Digital Lives

>> Legal & Ethical Issues

I am very pleased to be able to make available a Digital Lives discussion paper by Andrew Charlesworth on Legal & Ethical Issues. It represents our principal output for the legal and ethical component of the project. Download Digital Lives >> Legal & Ethical

From my perspective it has a number of useful qualities.

(1) It is directed at - or at least is accessible to - a wide audience, and should be useful not only to large and small repositories but also people at home organising and preparing their own personal archives whether these are destined to go to a repository in time or are to be passed to a family member or friend. It provides in one place a straightforward and concise outline of the legal requirements - to the extent that these can be determined in the absence of court cases that serve as precedents.

(2) It is imbued with a natural pragmatism. It urges repositories to take a pragmatic stance in dealing with the legal uncertainties of holding and making available personal digital archives. Specifically, it confirms what many in the profession have suspected for some time, that there is some significant uncertainty about what precisely the law expects, and suggests therefore that there is a need to consider not only the potential costs of the 'risk' (which may not in the end manifest themselves) but also the benefits of a less conservative approach in terms of capturing, preserving and making available archival resources to current and, equally importantly, future generations.

(3) The paper elaborates in more detail, but briefly the approach entails: (i) a transparency in the policies, guidelines and actions of repositories, (ii) a passing of the onus to the users of the library (who are after all subject to the law too), and critically (iii) a responsive, prompt and sympathetic system for addressing and acting on concerns and grievances of third parties. Speaking for my own institution I am pleased to see that steps in this direction are already emerging.  

(4) I also like the idea of using icons to represent specific metadata and the existence of layered explanations of legal statements. Regarding the use of icons I had been thinking along similar lines having come across a paper describing this approach in bioinformatic cataloguing and archiving. Again, the onus is being passed in part to others - in this case the creators of personal archives.

Suggestions and feedback would be very welcome. You can email us at digital.lives@bl.uk. Please identify yourself, and if available use an institutional email address. Please do not include attachments. We may not be able to reply to all emails but we shall read them all. Thank you, in anticipation.

A number of people from a variety of institutions kindly participated in two focus group meetings, and we would like to thank them very much for their support:

Guy Baxter, Victoria & Albert Museum
Gareth Burfoot, British Library
Else Churchill, Society of Genealogists
Maxine Clarke, Nature Publishing Group
Frances Harris, British Library
Arwel Jones, National Library of Wales
Jack Latimer, Community Sites
Hannah Little, HATII, University of Glasgow
Luke McKernan, British Library
Kathleen O'Riordan, Media & Film, University of Sussex
Helene Snee, University of Manchester
Tilli Tansey, Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine
Susan E. Thomas, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford
Dave Thompson, Wellcome Library
Lynn Young, British Library.

I'd like personally also to thank the Digital Lives team members: most especially Jamie Andrews, Alison Hill, Ian Rowlands and Pete Williams as well as Lynn Young for their comments on an earlier draft. Finally,  congratulations to Andrew himself for an excellent paper.

Emerging Output

Following the widely acclaimed three-day Digital Lives Research Conference in February, we have had - over the subsequent weeks - a period of consolidation for the research and writing. A key milestone which is looming fast is a report outlining the achievements of the project. It is due in the first week of June; and we have been gathering the necessary project statistics to send to the Arts and Humanities  Research Council.

During the remainder of June we shall: (i) bring together the various strands of the project in the form of a final synthesis; (ii) enhance the website, making available some of the project files; and (iii) with publications and various pieces of research writing coming to fruition highlight findings and discuss more widely the possible implications of the research.

A quick overview of the outputs of the project:

    •    over the course of the project to date more than 20 presentations have been given by team members  at conferences and seminars on three continents;

    •    seven quality papers or articles (including essays) have been published or are in press or are in the final stages of preparation: this includes two peer reviewed papers that have been accepted and one that has been submitted (the original research proposal commits us to only one peer reviewed paper);  we expect to produce at least five more quality papers;

    •    the First Digital  Lives Research Conference entailed lectures from more than 45 eminent speakers, with talks additionally being broadcast to (and from) the virtual world Second Life;

    •    we intend to enrich the website, with the uploading of files being conducted in phases over the weeks - ultimately there will be more than 60 files made available for download including videocasts, audio  interviews, transcripts, presentation slides and papers;

•        project synthesis report.

Digital Life at the Extremes

I am very excited to be able to say that the First Digital Lives Research Conference will conclude with a Lecture entitled "Digital Life at the Extremes" by the renowned polar explorer Ben Saunders: 11th February 2009 at the British Library.


 

Ben Saunders is the youngest person to ski solo to the North Pole and holds the record for the longest solo Arctic journey by a Briton. Ben is also well known for his use of digital technologies during his expeditions.









These photographs were taken by Martin Hartley © All Rights Reserved

Writers in Conversation

I am delighted to be able to announce that Rt Hon. Anthony Wedgewood Benn PC and Dame Antonia Byatt DBE have very kindly agreed to participate in the "Writers in Conversation" session on the second day of the Digital Lives Research Conference on the 10th of February 2009.

Four Weeks to go to the Conference

The Digital Lives Research Project sends its best wishes for the New Year to all colleagues, friends and viewers who are interested in this research.

Registration for the first Digital Lives Research Conference is open. Some details can be found on the conference website. More recent information can be found in this draft programme with a growing list of speakers (download draft programme pdf). Further details of the three days are provided in this outline (download outline pdf).

An update on the research project will be presented in this blog in the next day or so.

My new year resolution is to blog more frequently.

The digital public and computing academics

The online survey is now closed. There have been two arms of the survey (professional service route, and university and library route), and we are delighted to report that the grand total for both of them is 3,468 responses.

One of the items of feedback that John Tuck brought back from Western Australia (see previous blog entry) related to the extent to which the project is paying attention to people generally as well as the most distinguished individuals. We are committed by the original proposal to conduct a survey of 1000 academics. However, earlier in the year it was decided to also embrace what I call the Digital Public, members of the public, or citizens, actively using computers in their lives. The total (from both arms of the survey) for academics is 1053, while that for the digital public is 2415.

We are very grateful to everyone who took the time and made the effort to complete the survey. We shall be undertaking the prize draw shortly, and will report in this blog when the vouchers have been sent to the winner.

The numbers reached could not have been achieved without the help of many people in highlighting the link to the survey. In due course we shall try to thank by name as many as possible of those who helped; but we are particularly indebted to Suvi Kankainen and Lawrence Christensen of the British Library's Press Office, whose press release led to mentions in the Guardian newspaper and the Times Higher Education for example (and of course to all publications and websites themselves).

Thanks too to Colin Wight and Adrian Arthur of the British Library's Web Services team who gave prominence to the link on the website at a competitive time.

A further note of thanks from me to my team mates: Ian Rowlands (the mastermind behind the two-armed approach) and Pete Williams (the relentless searcher for websites where a link to our survey could encamp for a while).

It is clear from initial examination of the data that the analysis will yield some very interesting findings. More anon....

Appointment

Following his appointment as Director of Library Services, John Tuck has moved on to Royal Holloway College of the University of London, leaving the British Library on 31 July 2008. The Digital Lives team sends John very many congratulations and profound thanks for all that he has done. The intensity of his activity showed no signs of let up during the summer as he continued to honour his previous commitments, including giving a presentation "The UK Digital Lives project" at the Annual Conference at the Australian Society of Archivists in Perth, 6-9 August 2008.

The Society has, incidentally, just published the Third Edition of its advisory guide: "Keeping Archives".

Time Away, the first part

Back at last, having been away for some time: an eyebrow-raising absence, requiring some explanation. The first part of this Time Away was spent writing a paper for the forthcoming iPRES 2008 conference, which is being held at the British Library on 29 and 30 September 2008: a series that was originally conceived by the Chinese Academy of Science and Electronic Information for Libraries. The key organiser of the 2008 conference is Dr Adam Farquhar who also directs the pan-European PLANETS project led by the British Library.

The writing in my paper was shaped and finished on a series of dining tables in places across western Europe. I am indebted to those family members who let me occupy this central place in their homes. As many readers know, sometimes writing can be a lonely activity, and when the composing of a paper has started to involve mainly a shuffling of paragraphs, a checking of layout and styles and the catching of wayward punctuation, it can be a relief to be surrounded by the sounds and activities of life, watching children at play for instance: even if the background noise - as in bows and arrows, excited squealing (or is it howling?) and airborne toys - would sometimes require the music in my ears to be turned up to a compensating range of decibels. The paper is entitled "Adapting existing technologies for digitally archiving personal lives. Digital forensics, ancestral computing, and evolutionary perspectives and tools".

The last eating table I occupied was in a garden under the dappled sunlight of Wisteria leaves, in Freising, Bavaria, widely known in Germany as a place where religion and canonical activity flourished in medieval times and where the oldest brewery exists: Weihenstephan. Standing on the two principal hills respectively, the cathedral and brewery are not unrelated, as it was the Benedictine monks who established the brewery at their monastery, also known for its scriptorium and manuscripts.

This was just before my wife and I and our children set off for the Alps. I pondered the likely prevalence of Alpine internet cafés, but I (we) thought better of it, and decided to send the paper to the organisers of iPRES 2008 a week or so before the deadline. The moment I pressed the mouse to Send the email with its precious attachment and we saw that the Outbox had done its duty, we were like Beijing Olympics athletes springing from the blocks. Within a quarter of an hour we were in the car heading south, drinking tea poured from the thermos flask, the sun of the afternoon already looking feeble and clouds ominously dark, and the children tearful on parting from the dog with which they had played incessantly (dog and children would be reunited a couple of weeks later in another place). The holidays had begun.

Yunus

Returning to the theme of capturing a digital childhood (see blog entry for 19 May 2008), it is a real pleasure to be able to say that Dr Katrina Dean of the Digital Lives project has given birth to a baby boy. His name is Yunus and here is his photo (with permission of his mother and father).

Yunus was the principal topic of the Digital Lives team meeting today, and we send very many congratulations to him and his mother and father. We are looking forward very much to meeting Yunus soon.

Online survey fully launched

The online survey has been fully launched. It is being led by Dr Ian Rowlands, a founding Director of CIBER at SLAIS, University College London.

A link to the invitation exists for the time being on the front page of the British Library website. Otherwise you can go directly to the invitation itself.

Everyone is invited to complete it. Employees of the British Library cannot win the prize of book vouchers but are encouraged to complete the survey too. Many thanks to all who have already done so.

The design of the survey was a team effort involving members of UCL and the British Library.