Library hears from online preservationist

The Norwood Morrill Memorial Library Board of Trustees met last Tuesday with preservation advocate and fellow of the Stanford Constitutional Law Center Michael Menna and heard his presentation on the importance of preserving online materials and his pitch for the Morrill to join the Our Future Memory Project (FMP) – https://ourfuturememory.org

The first myth he said he wanted to dispel was that of the Internet is Forever. While that might be true for celebrities trying to forget an embarrassing incident, it’s not necessarily true for all types of information.

“You may talk to people and they have this misunderstanding that a website or an HTML or any sort of digital object is more durable because it can’t be taken in all these scenarios, but it can also be deleted,” Menna said. “And then you lose it to time, and that compromises many memory institution practices.”

“The point is that memory institutions need to be able to determine access on their own terms and be able to meet patrons where they are,” he said.

Libraries are memory institutions, and Menna said that making sure the library can access and give access to digital information is critical to secure its use in the 21st century. He wrote a paper on the topic that can be found at – https://gvimes.link/libraryrights

The problems discussed in the paper revolve around digital lending practices, mostly with e-books, audio books, audio data, and digital movie lending. If you haven’t used the MinuteMan Network or Hoopla, you might not know that these services, provided by libraries across the state, are hampered by copyright access laws and agreements with content providers. One audio book a month, for instance, or only 12 movies a year in some cases, things like that.

The other issue is that content providers and copyright holders can challenge or take away their materials at any point. It’s not like the library buys a physical copy of Carrie, and Stephen King walks in one day and demands they give it back. Most libraries probably would, just for the celebrity exposure, but the point remains.

The FMP has four basic rights that it wants bestowed on libraries across the country, and they include the right to collect materials in a digital form, preserve digital materials (reformat, repair and back up), provide controlled access to digital materials, and to be able to cooperate with other memory institutions.

“We want this to sort of become common practice, something that everyday people understand in their individual communities and see themselves and their local library as doing,” Menna said. “And they should, because the framework we see at play right now is that more and more content is being published to disappear, to stream, to be edited ongoing over time. And if we don’t change something soon, we will find ourselves in trouble where our future memory sort of just, falls away.”

He pointed to Disney’s rewriting of its own history, relatively recently, where certain films, now considered extremely racist, will not be going to the company’s digital streaming service Disney Plus – https://gvimes.link/songsouth – even with the cultural sensitivity disclaimer that now accompanies some films and shorts.

Menna said while movies and entertainment may not be the most urgent preservationist need, the preservation of newspapers, digital news, and other such content is vital.

“We talk about Vanishing Culture – which is the term that the Internet Archive ( https://archive.org ) has popularized with its recent collection of essays – this digital vanishing is a problem,” he said. “Vanishing Culture encompasses two things: it encompasses the inability to preserve digital objects, and the inability to make physical objects available and accessible in a digital format in an increasingly digital world, as more and more people turn to those objects. Vanishing Culture, we argue, has these repercussions along all problems. And one of them is the journalism problem. Journalism has often been called the ‘First Draft of History,’ but what happens when that first draft never gets saved?”

Menna said that can lead to people being unable to verify historical events.

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“It’s something that we know is contested, because in an information ecosystem like our own, that is increasingly polarized where reporting is only done to specific channels and communities, that can only make things worse,” he said. “When people don’t have the archive, sure, but also when people don’t have a stable sense of what happened one way or the other, and don’t have trustworthy archive to verify those comments.”

Menna said they are simply looking for institutions to make a value statement, as there is no legally binding element to the group’s signatory list. But he said signing on with FMP will help push the needle towards information access.

Menna also said that their goal right now is to get everybody invested and on board.

The Board will be voting on signing the proclamation at its next meeting. For more information, go to https://ourfuturememory.org

Editor’s Note: We are still working to get the backlog of issues of The Norwood Record and The Bulletin back online, but it is a different system than before and will take time.