From the IA: Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record

As if the often ruinous big publisher prices and unfavorable license terms weren’t enough to prevent libraries from building and maintaining a deep and sustainable digital collection, the move to streaming—and often deliberately excluding libraries from access—is also becoming an issue.

Luca Messarra (of Stanford University) and Chris Freeland and Juliya Ziskina (of the Internet Archive) have released a report on this issue. It’s worth a read.

“In today’s digital landscape, corporate interests, shifting distribution models, and malicious cyber attacks are threatening public access to our shared cultural history.

• The rise of streaming platforms and temporary licensing agreements means that sound recordings, books, films, and other cultural artifacts that used to be owned in physical form, are now at risk—in digital form—of disappearing from public view without ever being archived.

• Cyber attacks, like those against the Internet Archive, British Library, Seattle Public Library, Toronto Public Library and Calgary Public Library, are a new threat to digital culture, disrupting the infrastructure that secures our digital heritage and impeding access to information at community scale.

When digital materials are vulnerable to sudden removal—whether by design or by attack—our collective memory is compromised, and the public’s ability to access its own history is at risk. 

Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record (download) aims to raise awareness of these growing issues. The report details recent instances of cultural loss, highlights the underlying causes, and emphasizes the critical role that public-serving libraries and archives must play in preserving these materials for future generations. By empowering libraries and archives legally, culturally, and financially, we can safeguard the public’s ability to maintain access to our cultural history and our digital future.”

Current laws unbalance copyright to the advantage of rights holders and to the detriment of “the power to promote the progress of science and useful arts,” not to mention to the detriment of the sharing and preservation of the intellectual record. Knowing the details of the problem is important for working for change. Give it a read.