0.12 The evia digital archive project: challenges and solutions  (Page 6/10)

The seminal ideas that led to the EVIA Project were based in finding preservation solutions. How do we address the problems of deterioration, format obsolescence, and access to research video? True preservation is a long-term commitment, and in the digital age, one that requires active management. While we have moved forward with solutions to video preservation, no broad consensus on digital video preservation exists and so we remain in dialog with the archiving community on these developments. Especially encouraging is a joint effort by the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archivists (IASA) and the Association for Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) to develop such best practices. These efforts are in a very early stage, however.

Access and intellectual property

Online access to humanities collections is hampered in many cases by restrictions due to intellectual property obstacles. The recordings in the EVIA Digital Archive Project present a unique set of circumstances that have warranted a unique approach to online access. On one level, we have to address the fact that some recordings contain copyrighted material. While much of the ethnographic recordings do not document copyrighted works, some do and we must accommodate this issue. Because our mission is devoted to research and education, our legal consultants felt that we have a strong case for providing access under the aegis of Fair Use. This means that we cannot provide blanket public access and that we have to limit access to uses that are educational. In addition to any rights to given works that might exist in the recordings, the scholar who made the recording owns the rights to the recording itself. We require that the depositor sign an agreement giving the EVIA Project non-exclusive rights to make the recordings and annotations available online. This enables scholars to use their video for other projects if they choose to do so.

Just as significant as the legal matters are the ethical ones. We are very sensitive to the fact that we must operate within the ethical guidelines of our disciplines and we do our best to ensure we have some kind of assurance that it is acceptable to the subjects to have recordings of them made available online in this fashion. To facilitate these permissions, we have devised forms for researchers to use when conducting their fieldwork. In cases of older recordings, it has usually been practically impossible to get direct permissions from subjects and in these cases we rely on the scholar’s understanding of the nature of the permissions they acquired many years ago and on their relationship with the community or individuals in question to make a determination about the appropriateness of online access.

Individual depositors handle their ethical issues based on their arrangements with their primary consultants regarding consent and permission and their concern for materials they do not wish to make public. While guidelines for ethical ethnographic research behavior have been around for many years, the methods of gathering permissions for recordings have varied widely in the decades since video technology has been employed as part of fieldwork. Many scholars have made video recordings for their own research use but have not considered making the recordings publically available. Indeed, it has been only in the last few years that distribution of video via the Internet has been conceivable. In some cases, EVIA Project depositors reconnect with consultants and obtain the explicit permissions they need. In other cases, the passage of time or the disruption of communities by social, economic, or political events such as warfare makes it impossible to locate consultants. Depositors must rely in such cases on their relationships with the individuals or communities in question and their understanding of what would be appropriate to make public. Because we take the approach of archival preservation, we transfer entire video recordings and not just portions of them. However, many field recordings contain a mix of footage types, and portions may need to be restricted while other parts can be made available. Our solution is to allow depositors through the annotation process to block public access to content segments containing politically, culturally, personally, or religiously sensitive material, or copyrighted material that does not fit within our provisions of Fair Use.