Interviewer
If you were given unlimited funding to design a system for storing and preserving digital information for at least a century, what would you do?
Ian Milligan
That’s interesting. So if I had unlimited money to design a system to preserve information for at least 100 years, my answer would be that I don’t think there’s a technological solution that’s going to achieve that goal.
[The Library of Alexandria] fundamentally died because people stopped caring.
The example I often come back to when I’m talking to students is the Library of Alexandria. We think of this great library that amassed this unparalleled collection during the antiquity period, and then it failed. People think it failed because of beautiful Renaissance paintings of marauding armies burning down the Library of Alexandria, but it fundamentally died because people stopped caring. If people stop caring about information, no matter how well your system is designed, it’s going to degrade. So I think if I had unlimited money, it would all be dedicated to building an apparatus that does community outreach, building an infrastructure that provides access to collections and integrates collections into the everyday life of people. So that the public can use that information, see the value of it, and they can advocate for the continued preservation of it.
With traditional physical holdings, every time information is used or touched you worry a little bit. But with digital information, the more that information is touched, the more that it’s handled, the more that it’s forward migrated, the more that it’s engaged with, the safer it is.
So I think it wouldn’t be a magical vault that could be locked away for 100 years. It needs to be some way to provide access to information to people so that they continue to see the value and relevance of it.
Interviewer
Both for this question and in your everyday work, how do you think about and experience the stewardship and governance of collections? How do you balance the inherent tradeoffs between different types of organizations that are engaged in collecting and preservation?
Ian Milligan
As an administrator I’ve seen a little bit of this firsthand. So much of what we think about is in terms of risk. I’ve done quite a bit of work with the Internet Archive, and the Internet Archive acts as an interplay between institutions and broader community efforts.
For a lot of institutions, when we get into digital collecting and web archiving, it’s pretty risky territory. And it’s been risky territory for a long time. Even when the Internet Archive started, the risks involved were predicted. When they launched the Wayback Machine in late 2001, it was universal opinion that this is a good idea but they’re going to get sued. This would be in the mainstream press coverage. Brewster, what are you doing? You’re going to get sued to oblivion! What are you thinking? You can’t provide access through a web portal to other people’s copyrighted materials.
I like working with the Internet Archive because they are willing to take on risk, but they’re also willing to partner. They take these leaps on the edge, but they also partner with the Library of Congress, with Library and Archives Canada. They can provide the technical infrastructure and expertise so that other types of institutions can collect materials on their own.
It’s been those partnerships that balance the Internet Archive pushing the envelope, and they’re always pushing the envelope on the legal side, while typical educational and governmental institutions are more risk-averse, but safer in certain ways. Of course, you hope both types of institutions will still be there, but there’s a difference there. The world is changing, but if the Library of Congress doesn’t exist, the United States and the world are in deep trouble.
It’s in these partnerships between different types of organizations that you can have long-term stewardship. It can be a symbiotic relationship.
Interviewer
When considering access and combating neglect, how do you think about materials that do not sustain interest for long periods, but then are “rediscovered” and valued highly later on? For example, interest in the musical works of Vivaldi basically goes dormant for a couple centuries.
Ian Milligan
I’ve been in rooms with stakeholders of traditional archives and people start talking about metrics of access on digital collections. I’ve always pushed back in these conversations, because we don’t always hold traditional archives to the same level of metrics scrutiny as we do digital collections. Part of that is a lot of archives are still providing physical access to print collections. It’s fairly low volume. It’s human to human. You email the archivist, you make an appointment, they get the boxes out. Whereas with digital collections, the team usually provides some kind of Google Analytics dashboard and managers can measure that more easily than they can measure traditional access. It’s especially tricky right now, because we’re collecting a lot of information. We are collecting the petabyte scale of information and usage may be low in many places. I think the example of Vivaldi is a good one. It takes time for materials to become part of the historical record.
In terms of access, it’s been really tricky to use web archives so far, especially for anything approaching scholarly rigor. You can use replay engines if you know what you’re looking for and what you’re doing, but I’ve seen historians sometimes struggle to even use the Wayback Machine, let alone other mechanisms.Che-Wei and Taylor agreed: interfaces, interfaces, interfaces! We need to build capacity amongst researchers, historians, journalists, and social scientists to begin thinking of the web as a historical document. It’s not really new media anymore. It’s been the cultural record of our society for 20 years. But access continues to be critical. It’s important both for users of the information and also for collectors. Access is the way that we can find gaps, see what is not already collected, and fill those areas to create a richer record.
Interviewer
Where do you wish copyright would go in the future?
Ian Milligan
I really wish we had a more expansive understanding of what copyright stands in the way of, while trying to find a balancing act. I’m an author, but I’m an author with a university position and so I totally sympathize with authors who don’t have that sort of institutional support. Copyright is really important to ensure that authors can get paid for their work, earn a living wage, and do the important work that they do. However, I think we’ve let copyright terms extend far too long. We’re well beyond the reasonable balance in making sure an author can get compensated.
Especially in the United States we’ve got copyright terms going back just shy of a century. I really wish we would move to a model where copyright terms were shorter, and there were more exemptions. I wish there was more of a robust exemption for data mining and text analysis, so that we could do large scale cultural work in a way that in no way is going to interfere with the individual sales of products. I wish there were more exemptions around digital preservation.
You have situations where there are real worries that it is not going to be possible to save digital material that’s behind copyright. Time passes, and we are not able to remove a digital lock, and something is lost to us as a society.
I’m not a lawyer, and I don’t know what the exact right balance is, but it strikes me that the balance is off. We’ve moved far away from the original well meeting idea of copyright, which is to find a way to protect the intellectual property of creators. We’ve let it go so far back that it’s becoming a mechanism for corporate and generational wealth, as opposed to the authors themselves. In a dream world, shorter terms and more exemptions would be great.
I would say the only silver lining is, you know, we’re back to seeing materials being released into the public domain after a very long time of the freeze under the Copyright Extension Acts in the United States. So it is nice to now see every year, we see a little more entering into the public domain. We’re seeing Winnie the Pooh and Mickey Mouse and some of those big, those big cultural icons entering the public domain. I’m pretty sure that those corporations are still making a lot of money. So I’m hopeful, maybe some of these sort of fear mongering and apocalyptic thinking by those rights holders can fall by the wayside, and they realize they can still make money off Winnie the Pooh, even if there is a public domain version of him out there.