Long Road

Sarah Kansa has a short article posted at the iCommons site. She makes several compelling points about the necessity of defining and planning for the desired preservation of content in “perpetuity.” She shows (as others have) that the digital format is less stable in many ways than paper, but that doesn’t mean we should forgo digital collections. She argues that:

Digital content that carries clear and transferable metadata that allow for its use and reuse will stand a far better chance of being copied, converted to new formats and media and saved into perpetuity.

Absolutely. Issues of standards like those suggested by the Open Archives Initiative folks help pave the way for international standards that help address interoperability and sustainability.

Further down she goes on to suggest that:

Clear information about how content can be used increases its impact and also assures that authorship is archived along with original content. This is important for encouraging scholars, who are often the custodians of cultural heritage content, to participate in openness.

I left a longish comment over at the iCommons site, but I’ll reproduce it here:

I agree that one important step with any of these types of projects is clearly addressing how and if content can be “shared”. Creative Commons licenses help with this in some cases. I wonder, though, with the focus on “scholars” as the custodians, if we aren’t leaving out another group–that is the indigenous custodians of the materials. Certainly it’s legally the case that much cultural heritage is in the control of scholars, museums etc., but I wonder if there is a way to reach out and extend the reach of the notion of custodianship here? Certainly it would, most likely, then force scholars to grapple with the bounds and reach of “openness” in other contexts and stemming from multiple types of histories (of the objects and data as well as the collectors). I am involved with two projects (one in Australia and one in the US) looking at how to involve both Indigenous communities as well as scholars who have collected and deposited collections at various institutions. The goal is to decide the parameters for the “sharing” of this content (as well as the metadata) in dialogue with the Indigenous communities–recognizing that there is no one size fits all notion of “openness” that might translate. A similar project is underway at the UBC Museum of Anthropology. The technology involved with Open Context seems a great resource and model for cultural heritage, but does Open Context grapple with any of these issues of authorship and openness in relation to communities other than “scholars”?

Is there a way, in other words, for us to unpack this default to “openness” and use the technological tools at hand to provide an alternative view of “custodianship” and “authorship” so that we can allow for other systems of content management and information circulation? I obviously think that this is the work ahead in terms of bridging the progressive work of Creative Commons and others with the progressive work of those looking to examine Indigenous claims to cultural materials. This isn’t an all-or-nothing proposition.