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.
