.

Hinderliter – small institutions that can’t handle these collections might be making themselves irrelevant

Schmitz – consortia and partnerships are possible solutions for those who haven’t the right amount of infrastructure.

Laudeman – how to bring the smaller institutions on board?

Daigle – it’s not a technical but an administrative question.  Feelings of ownership / relationships between large and small institutions is a question of trust.