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To cite this article: Martin Nakata , Vicky Nakata , Gabrielle Gardiner , Jill McKeough , Alex
Byrne & Jason Gibson (2008) Indigenous Digital Collections: An Early Look at the Organisation
and Culture Interface, Australian Academic & Research Libraries, 39:4, 223-236, DOI:
10.1080/00048623.2008.10721360
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00048623.2008.10721360
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How will institutions deal with materials in ways that safeguard the
interests of Indigenous peoples?
What can be relied upon to inform best practice in this area?
Will accepted practice deal satisfactorily with materials already in
the public domain but which have contested Indigenous intellectual
property interests?
How will works whose copyright holders cannot be located (orphan
works) be dealt with?
What will inform consistent and fair processes when copyright expires
and traditional knowledge information comes into the public domain?
How will diverse or conflicting views within the Indigenous community
be negotiated by institutions?
How can institutions be certain that they are meeting the expectations
of Indigenous communities?
The 2006 National Summit organised by the Collections Council of Australia
to consider a framework for digital collections prioritised the need for consistent
standards and protocols for digital repositories across the collecting sector for
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similar uncertainties.
The priority for specific standards, practices and protocols for Indigenous
digital collections is, however, still to gain traction in this process. This led the
UTS researchers who undertook the ATSILIRN Protocols review to pursue
a collaborative project with three state institutions: The State Library of New
South Wales, the Northern Territory Library, and the Library of Queensland.
The project aimed to provide a preliminary investigation of the practical issues
being grappled with by institutions when digitising materials generally and when
digitising Indigenous materials in particular. Our key objective was to gather a
variety of institutional experience, with general approaches to digitisation and
the fit within general approaches of Indigenous Australian materials, in order to
highlight the issues and to describe some approaches to dealing with Indigenous
materials in the digitisation process. On-site discussions and interviews were
held with library personnel involved in all stages of the digitisation process, from
policy development, through project scoping, selection of materials, workflow
design and technical processes, ongoing management systems and issues,
and Indigenous community consultation and communication processes. The
personnel interviewed were identified by the institutions, but in all institutions
there was also consultation with Indigenous library staff, including those not
directly involved in the digitisation process but with broader roles in Indigenous
heritage and reference services, client services and community outreach. The
identification by staff of difficult or unresolved issues provided opportunities
for further exploration of these issues to assist the development of protocols
for dealing with them. To this end the project has also drawn from a range
of sources of knowledge/information/practice/expertise to address some of these
challenges.
Beyond this current project, the end goal is best practice guidelines for developing
and managing Australian Indigenous digital collections. Our long-term aim is
to extend the collaboration into another project to focus on the issues across
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cultural institutions that collect and hold Indigenous materials. A common goal
must be, at the end of the day, to set high-level practices for engagement with
Indigenous materials in all collecting institutions.
Indigenous mateRIALs and digitisation issues in pRACtice
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The other two institutions in this study have been more open to risk but employ
a range of strategies to manage and minimise risks. These include a range of
consultation measures and take-down policies, notably:
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We think it useful to then state what level of legal and cultural protection is being
afforded via any approach. It has to be conceded that resolution is likely to be
quite imperfect. In this case, both Indigenous stakeholders and institutions need
to understand the risks and weigh up each others level of risk. It is also critical
to understand what particular approaches mean for the digitisation process.
What does it mean for the technical conversion of materials and the ongoing
management of them in repositories or online? And therefore what information
has to be captured? And when, and by what means, and where in the process
does this information have to be captured and recorded?
In addition, the implications for managing complaints about infringements have
to be built into any risk management approach. Questions for the process might
include:
What has to be documented?
What has to have formal agreement or broad agreement?
What information has to be gathered about what is high risk material
likely to offend or attract litigation?
What information has to be publicly displayed? and
What process has to be demonstrated and transparent to reduce legal
risks and so on?
This is a way of instituting exceptions for Indigenous materials in the absence of,
or ahead of, any appropriate legal provision in legislation.
We think that setting this out as a practical guide should also help dialogue
between Indigenous and institutional stakeholders because it clarifies the
positions of both, and situates the compromise in a way that promotes better
understanding of all that is at stake. This space must be mutually intelligible and
a common language needs to develop. So consistency is useful in this regard as
well.
To encourage development of such an approach and to guide practice in this area,
some professionals drew attention to the need for some supporting materials,
perhaps by way of information sheets. These might well include:
Broad principles for due diligence for orphan works containing
Indigenous materials;
Ways to deal with in-perpetuity copyright when it inhibits Indigenous
access;
Creative Commons and non-exclusive rights issues and approaches for
Indigenous materials;
Constructing a take-down policy that works as a process;
Examples of statements and disclaimers for various things;
Examples of the sorts of information that need to be gathered at the
point of acquisition or deposit of Indigenous materials, or at the initial
selection point;
Examples of what information to include in headers and footers of
digital files, and the benefits of working towards that as best practice;
Examples of what and how to include the existence of some items for
searching purposes but not for viewing online;
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Institutions that were managing risk identified another example where the microprocess needs to be clear. It is easy to take down materials and name that as a
risk-management practice. But it requires more work to build consistent practice
that will also contribute to a due diligence approach. For example, what is the
process to be followed for take down of materials should there be complaints? A
number of issues were raised about this:
Are they to disappear altogether, or would the Indigenous community
and the integrity of collections be better served by blocking out and
inserting an appropriate message, as, for example, AIATSIS (Australian
Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies) does?
What if the item is still publicly accessible in other places, such as on
Picture Australia, for example?
What process should follow any take down to assess if items should
stay down, or if the request was unreasonable?
How is the time frame for putting back up materials associated with
sorry business to be managed?
What do all these issues mean for the technical conversion stage?
Whether institutions were risk-averse or risk managers, they had all identified
the need for clearly-identified processes to manage issues relating to Indigenous
materials. The difference among the institutions related to whether they were
tidying up these loose ends before or after the fact of digitisation and upload for
public access.
So, it is clear that any future digitisation guidelines for Indigenous materials need
to attend to the issue of where points of differentiated practice have to be flagged
in the workflow design and to the sort of information to be captured at these
points to facilitate best practice.
Prioritising Indigenous MateRIALs
As noted already, legal and cultural sensitivity issues affect the selection process
because they help determine what can be digitised and what cannot. This is
a challenge for Indigenous priorities, because dealing with the intellectual
property issues incurs more than risk. It incurs additional time and costs and can
mean circumventing materials which might be significant to Indigenous people
or might build useful Indigenous collections.
Different institutions organise selection criteria according to their collections
and locations, but they have in common the consideration of the following:
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and information produced about Indigenous groups, collected from them and
now dispersed through cultural collections across the country. This is knowledge
and information Indigenous people want to access for future utility, for creative
endeavours and, importantly, for emotional and spiritual restoration of a
people.
Indigenous Priorities and Digitisation Policy
If the digitisation schedules in libraries are going to reflect some priority for
materials that are significant to Indigenous communities and people, then
something needs to be said about the connections between policy and priorities
for digitisation and how these inform selection and decision making in the
preliminary stage of the digitisation process. However, this does not necessarily
mean developing separate policy and guidelines in the area. That approach
creates an unnecessary duplication of work, and we doubt that it helps in the
day-to-day practice of busy professionals.
We consider it more efficient, and more encouraging for inclusion of Indigenous
issues as core business, if primary policy positions include specific reference to
Indigenous materials within them. This already occurs at some levels, for example,
in collection development policy in the institutions we visited. Indeed, institutions
articulated Indigenous collection development priorities very clearly and quite
comprehensively in general policy. It would be strategic, however, to extend this
to digitisation policy areas and to best practice digitisation guidelines.
Some Concluding Remarks
There are some key critical points which future institutional activity needs to
address. Firstly, from the institutions perspective, the legal and sensitivity issues
are reported to be the major point of disjuncture from standard digitisation
processes. These issues are central to Indigenous people as well, in order to ensure
appropriate preparation, handling and management of materials. However, they
can also work to reduce the selection of Indigenous materials, and, therefore, the
value of Indigenous digital collections for Indigenous people. The immediate task
is to focus on resolving some of these issues through the development of guides
and procedures in the next project and to test them over a period of time in a
greater number of cultural organisations to inform sustainable configurations for
Indigenous virtual repositories.
Secondly, the Indigenous preference, without a shadow of doubt, would be to
begin at a different primary point for selection that is, the need for Indigenous
access and use of Indigenous materials in collections. This underlines the urgent
need to identify Indigenous materials in collections. While we can say this
objective is assumed by institutions, and while it is the case that this informs all
that they do, progress towards this goal is patchy. So, as practice moves forward,
it is all-important that the broader goal of Indigenous access to materials held in
collecting institutions is not submerged in the process of working out the microissues of managing the digitisation process.
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2.
3.
4.
5.
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6.
7.
8.
For example The Knowledge Web 2004, UK Museums, Libraries & Archives
at http://www.mla.gov.uk/resources/assets//I/iik_kw_pdf_5292.pdf
9.
10. For example, M Nakata Indigenous Knowledge and the Cultural Interface:
Underlying Issues at the Intersection of Knowledge and Information
Systems IFLA Journal 2002 vol 28 no 5/6 pp281-291.
11. For example, J Anderson Indigenous Knowledge and Intellectual Property:
Access, Ownership and Control of Cultural Materials Unpublished Part
A-Research Report to AIATSIS 31 March 2006; J Anderson Access and
Control of Indigenous Knowledge in Libraries and Archives: Ownership and
Future Use Paper presented for the American Library Association and the
MacArthur Foundation, New York Columbia University 2006; E Hudson,
Cultural Institutions, Law and Indigenous Knowledge: A Legal Primer on
the Management of Australian Indigenous Collections Melbourne IPRIA
2006; T Janke Our Culture Our Future: Report on Australian Indigenous
Cultural and Intellectual Property Rights Surrey Hills Michael Frankel &
Co 1998; D Mellor and T Janke Valuing Art Respecting Culture Sydney
National Association for the Visual Arts Ltd 2001.
12. See annex to WIPOGRTKF/IC/9/5 Revised Provisions for the Protection
of Traditional Knowledge: Policy Objectives and Core Principles 2006 at
http://www.wipo.int/edocs/mdocs/tk/en/wipo_grtkf_ic_9/wipo_grtkf_ic_9_
5.doc; J Anderson Framework for Community Protocol Canberra AIATSIS
2006.
13. Liauw Toong Tjiek Desa Informasi: The Role of Digital Libraries in the
Preservation and Dissemination of Indigenous Knowledge The International
Information and Library Review 2006 vol 38 pp123-131.
14. Collections Council of Australia Summit 2006 Digital Collections at http://
www.collectionscouncil.com.au/summit+2006+-+digital+collections.aspx
15. M Nakata & M Langton (eds) Australian Indigenous Knowledge and
Libraries Canberra Australian Academic & Research Libraries 2005.
16. See Australian Indigenous Digital Collections: First Generation Issues 2008
at http://hdl.handle.net/2100/631
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