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Bytes, Copyright, and Info-Survival
The
accelerating transfer of information from paper to computer files
may be a boon to academia, but it is creating questions about who
owns what data. Then there's the issue of making sure none of it
gets lost in the ether.
by
Bruce Fellman
February 2001
Just
about every year since he started teaching at Yale in the 1940s, Vincent Scully would dutifully trek to the slide library
to pick out the images he intended to discuss during the lectures
for his introductory art history course. And when his students needed
a closer look at the artwork, they would dutifully trek to Street
Hall, where copies of the images were tacked up on what was not
so affectionately called the "Wailing Wall." So heavy was the traffic
that on the nights before examinations the campus police would occasionally
catch desperate undergraduates breaking into the building for a
final peek.
That unloved ritual
is no more. Thanks to computers, a high-speed data-transmission network, and all
the other hardware and software that make up the foundation of Yale's information-processing
system, Scully's images are only a click away. Anyone with a campus network connection
can visit the course Web site, at http://classes.yale.edu/hsar112a/.
The transformation
of a vintage art history course is only one example of the ways computers are
altering the academic landscape at Yale. Many other entries in the Blue Book also
have a presence on the World Wide Web, and almost all of them have one thing in
common: a database of digital information that can be accessed, retrieved, and
used in a variety of ways. A database can encompass the works of Shakespeare, every issue of a scientific journal, the entire corpus of knowledge about the
human genome, the catalogue raisonne of the late photographer Robert Mapplethorpe,
or any collection of material that can be rendered into bits and bytes and then
posted on an Internet site or burned onto a CD.
At Yale, as elsewhere,
there is a rush to create innovative educational opportunities in electronic form.
But according to Ann Okerson, associate University librarian, the process is fraught
with unexpected perils. "We're all trying to invent the future," says Okerson,
an expert on the
impact of electronic publishing. "But we need to figure out how to set things
up so that the digital age happens right."
For Okerson and her
colleagues, the issue is less one of technology (although that is certainly important)
than of ensuring that information is accessible -- both now and in the future.
Questions such as who owns the information, who is allowed to see and use it (and
at what cost), and what is the right way to display it in order to best fulfill
the University's mission once had relatively straightforward answers. "You bought
a book or subscribed to a journal and put it on the shelves," Okerson explains.
"But nothing is simple anymore."
Consider the current effort by the Art Library to digitize its half-million prints and slides. "In
typical Yale fashion, this started because of a building project," says Max Marmor,
the arts librarian. "We had more than 4,000 square feet of library space invested
in storing these images, and in 1995, when we started to plan for a library renovation,
we saw that the future was digital."
Transforming every
photograph and transparency into electronic form would certainly have freed up
shelf space, but Marmor and his colleagues opted for a more targeted approach.
"We decided to create a coherent set of digital collections that directly supported
teaching and research rather than a complete digital archive," he says.
One reason, of course,
was money. "Digitizing 500,000-plus images is expensive and labor-intensive,"
says Marmor. But an equally important factor was programmatic. "Our goal is to
build a meaningful digital library," he explains, "and in many ways, this is no
different from developing a conventional collection. You have to make choices.
To make the change to digital in a cost-effective way, we had to determine precisely
what we were going to digitize to best meet scholarly needs."
The result of this
analysis is what the Library has dubbed the "Imaging
America" project, a database that will eventually hold thousands of images
drawn from Yale's many collections, as well as from those outside the University,
and which will be used to support courses and research in American Studies both
here and elsewhere. But the effort has a wider purpose than simply enabling students
or professors to examine a painting by Thomas Eakins, a print by Winslow Homer,
or a photograph by Walter McClintock from the comfort of a dorm room or office.
"The ultimate aim
of the project is to help create and shape a digital marketplace," says Marmor,
admitting that such entrepreneurship runs counter to the ethos of the librarian.
"As librarians, we're naturally subversive -- we like to give things away -- but
there's also an abiding tension here," he says. "While we're not in it for the
money, we recognize the need to create something that recovers its own costs:
products and services that are academically worthwhile and worth subscribing to."
Two years ago, with
a grant from the Getty Trust, Marmor invited a dozen like-minded universities
and museums to begin shaping the Imaging America digital library. The group met
for the first time in April of 1999, and since then, Yale has become a testing
ground for the development of a marketable image database that could eventually
draw on the resources of all the consortium members.
One reason for Yale
to take the lead is that the University actually owns the pictures to be digitized.
All too often, notes Marmor, slides that are used in teaching have been copied
from books with little regard to copyright. The practice is considered to be allowable
under the "fair use" provision of the law as it applies to the classroom. However,
because the Imaging America program aspires to be a sustainable public service,
it had to be limited to material that complied with copyright law.
Yale had another
advantage that made it a logical candidate for the testing phase. The University
was already working with a California-based software company known as Luna Imaging
to develop image databases that both teachers and students could access over the
Web and customize to fulfill classroom and research requirements. Using the Luna
package of software, it was possible, while sitting in front of the computer,
to retrieve the necessary digital images from a server on campus, assemble them
into a slide show, and present it to a class. There was no risk of jammed projectors
or upside-down slides, and if a professor needed to substitute an image, it could
be done quickly and painlessly.
Art historian Mary
Miller, who has used the system for presentations to her classes in Meso-American
art and architecture, likes the quality of the projected images and the ability
to zoom in on details. But after extensive experimentation, she has also discovered
that the test version of the software was not quite ready for prime time. "There
are lots of glitches, so I've recently gone back to the security of slides," says
Miller. "But when they've worked out all the bugs, I'll be first in line to use
it."
Bugs or no bugs,
nearly 10 percent of the library's budget is now spent on "things that people
will never actually touch," says Okerson. "But these kinds of resources pose all
sorts of new challenges for universities, and their libraries in particular."
One issue that has
taken on major importance in the electronic landscape is copyright, the section
of the legal code that deals with the ownership of intellectual property. "Since
it was first written into law in 1709, copyright has served us well in protecting
the public interest and promoting the dissemination of knowledge," says University
Librarian Scott Bennett. "But until recently nobody was paying attention to digits,
and there's a concern that the Web and other new media opportunities offer publishers
the means to achieve a perfect information monopoly."
One critical issue,
says Bennett, is an effort by at least some publishers to eliminate the concept
of fair use from copyright law so that they can control (and charge money for)
any use of material they own. "If we don't find a way to preserve the fair-use
concept, we're in serious trouble," Bennett says.
Cost crops up repeatedly
in any conversation about digital information. The dawn of the cyber age had led
many information managers to expect lower costs, as journals discussed abandoning
their print versions and publishing only on the Internet. But Joseph Esposito,
a publishing strategist, is skeptical. "The big myth is that it's cheaper to publish
online than it is by the traditional, hard-copy route," says Esposito, who has
directed the development of a Web version of the Encyclopedia
Britannica. The hope in that case was that revenue from on-screen advertising
would sustain the cost, but things have not worked out that way. "Academic content
is expensive not because of production costs or because publishers are greedy,
horrible people," Esposito says. "It's because the economic factors of the mass
market don't work for academic journals."
What Esposito and
others call "the crisis in pricing" is a function of the fact that academic publishing
is not a growth business with an unlimited audience. "What works for John Grisham -- lowering your price and recouping it in extra volume -- doesn't apply to the Journal of Hand Surgery, " he says.
Okerson expects that
in time the proliferation of digital resources may result in at least some savings
simply because Yale's library system won't have to keep expanding to find shelf
space for all the new material. But the switch from the outright ownership of
information to a leasing arrangement is itself causing a potential problem.
The contents of a
conventional publication owned by a library can reside in the stacks indefinitely,
but the rights to access electronic material often live with -- and can be withdrawn
by -- its producer. In the worst-case scenario, the result might be a kind of
digital dictatorship -- the result of too much information being controlled by
too few hands. But even if such a dire situation never comes to pass, there are
other, more immediate difficulties to solve.
Bennett and Okerson,
through a $150,000 grant awarded in December by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation,
are working on ways to ensure long-term access to digital resources. Through the
Mellon grant, the librarians are developing a collaboration with Elsevier Science,
a publisher of scientific journals, to create the foundations of an access system.
"The grand tradition of the library is that when readers come in, they can see everything we own," says Okerson. "But because we're often not dealing with artifacts
anymore, the access relationship may come down to a case of 'let's make a deal.'
The library is signing contracts that give us certain access rights to content."
The purpose of the
relationship with Elsevier is to figure out how to build an electronic archive
that will persist over time. "Perpetual access is a big issue right now," says
Okerson. "We need to determine how to write contracts that enable us to get information
we've already paid for if, say, we drop our subscription to a journal, or if the
company that created the resource goes out of business."
The library is certainly
no stranger to what is in some ways a conservation problem. Indeed, creating an environment conducive to the long-term storage of books was the impetus for the
recently completed $20 million renovation effort at Sterling. "We've known about
paper deterioration since 1823, but it wasn't until the late 1950s that we understood
the chemistry of the problem and learned how to combat it," says Bennett.
In the early 1990s
Yale made a commitment to correct the situation. The result is better heating
and cooling, along with one of the premier book conservation laboratories in the
country and a program called "Collections Care," the purpose of which is to keep
books in good circulating condition. "Conventional scholars worried that we would
go berserk with electronic materials and neglect traditional media, but that's
not going to happen," says Okerson. "We're committed to information in every format."
But while bits and
bytes may not be subject to the same kinds of degradation suffered by their paper
counterparts, it's becoming apparent that the endless strings of ones and zeros
which make up computer code have their own unique conservation requirements. "Digital
material is in fact a lot more fragile than its traditional counterpart," says
Dale Flecker, associate director for planning and systems of the Harvard library
system. "It's not a matter of preserving bits of data, but rather preserving their
utility."
Older computer users
are familiar with what's called the "Five-and-a-Quarter-Inch Floppy Disk Syndrome."
Disks of this size used to be the standard for storing and transporting data;
now, one would be hard-pressed to find a computer on the Yale campus capable of
reading such a thing.
Obsolescence is commonplace
in the electronic landscape, says Flecker, who is working on a five-year, $12-million effort to ensure that digital resources will not disappear into the ether of inaccessibility.
"Technology is moving extremely fast," he explains. "When it comes to books and
paper, it's conceptually easy to do such things as microfilming and rebinding
to keep these resources usable, but it's hard to predict the future formats of
digital material."
One strategy for
overcoming the predictability problem is to routinely practice "data migration."
This means that every time there's a major change in the form in which data is
stored and accessed, the people responsible for housing the material must ensure
that it changes shape to match. This may be as relatively easy a task as transferring
the files that are stored on five-and-a-quarter-inch floppies to three-and-a-half-inch
disks, or as massive a job as Project X, the recently completed (and notoriously
bug-infested) migration of all of Yale's administrative data into a new system.
"You can't avoid
the fact that waves of changing technology will roll over you faster than you
can plan for them, so regular data migration is a fact of life," says Lawrence
Gall, systems manager for the Peabody Museum of Natural History and the director
of its ongoing effort to create an online
museum. "The need to do what might be called creative destruction has to be
built into your thinking and planning about the future."
So, clearly, is the
need to determine what kind of structure the "creative destruction" -- the seemingly endless cycle of digital construction and reconstruction -- is supposed to produce.
"We're getting to the point where an article published in electronic form is less
about content than it is about communications," says Joseph Esposito, pointing
out that most Web material now includes links to new sources of information and
to the people who created it. "Ultimately, this is about changing the boundaries
of organizations and creating communities that have never before existed."  |
