Presentation 1
How to Dodge the Born Digital News Memory Hole
The year is 2104. For her Europa University sociology studies your great granddaughter must research the distribution of news through early 21st century social media like Facebook and Twitter, predecessors to MyUniverse, the largest communications and social network on Earth, Mars, and most of Jupiter's moons, including Europa. Unfortunately, even though her University is a founding member of MyUniverse with full privileges, she cannot find much news about social media from the early 2000s. She asks you to help. You must tell her why news from this time is scarce.
Sound farfetched? Unfortunately it isn't. The present state of copyright laws, the lack of born digital legal deposit legislation in this country and many others, and rapid technology changes in the production and distribution of news combined with neglect of born digital news by cultural heritage organizations make your great granddaughter's research misfortune altogether too likely.
In a keynote at the Dodging the Memory Hole conference Clifford Lynch reminded us that news is important not only now but also in future as "the first draft of history". An accurate and easily accessible journalistic record is important to many people and organizations: Historians, politicians, genealogists, scholars of all sorts, academics, sociologists, economists, governments, and, of course, to your great granddaughter.
The preservation challenges are formidable. It's no longer as simple as subscribing to the Washington Post and binding issues into volumes. Or piling them in a safe, neglected corner. Now to preserve news we must consider copyright, the dizzying variety of formats for digital news, the composite nature of many news feeds, its algorithmic personalization by Facebook, Google, and others, changes due to changing governments, citizen journalists and bloggers, as well comments about the news by readers. Once news was scarce. Now we are drowning in it! What can you do?
Presenters: Frederick Zarndt (Digital Divide Data), Sam Meister (Educopia Institute), Edward McCain (Donald W. Reynolds Institute, Missouri School of Journalism)
Presentation 2
Linking Born-Digital News and Social Media Collections via Automated Entity Detection and Authority Matching
Digital libraries increasingly have the means to assemble large collections of born-digital news materials and social media records. These collections can be opaque and difficult to use on their own, yet become much more valuable when linked to each other, thereby increasing their collective exposure and discoverability and ultimately enabling the assembly of multi-perspective histories of significant events. We have been developing techniques to discover and use such inter-archive connections and now wish to share with the DLF community the results of our latest project, which links social media materials to a large database of computationally indexed news broadcasts.
The tools and resources we have employed in this project include named-entity extraction software specially tuned for each type of media, which then reconciles discovered entities with entries in the Virtual International Authority File (VIAF) service. To demonstrate the effectiveness of this technique and present a practical example for comment and evaluation, we describe our experiences linking particular sections of the UCLA NewsScape television news collection to material captured from Twitter that pertains to specific events of regional or global interest.
Steps we have taken to evaluate the effectiveness of these efforts include enumerating the types of entities we were able to discover and link between the two collections, as a first-order quantification of how our linking techniques can increase the visibility and discoverability of the resources in each collection. We also have assembled case studies of the types of multi-perspective narratives that users can build using online search aids that incorporate discovered inter-collection links into their results. We welcome input from other forum participants regarding next steps to take, new tools and resources to use in the future, and the potential for subsequent collaborations and re-use of our work in other archival projects.
Presenters: Martin Klein (University of California, Los Angeles), Peter Broadwell (University of California, Los Angeles)
Presentation 3
Online-Only Media: 21st Century Collection Crisis?
Today's music and movie industry is increasingly favoring streaming and download-only, direct-to-consumer distribution. No longer can librarians or archivists expect to collect sound recordings and videos on tangible media (e.g., CDs and DVDs) where first sale doctrine applies. At an ever-increasing rate, librarians are discovering that many titles are only available via such online distribution sites as iTunes or Amazon.com. These distributors require individual purchasers to agree to restrictive end-user license agreements (EULAs) that explicitly forbid institutional access and such core library functions as lending: "Upon payment for Music Content, we grant you a non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use the Music Content only for your personal, non-commercial, entertainment use..." (amazon.com).
With this presentation we describe failed attempts to negotiate a library-friendly EULA with tech/music industry representatives, and give an overview of an IMLS funded project tasked with investigating the issue. Called the "National Forum on Online-Only Music," the project has enabled us to hire legal consultants, work with the Library of Congress' National Recording Preservation Board, as well as envision a range of possible solutions: from licensing online-only works directly from artists to creating a closed collection of files that would be released when the content is no longer commercially available.
Presenter: John Vallier (University of Washington Libraries)
