Launched last year, Open Folklore is a collaborative project to provide open access to resources for the study and enjoyment of folklore. Partners include the American Folklore Society, Indiana University Bloomington Libraries, Indiana University Digital Library Program, and Utah State University Libraries (strategic partner).

The project has already made significant contributions to the accessibility of folklore resources. Here’s just a few of the recent activities:

• The American Folklore Society’s Ethnographic Thesaurus was added in August. A full download should be available soon.
• A series of video tutorials was launched. The first tutorial is an introduction to Open Folklore’s search options, the second is a more in-depth look at how to find open access journals.
• Significant additions have been made to the American Folklore Society (AFS) community in the IUScholarWorks Repository. This includes annual meeting reports, annual meeting programs, and a large collection of syllabi for folklore and folklife courses taught by AFS members.

You can read more about the changes and new features on the Open Folklore News page and on Jason Baird Jackson’s blog.

These are major developments that are the result of what must be significant behind-the-scenes work by the project team. Kudos to all. But I am still waiting for the project team address the governance issues that will be critical to the long-term stability of this initiative. Without a real governance model, Open Folklore is a project, not a permanent resource. In light of the Authors Guild’s decision to sue Hathi Trust and five universities, it seems very prudent for the Open Folklore team to outline its mandate, vision, organizational structure, and financial foundation. Why not take a cue from some other open initiatives (e.g., Wikipedia, WordPress) and establish a non-profit foundation to carry out this work?

A non-profit foundation doesn’t just help improve governance, it helps ensure transparency and accountability. Hathi Trust’s partner institutions and consortia held a Constitutional Convention earlier this month and passed a ballot proposal that calls for the establishment of an effective governance structure, but doesn’t call for the establishment of a charitable-status non-profit foundation. Until then, the new Board of Directors is only responsible to its institutional and consortia members, not the public at large. One might argue that it’s the same thing since the majority of Hathi Trust’s members are publicly funded institutions, but universities are notorious for hiding their financial information. Since this work is being carried out for the public good, why can’t we be more forthcoming about the very real resources being committed?

As much as I find the actions of the Authors Guild deplorable, these initiatives must find a way to demonstrate that they are working with the system and not just pushing the envelope. Even if the Hathi Trust is partnering with rights holders as Jason Baird Jackson points out, there are clearly flaws in the system large enough to dismantle the whole thing. It would be a shame to see some early mistakes derail these laudable efforts to combat the otherwise unmitigated march to expand copyright protection.

You can subscribe to the Open Folklore news feed if you want to keep up on the announcements. For more on the Authors Guild suit, check out Kevin Smith’s open letter to J.R. Salamanca, the author of a book listed as orphaned by the Hathi Trust.

According to the notice posted on the ArchivesSpace Discussion List:

Questions must be received by 5:00PM EDT, Friday, September 16, 2011 and should be sent via email to Mark Matienzo, ArchivesSpace Technical Architect (mark.matienzo@yale.edu), and Katherine Kott, ArchivesSpace Development Manager (katherine.kott@gmail.com). Please format the subject line with the phrase “Question re: ArchivesSpace RFP – [overview of question]“. An email response or status of response will be provided by 5:00PM EDT, Friday September 23, 2011. Questions and answers will be sent to all known participants in the RFP.

Proposals are due by 5:00PM EDT, Friday, October 14, 2011. Proposals should be sent via email to Mark Matienzo, ArchivesSpace Technical Architect (mark.matienzo@yale.edu), and Katherine Kott, ArchivesSpace Development Manager (katherine.kott@gmail.com). Please format the subject line with the phrase “ArchivesSpace Proposal – [Business/firm name of respondent]“.

Exciting stuff. If you’re not familiar with the project, ArchivesSpace is a planned open source software application that combines the functional strengths of the two leading American archival collection management systems: Archon and the Archivists’ Toolkit. The project is supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and is a partnership between the New York University Libraries, the UC San Diego Libraries, and the University Library of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

More information about the project can be found on the http://archivesspace.org”>project’s website. Mark also gave an update on the project at SAA 2011.

I’m looking forward to seeing a) who the successful developer will be and b) how the project will evolve during the run-up to the beta release (slated for early 2013). There’s already been some discussion on the list about adding an external documents feature to the names module and possibly the subjects module. I would be more interested to see some kind of OAI harvesting functionality that harvested the metadata rather than link to it. That could be one way to bring collections management closer to authority control projects like Social Networks and Archival Context Project (SNAC) and Virtual International Authority File (VIAF).

Anyway, nice to see things progressing!

LCCN Permalinks are now displayed on authority record entries in Library of Congress Authorities.

To create an permalink you just add a LCCN to the LCCN Permalink domain name — http://lccn.loc.gov/. For example: http://lccn.loc.gov/n79018774 or http://lccn.loc.gov/sh85026371

The notice circulated on the EAD email list provided this explanation of how LCCN Permalinks work:

An LCCN Permalink retrieves a MARCXML-formatted record using the Z39.50/SRU protocol. Both valid and cancelled LCCNs (MARC 21 fields 010a and 010z) are searched. Authority record displays for LCCN Permalink follow the labeled display found in LC Authorities. MARCXML and MADS versions of the records are also available. Displays link to entries in LC Authorities and the LC Online Catalog — and, where appropriate, to entries in the Virtual International Authority File and LC Authorities and Vocabularies.

Additional information is available on the LCCN Permalink FAQ. I’m really interested in the idea of permalinked authority records, but it’s still a little hard to see where this is all going, especially for archives. I noticed today that the Archivists’ Toolkit doesn’t have a dedicated field for URLs in the names or subject modules and neither does ICA A-to-M. Even if there was a place to enter the links, what would you do with them?

I also wonder how these LCCN permalinks (and the LC Authorities in general) will interplay with other authority control projects like the Social Networks and Archival Context (SNAC) Project and the Virtual International Authority File project. The prototype for SNAC is enough to show the limitations of MARC encoded authority files and the benefits of Encoded Archival Context. And it creates more URLs. VIAF, on the other hand, is taking MARC to new heights, linking authority files from disparate national catalogues – and providing more URLs. Providing users with a handful of URLs to choose from seems confusing – there could be LCCN, VIAF, and SNAC URLs all coexisting – so it will be interesting to see how these various authority initiatives pan out.

Wiley

There is an interesting copyright case making its way through the U.S. federal courts. John Wiley and Sons is suing Supap Kirtsaeng, a Thai doctoral student who was importing foreign edition textbooks and selling them on eBay between 2007 and 2008. Wiley sued Kirtsaeng alleging copyright infringement under 17 U.S.C. § 501, trademark infringement under 15 U.S.C. § 1114(a), and unfair competition under New York state law. Wiley also sought a preliminary and permanent injunction under 17 U.S.C. § 502(a) and statutory damages under 17 U.S.C. § 504(c). Kirtsaeng argued that the first-sale doctrine – a copyright provision that allows the purchaser to transfer (i.e., sell, lend or give away) a particular lawfully made copy of the copyrighted work without permission – was a defense to copyright infringement.

The case went to trial and a jury found Kirtsaeng guilty of willful copyright infringement. The docket has a good explanation of how the jury deliberated:

At the end of the trial, the District Court charged the jury to determine whether Kirtsaeng had infringed the copyrights of each of eight works and whether any such infringements had been willful. The District Court explained that, under the statutory damages scheme found at 17 U.S.C. § 504(c), see note 10, ante, if the jury found that Kirtsaeng had infringed Wiley’s copyright, it could award no less than $750 and no more than $30,000 in damages for each infringed work.

The District Court identified two exceptions to this rule. First, the District Court instructed the jury that, if it found that Wiley had proved by a preponderance of the evidence that the infringement was willful, under the statutory scheme the jury had the option of awarding up to $150,000 in damages per infringed work. Second, if the jury found that Kirtsaeng had proved by a preponderance of the evidence “that he was not aware and had no reason to believe that his acts constituted an infringement of copyright,” the jury could choose to impose an award of statutory damages as low as $200 per infringed work. The jury ultimately found Kirtsaeng liable for willful copyright infringement of all eight works and imposed damages of $75,000 for each of the eight works.

Yikes. $600,000 in damages. Damages that were just affirmed by the Court of Appeals, 2nd Circuit. The ruling means that the first-sale doctrine only applies to works manufactured in the United States. Judge J. Garvan Murtha dissented, arguing that the ruling could allow companies to exert complete control over the resale of its products:

Even in the absence of a market allocation agreement between, for example, a publisher of the United States edition and a publisher of the British edition of the same work, each such publisher could make lawful copies. If the author of the work gave the exclusive United States distribution rights—enforceable under the Act—to the publisher of the United States edition and the exclusive British distribution rights to the publisher of the British edition, however, presumably only those made by the publisher of the United States edition would be ‘lawfully made under this title’ within the meaning of § 109(a). The first sale doctrine would not provide the publisher of the British edition who decided to sell in the American market with a defense to an action under § 602(a).

The first-sale doctrine has been part of U.S copyright law since the early 1900s so it is unfortunate to see it limited in such a drastic manner. And by the looks of the docket, Wiley’s counsel used some pretty dubious methods to get Kirtsaeng’s complete PayPal records – which included income from the sale of books by many other publishers – admitted as evidence. The Court had to remind the counsel that it “must be careful not to refer to these [unrelated] sales in any way as infringing sales, because that would be entirely improper.” Even so, it’s not hard to imagine a jury becoming comfortable leveraging $600,000 in damages for 8 books after it hears about 1.2 million in revenue for an unspecified number of books.

More:
Kenyon and Kenyon LLP – Does the Copyright Act’s First Sale Doctrine Permit Infringement Claims for Importing Genuine Works Made Outside the United States?

Library Journal – Court Rules First Sale Doctrine Only Applies to Works Manufactured in U.S.

Thomson Reuters News and Insight – Copyright Owners Win Broader Rights for Works Made Abroad

Here is the table of contents:

1 General (Last update: 6/15/11)

2 Country and Regional Surveys (Last update: 6/15/11)

3 Multiple-Institution Repositories (Last update: 11/15/10)

4 Specific Institutional Repositories (Last update: 6/15/11)

4.1 eScholarship

4.2 MIT

4.3 OSU Knowledge Bank

4.4 Other

5 Digital Preservation (Last update: 6/15/11)

6 Library Issues (Last update: 6/15/11)

7 Metadata (Last update: 6/15/11)

8 Institutional Open Access Mandates and Policies (Last update: 6/15/11)

9 R&D Projects (Last update: 6/15/11)

10 Research Studies (Last update: 6/15/11)

11 Software (Last update: 6/15/11)

11.1 General

11.2 DSpace

11.3 EPrints

11.4 Fedora

11.5 Other

12 Electronic Theses and Dissertations (Last update: 6/15/11)

Appendix A. Related Bibliographies (Last update: 6/15/11)

Appendix B. About the Author (Last update: 6/15/11)

Thanks Charles!

I’ll try to write more about the conference soon, but for now, I just thought I’d share a panoramic photo of the Toronto skyline as seen from one of the balconies in the Delta Chelsea.

Toronto Skyline on June 4, 2011

Was a pretty nice night out there!

The Outstanding Collaboration Citation:

recognizes and encourages collaborative problem-solving efforts in the areas of acquisition, access, management, preservation, or archiving of library materials. It recognizes a demonstrated benefit from actions, services, or products that improve and benefit providing and managing library collections.

You can read the Indiana University press release about the award here.  Congratulations all around, the award is much deserved!

Marieke Guy wrote a nice summary of Steve’s talk in which she notes:

“Bailey points out that we now find ourselves in a world where the responsibility for archiving much of our office 2.0 documents lays at the feet of 3rd parties. Documents are stored according to format and regardless of their communality of content, text documents are now stored on Google docs, videos on YouTube, photos on Flickr and so on. Although cloud services have brought us much flexibility they have left us with a Pandora’s Box, ‘no regard for preservation’ is one of the evils that has flown out. They are externally hosted services with very different agendas from ours, they may notify us if they are going to delete all our content but they don’t necessarily have to so.”

This is a challenging situation for archivists.   Steve is not the first to question the commitment third party service providers have toward digital preservation, nor is he the first to point out the “decline in our future professional role” third party digital storage is likely to bring about.  But rather than lament the situation or look inward for answers, Steve suggests we open a dialog with Google and other cloud companies:

“Perhaps we should actually stop to ask Google and their peers whether they are indeed aware of the fact that the future of digital preservation lies in their hands and the responsibilities which comes with it and whether this is a role they are happy to fulfill. For perhaps just as we are in danger of sleepwalking our way into a situation where we have let this responsibility slip through our fingers, so they might be equally guilty of unwittingly finding it has landed in theirs.

If so, might this provide the opportunity for dialogue between the archival professions and cloud based service providers and in doing so, the opportunity for us to influence (and perhaps even still directly manage) the preservation of digital archives long into the future”.

Starting a dialogue between archivists and cloud service providers is excellent advice.  But I question whether we have actually found ourselves in a situation where the future of digital preservation lies in the hands of these businesses, or even in the hands of the technology “the cloud” represents.  Cloud technology is already playing a role in digital preservation, but we are far from seeing private cloud service providers assume responsibility for preserving electronic records in the public interest.

I think, rather, that we are in a far more precarious situation where the future of digital preservation lies in the hands of a group of poorly understood concepts — public-private partnerships, open source software, and effective, non-proprietary standards.  And “the cloud” will continue to provide us with a false sense of security until archivists assert themselves in the digital world.

The Elusive Cloud

You hear about it everywhere these days.  The cloud market is predicted to explode in the next few years. Widespread adoption of cloud storage is imminent.  Google is experimenting with a new cloud storage service.  But what does it all mean?

For one thing, it’s not what you see in Microsoft’s new “To the Cloud” ad campaign.   The couple in the airport using some kind of remote desktop tool is not cloud computing.  Storing your documents using Office 365 or Google Docs is cloud computing.  But really, it all depends on who you ask.  Philip Delves Broughton offered a reasonable explanation in a recent Financial Times article:

Cloud technology clearly has a lot to offer businesses, organizations, and individuals.  But it also carries a significant amount of risk.  Companies like Google, Facebook, and even web hosts assume no responsibility they don’t absolutely need for their business to operate.   The internet is inherently spontaneous and content routinely appears, disappears, changes domains, etc.   The cloud just defies traditional concepts of what a record is, how it is created, and where it should be stored.

If you're looking for a host for your potentially controversial content, don't trust Amazon with it

Basically, the big risk with relinquishing control over your records is that you have no control over your records.  They are left in the hands of whatever business owns the servers they reside on, and more importantly, whatever dynamics affect the way that business operates.

Take Wikileaks.  After getting hacked, Wikileaks moved its website to Amazon Web Services, only to be pressured to remove the content.  When the company obliged, PC World asked “in an idyllic future where we make heavy use of the cloud, what happens if a cloud service provider removes content it deems inappropriate, or just doesn’t like?”

Needless to say, businesses are still wary of using the cloud for their critical data.  But all the forecasts about cloud technology remain true – it is playing an increasingly central role in how we work.  For many businesses, this will mean a hybrid approach that uses cloud technology for some content and traditional networks for other content.  This all means archivists must understand the intricacies of cloud technology if they want to be leaders in digital preservation.  (Since we don’t, Steve Bailey is absolutely correct that cloud service providers have digital preservation in their hands, for now).

Public Interest in the Private Sector

Steve began his paper with a reminder of what a collection of personal papers might look like if it was held by the various businesses someone interacted with.  He used the collection of Samuel Pepys, an 18th century diarist.  Would Pepys’ collection still exist if he entrusted it to the various businesses he bought communication media from (the tannery, the stationer, the cartographer)?  In chunks?  Perhaps, but in its entirety? doubtful.

Taking the metaphor “to the cloud,” what would a collection look like if an archivist tried to compile it from the various service providers someone interacted with?  Would their entire collection exist in 50 years?  100 years?

In these terms, it becomes clear that leaving any responsibility for digital preservation in the hands of the private sector would place those records at great risk.   For one thing, we have to assume most of these private companies don’t want to have that responsibility.   We are far more likely to agree to a terms of service with a waiver of liability than one with a clause about long-term preservation.  That’s usually because well-managed businesses are in general wary of taking on long-term obligations unless it brings profit or is necessary to operate.  Obligations carry risks, and risks increase liability.  Why would a business providing cloud services agree to be responsible for the preservation of content unless that’s what they were selling?

Suppose cloud companies like Google did want to assume this responsibility.  What would this look like?  Would it be unilateral agreements between a business and an archival institution?  Would archival institutions have to negotiate these agreements each time they acquire a collection that involves a new third party?  Or would businesses just publicly affirm their commitment to beefing up their digital preservation practices?  What would they do beyond simply storing records on their servers?  Would they seek advice from archivists and conservators or computer scientists and developers, or (hopefully) both?

I can’t think of any desirable situation where third party businesses would be left responsible for the long-term storage of electronic records, let alone the preservation of them.  I know there are many archives that have agreements with records storage companies, but that’s just a different situation than being comfortable with considering someone’s home videos preserved if the only copy is available on YouTube.  As democratic or open as the internet may be, the legal framework surrounding it – and electronic media in general – is way too fragile for archivists to just accept that private companies will preserve the records they are entrusted with unless preservation is explicitly accounted for.

Public-Private Partnerships in Heritage Institutions

This is not to say that private businesses don’t share a role in archiving.  The private sector has a significant role – from the production of communication and storage media all the way to archival consulting and conservation.  As the public purse tightens, it’s inevitable that the heritage community will turn to the private sector for support for core functions like preservation.

And there will be demonstrable results.  Google Books and Ancestry.com are just two examples of agreements between public institutions and private businesses that have yielded great dividends for the public, even if they have threatened the role of archivists and librarians in the organization and provision of information.  The Library of Congress’s decision to archive Twitter is another.

Archivists should really consider this type of agreement to be a public-private partnership.  The business is either contributing content, contributing storage and/or related services, or both.  There is a degree of risk assumed by all parties, and a public service is being provided.  These partnerships are controversial, but it’s clear that key decision makers in the heritage community are being swayed in their favour, because they are increasingly common.

I’m not advocating for public-private partnerships and I recognize that there is much to criticize about them.  But one way or another, contractual agreements between private businesses that operate in the cloud and archival institutions with an interest in acquiring content from the cloud will be an important component to the future of digital preservation, even for personal archives.

CLOCKSS is a non-profit joint venture that brings together scholarly publishers and research libraries

The growing presence of these relationships is already leading to new organizational models, which will invariably lead to new tools and procedures.  And as you might expect from the introduction of private interests, restricted access provisions are even being used as a carrot for long-term preservation.

One example of this is CLOCKSS, a non-profit joint venture between scholarly publishers and research libraries that makes use of LOCKSS technology. The program was set up “to ensure the long-term survival of Web-based scholarly publications for the benefit of the greater global research community.”  Content in CLOCKSS is only accessible when it is no longer available from the publisher, like when the publisher goes out of business or when the title is no longer available.  CLOCKSS calls these “trigger events,” and when the CLOCKSS Board detects them, it initiates a process that migrates the content to the newest format and transfer it from a secure server to a publicly accessible server.

In his discussion of the cloud’s role in digital preservation, Steve Bailey proposed the creation of a similarly structured public funded meta repository for online content:

“Maybe the interconnection of content creation and use and its long term preservation need not be as indivisible within the cloud as it might first appear. Yes Google’s appetite for content might appear insatiable, but that does not necessarily mean that they wish to hold it all themselves – after all, their core business of search does not require them to hold themselves every web page they index, merely to have the means to crawl it and to return the results to the user. Might we be able to persuade them that the same logic should also apply to the contents of Google Apps, Blogger, YouTube and the like? If so, might the door be open for us, the archival community through the publicly funded purse to create and maintain our own meta-repository within which online content can be transferred, or just copied, for controlled, managed long term storage whilst continuing to provide access to it to the services and companies from which it originated?

That way they get to continue to accrue the benefit of allowing their users to access and manipulate digital content in ways which benefit their bottom line, the user continues to enjoy the services they have grown accustomed to and the archival community can sleep soundly, safe in the knowledge that whilst service providers are free to do what they want with live content, its long term preservation and safety continues to lie in our own experienced and trusted hands”.

It really is an excellent idea.  It’s likely that partnerships and consortia like CLOCKSS will continue to shape the digital preservation landscape for the foreseeable future.  So why not create a global network of repositories to transfer or copy electronic content to?  If businesses can have a cloud, why can’t archives?  Why can’t there be a heritage cloud, mirrored in multiple locations to ensure its longevity?

Without a strong commitment from government, heritage organizations are left with a choice between failing to deliver on their responsibilities or delivering on their responsibilities with the assistance of the private sector.  This means more public-private partnerships.  If Google Books and Ancestry.com are any indication, these agreements have a better chance of success in the heritage sector than they might in built infrastructure or education. Who knows, maybe Google will step up and incorporate digital preservation into its philanthropic activities.  But archival institutions should tread carefully and stick to their core principles when forging these relationships.  And make sure that they are keeping up with the technology every step of the way.

(In Part Two of this post, I’ll finish with some thoughts on how the future of digital preservation also lies in open source software and standards)

This sounds really interesting.  I’m intrigued about what it could do for banjo researchers and for what kind of model it will be for other knowledge management activities in social sciences and the humanities.

The project description offers this abstract:

Few musical instruments are more closely tied or hold greater significance to American history than the banjo. From its West African roots, to its birth in the seventeenth century Caribbean, and through its meteoric rise in nineteenth century American popular culture, the banjo is an iconic instrument whose impact is woven into the cultural fabric of the American experience. As scholars, researchers, and enthusiasts continue to discover new information about the early banjo, there is no collective location to maintain, interact with, and collectively analyze this important data. The proposed Banjo Sightings Database Project (BSD) will combine rare and widely-dispersed primary source material (circa 1650-1870) with appropriate and innovative technological applications, resulting in a system that not only catalogs information about the early banjo, but also establishes an interactive, peer-reviewed knowledge management system, allowing users to explore the early banjo.

I can see this being a really useful research and discovery tool.  Greg is soliciting two kinds of feedback right now: (1) beyond the banjo, how might the broader implications of this project relate to your work or the work of colleagues? (2) questions or comments regarding the actual project or the white paper.

Collaboration

At the Association of Canadian Archivists conference last June, I presented a paper on the Helen Creighton collection, and one of the things I touched on was what a global registry of traditional music “instances” might look like.  In many ways, what I was discussing is what Greg is building for the banjo.  I would like to see a system that can hold information about traditional music, and I want it to compile information about a particular song – archival materials, museum materials, published sources, gray literature, recordings, etc.   He uses the term “sightings,” I was using the term “instances,” but the principle is basically the same.

So a lot of what I have to say has to do with the fact that what Piedmont Folk Legacies is building for the banjo is very similar to what I am experimenting with for traditional music, specifically the Helen Creighton collection.

I was pleased to see that in Section III of the report, Greg identified the need to establish collaborative partnerships as an area that required immediate attention.  Collaborative partnerships are increasingly becoming a critical component of projects like this.   For the Sightings Database to be successful, the project will require the sustained participation of key institutions and organizations.  It’s good to see that the project has identified the need to form these partnerships at an early stage, because when it comes to unifying information about collections held in different heritage institutions, Piedmont Folk Legacies is wading into uncharted waters.

The paper I presented on Helen Creighton was part of a panel on archival collaboration.  It was fitting because the collection is distributed across four different archives.  The lack of collaboration has resulted in a difficult situation for researchers and uncoordinated  preservation activities by the institutions that hold the collections.  I have found it especially difficult to compile information about the collections because the institutions do not have any kind of collaborative partnership to jointly manage the collection as a whole.  And that is just for one collection.   Even if the project does focus on the banjo as “test case,” it will only be a viable discovery tool if it is able to pull information about archival and museum holdings from many institutions.  This in itself would be a major feat.  If Piedmont Folk Legacies is able to create a viable prototype, it will also have succeeded in creating a collaborative model for heritage institutions.

The “Bigger Picture”

It’s not surprising to hear that many people who participated in the planning period of the project wanted to see the next phase focus on more than just the banjo.  The report notes that:

While all respondents of the planning period outreach exercise found value in focusing on the banjo as a “test case,” most generally preferred to see that the Project focus on the “bigger picture.”  As Project Director, the most pressing issue for Adams is to maintain a practical balance between these different communities of interest. First, he must answer to the knowledge-bearers and other stakeholders within the banjo community who desire that the “test case,” the Banjo Sightings Database Project, be fully realized. On the other hand, as the outreach efforts have clearly shown, listserv respondents and representatives of institutions within the DC-metro region, who represent broader communities and possess much greater infrastructure, desire solutions to knowledge management as part of the “bigger picture” and not necessarily based on the banjo as the “test case.”

The report seems to send contradictory information about what the advisory board actually said.  Section II notes that the advisory board “regularly revisited the importance of thinking about the Project’s broader applicability to music instruments in general and largely agreed that the banjo was an excellent test case because of its multidisciplinary implications.”  But Section III says most generally preferred to see the project focus on the “bigger picture.”   This is confusing.  Did the advisory board want the project to focus on the bigger picture or did it like the idea of using the banjo as a test case?

Adams appears to have concluded that he will focus on the former group, because he concludes the report by saying that “ultimately, this “test case” will serve as a model for how researchers collaboratively study the development, migration, transformation, and dissemination of any music instrument.”

I question the wisdom behind this decision. The advisory board had representatives for the “knowledge-bearers and other stakeholders within the banjo community,” so I’m not sure there are two communities of interest.  And while I completely understand the rational behind Peidmont Folk Legacies’ interest in a banjo database (the non-profit is best known for organizing a music festival for Charlie Poole, an old-time banjo player from Eden, North Carolina), I think the advice to focus on knowledge management solutions for music instruments in general is good.

Focusing on a system that can handle all instruments obviously increases the scope and variability of the information it needs to handle.  The schema for the database would need to be overhauled.  But this would ensure that the system is robust enough to suit the needs of all researchers.

There is also the issue of backwards compatibility.  A knowledge management system built for the banjo may not necessarily work as a model for other instruments, but a knowledge management system built for instruments would be capable of organizing information about the banjo.

Recommendations

Either way, I look forward to seeing where the project goes.  I have a few recommendations about how to proceed:

1. Abandon “Sighting” terminology. Referring to a text-based reference to a banjo as a “sighting” is a little confusing.  My experience is that researchers prefer terms that are familiar and unambiguous.
   I’ve been using “instances,” but I’m not sure there even needs to be a term to unify everything.  It would probably be fine to refer to a banjo as a banjo and a recording as a recording.
2. Incorporate descriptive and structural metadata standards. The current schema is very good, but I think the final product would benefit greatly from incorporating established standards.  This could be achieved by broadly envisioning the database as several interconnected sets of data described using appropriate content standards and encoded using appropriate description standards.  These might include:
   1. Descriptive Standards
      • Rules for Archival Description
      • Describing Archives: A Content Standard
      • VRA Core
      • Categories for the Description of Works of Art
      • International Standard Archival Authority Record for Corporate Bodies, Persons, and Families – ISAAR (CPF)
   2. Structural Standards
      • MARCXML
      • VRA Core
      • MODS/METS
      • Encoded Archival Description (EAD)
      • Encoded Archival Context (EAC)
      • Dublin Core
      • BibTex
        

   Standards will help ensure that whatever is built is scalable and capable of interaction with other databases and information systems.  This will be especially important if the database hopes to harvest information from other standards-compliant information systems.

3. Add references to banjo recordings. The one type of “sighting” I felt was missing was the auditory kind.  It would be nice to include references to recordings of banjo music.
4. Crowdsource. This would be a perfect project to investigate the feasibility of crowdsourcing description.  Or even harvesting data.  Especially if the database is supposed to inform the “bigger picture,” it would be great to incorporate some more efficient ways of populating the database.
5. Focus on the “Bigger Picture.” Again, I understand the rational behind narrowing the focus, but I do think the final prototype will be more useful if it is capable of handling more instruments.   It would open up the database to many more researchers and reframe what the “bigger picture” actually is.

If you’re interested in seeing where Piedmont Folk Legacies takes this project, Greg Adams has a Vernacular Music Material Culture blog where he will be posting updates about what happens.  It looks like Piedmont Folk Legacies plans on pursuing Level II funding.  Hopefully the next phase of the project is able to build on the current prototype database and address some of the broader knowledge management needs facing the heritage community.