Digitisation and online accessibility

Dr. Josh Reiss,

Office +44 207-882-7982
Fax +44 207-882-7997
Dept of Electronic Engineering
Queen Mary, University of London
Mile End Road, London E14NS
United Kingdom
Email josh.reiss@elec.qmul.ac.uk
www.elec.qmul.ac.uk/people/josh

1) What additional measures could be taken at national and European level to encourage digitisation
and online accessibility of material in all European languages?

There needs to be further development and promotion of automatic archiving technology. As a

simple example, I can go to any entertainment venue’s website and find out about upcoming
events, but it is always difficult to find out about past events. Archiving technology should provide
an easy method whereby the content provider can store material such that it is effectively
organised, easily retrieved, and can be maintained separately from rapidly changing current
material. Such technology can easily be implemented with multilingual capabilities, thus
encouraging access in all European languages.

This can be achieved through the promotion of enabling technologies (research in FP7, esp.
STREPS), establishment of systems (development in FP7, esp. NoEs), and mandates to
governmental organisations.

2) What measures could be taken to promote private investments and new business-models such as
public-private partnerships for digitising and making historical collections accessible?

It always seems difficult to attract new companies to EU research programmes. One difficulty is that
the companies want to strongly protect their IP and worry that they may have to share it with other
consortium members. It needs to be made clear that this is not a problem.

Business involvement in digitisation and accessibility can be improved if media companies are made
aware that the projects will help access to their own content and that it is, in effect, a cheap way of
creating an enabling infrastructure for digital access. As far as specific measures go, perhaps FP7
calls can weaken the constraints used previously. For instance, it is often stressed that calls are not
to help partners digitise their collections. If a certain component was intended to do that, it would
encourage participation by content providers and promote digitisation using modern methods.

3) What measures of a legislative, technical, organisational or other nature, could facilitate the
digitisation and subsequent accessibility of copyrighted material, while respecting the legitimate
interests of authors?

I was about to write a long list here, but actually, I think very little needs to be done on a technical
or organisational level.. DRM technologies are moving rapidly, and the IPOD has shown the world
that access to copyrighted material can be very profitable. If anything, access to copyrighted
material is moving forward faster than expected.

However, there is one legislative issue that must be addressed. This is the Fair Use clause in most
countries copyright laws. In the multimedia world, particularly in academia where it is most
relevant, no one is completely certain what they can and cannot do. Furthermore, the law differs
from country to country, so that, for instance, French researchers do not know if they can work with
the same material in the same manner as american researchers. An EU-wide Fair Use policy would
go a long way towards clarifying the issues.
4) Is the issue of orphan material economically important and relevant in practice? If yes, what
technical, organisational and legal mechanisms could be used to facilitate wider use of this material?

I would go so far as to say that orphan material, if all reasonable efforts to track ownership have
failed, should be treated as public domain. Certainly, if the owner alleges copyright infringement, he
or she should at least show that it was possible for the alleged infringer to determine ownership and
contact the owner.

Orphan material is important. It is often the orphan material that is the key content in a collection
(rare recordings, unsigned manuscripts, etc.). Legislation can help deal with the issue by defining
policy and insisting that the copyright holder must make an effort to make themselves known.
Technical and organisational mechanisms can also be devised to streamline the communication
channels between copyright holders and content users and providers.

5) How could public domain material and other material available for general use (voluntary
sharing) be made more transparent and widely known in order to facilitate its online availability for
subsequent use?

Preservation of digital content

6) What priority measures – in particular of an organisational and legal nature-– should be taken at
national and European level to optimise the preservation of digital content with the limited resources
available?

Governmental documents of a certain level of importance or access should always be available in

electronic format and online. Wherever possible, it should not be necessary to physically go into an
office to obtain a document. Furthermore, there should be a push towards electronic submission of
all documents online (tax forms, residency forms, passport applications, etc.). Certainly, one of the
annoyances of modern life is standing in endless queues to deal with bureaucratic details, and this
should be minimised whenever possible.

National and European measures should also encourage online G2G communication (government to
government). This will both speed up the processing of governmental documents, as well as
encourage more standard electronic systems in governmental organisations.

7) Is there a risk that national legal deposit schemes lead to a multiplication of requirements on
internationally active companies? Would European legislation help avoiding this?

This is certainly a risk. We need to promote natural evolution of digital technologies, and not impose
a methodology or standard. In such a rapidly changing environment, it is exceedingly difficult to
predict the appropriate technologies for digital preservation. Such decisions should be made by
standards bodies with expertise in the area, as well as through the development of de facto
standards that flourish due to ease-of-use, practicality and popularity. Thus, I believe european
legislation may not be necessary here.

8) How could research contribute to progress on the preservation front? Which axes of work should
be addressed in priority by the forthcoming Specific Research Programmes as part of the 7th
Framework Programme?

Research could promote simple, easy-to-use and obvious digitisation and preservation methods. A
key obstacle to preservation is the lack of technical knowledge in cultural organisations. In
particular, formats and standards, though well-established, are not transparent to the novice user.
The 7th Framework could promote bridging technologies, that for instance, bridge technological and
semantic differences between metadata standards adopted by the library community, dealing only
in high level metadata, and standards adopted by the signal processing community, dealing with
more low level features with less direct meaning to the end user.