Peter Brantley, director of the Digital Library Federation, posts at his personal blog, shimenawa, but recently has begun posting at O'Reilly Radar. Today he posted, "Moving Images: Digitization for Access," which I found quite interesting. The group he describes, Lot 49, challenges many current practices in archive and preservation culture, some very, very old, some very new. That Lot 49 could actually proactively change these practices to achieve a public good seems a long shot, but one never knows unless one tries.
The group "accept[s] as a key principle that access is key to the survival of archives, and digitization the best enabler of access." Brantley goes on to summarize seven other principles that will guide Lot 49's efforts:
1. Public access online to publicly owned resources will remain free.
2. Partnerships shall support the joint goals of increased access and enhanced preservation of archival materials.
3. Our partnerships will be non-exclusive.
4. Our partners will provide our organizations -- without charge -- a complete set of the digital copies produced by the partnership, and the metadata required to make use of them.
5. Ultimately, our organizations will hold unrestricted ownership of these digital copies and metadata.
6. Our partnerships will balance the interests of the public with the financial investment of our partners.
7. We seek to protect and enhance our organizations' interests, while respecting the interests of our users, our community, and our partners.
The post goes on to identify other priorities as getting a better handle on what stores of moving images archives and libraries possess, and taking a more aggressive position to protect the public interest in these materials in negotiations with commercial partners, which reflects very closely Brantley's and others' criticisms of the Google Library partners' (UT included) efforts in this regard.
There is a brief reference to the legal limitations on such a project:
"... it is our hope that we can find ways to maximize access to moving image collections to the greatest extent that the law and our means permit."
Clearly, these legal limits are not insignificant, especially given the overall key principle that providing access is the best way to preserve. So I wonder what the group thinks it will be able to do with the undoubtedly huge number of moving images for which permission will never be able to be obtained, either because the owner will decide that maybe there's money to be made on the movie and so will want to limit access, or because no owner can be identified (orphan works issues). Even identifying what is in the public domain will be a monumental task. I would be very encouraged to hear that among the cultural practices that the group hopes to change is the oftentimes extreme cautiousness of conservative institutions in the face of ambiguities like those presented by orphan works. I note that the orphan works legislation so optimistically hearalded last session wasn't even introduced this session and with an election next year, it probably won't be introduced then either. It could be another decade before enlightened self-interest finally brings content owners around on the importance of freeing this kind of content from its near-century of forced obscurity. In the meantime, more courage on the part of archives and libraries to provide access to identified orphans works, regardless of medium, would be welcomed.
