‘A Future for the Past – Cultural Heritage in a Digital World’: The first publication by the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek
A conversation with the publishers Ellen Euler and Paul Klimpel
‘Technology transforms our world. In the last twenty years we have seen how all-pervasive digital technologies and their interlinking on the World Wide Web have brought about enormous changes in almost every area of life. Culture is not immune to these developments.
Archives, museums, libraries and scientific and conservational institutions alike are facing huge challenges. How are they to fulfil their social function in a changing and shifting environment? Within what kind of framework are they operating and how does this framework help or hinder the process of giving our past a future?’
The first joint publication to be produced by the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek and iRights Media is now addressing these questions. The book is being launched at the Leipzig Book Fair on the day of its publication, 12.03.2015.
In the run-up to its appearance we spoke with the two publishers, Ellen Euler and Paul Klimpel, on the background to the book and what we could expect it to contain. (Contact iRights media to reserve a copy)
*Dr. Ellen Euler is Deputy General Manager of the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek and an authority on copyright issues.
*Dr. Paul Klimpel is a lawyer, Head of iRights lab Kultur and President of the international ‘Shaping Access!’ conference.
Your publication ‘A Future for the Past – Cultural Heritage in a Digital World’ is about to appear. Frau Euler, Herr Klimpel, how did the book come to be written?
Ellen Euler: ‘The Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek acts as a catalyst for all the efforts going on to digitise culture and science. It promotes the discourse on the technical and socio-political aspects of digitisation and is also leading the way and shaping the process. The idea is that the publication will show how far we’ve come in creating a world in which every citizen can access the cultural heritage of the world from the comfort of a PC.’
Paul Klimpel: ‘The discourse is a very intensive one and has been conducted with great dedication over recent years. I thought it was important that we took stock of what the discourse had achieved so far, so that we didn’t have to keep hashing over the same issues from square one. I think we’ve reached a point which we can – and must – build on. As such the publication is an important first step but definitely not the end of the discourse and certainly not the last publication to appear on the subject.’
The publication is a collection of articles by industry experts on a broad spectrum of themes relating to the digitisation of cultural heritage. Could you say a few words on how the publication is structured and what topics it addresses? What areas are the authors familiar with?
Ellen Euler: ‘The publication starts with a culture and socio-political section that deals with public responsibility, social tasks and commitment from the private sector. That’s followed by a technical section concerned with the rules governing networking and the final part is given over to a discussion of the legal framework. These legal conditions have to be tweaked to accommodate the digitisation of cultural heritage. The authors involved work for institutions that are at the forefront of this process and have done a lot for the cause of digitisation or shown themselves to be capable of lateral thinking.’
Paul Klimpel: ‘Aside from the many articles, we have also printed material that has cropped up repeatedly in the discourse and which forms, and will continue to form, the basis for the discourse but to date has received very little exposure. For instance, we have a contribution by an expert from the European Union, a position paper from the German Museums Association and the recommendation of the big cultural institutions for the Berlin Declaration. The book also includes a fascinating series of photographs by Jürgen Keiper, who is studying the digitisation process within the institutions. Institutions are real, analogue locations and the photographs have done a beautiful job capturing the tension between the transient nature of digital material and incorporeality on the one hand and the materiality and concrete spatiality of digitisation processes on the other.’
What specific challenges do cultural and scientific institutions face, once they have opted to digitise their material? Does the publication set out to be – or is it able to be – a guide on how to proceed?
Paul Klimpel: ‘The challenges are threefold. First there’s the technical challenge: museums, archives and libraries have their own specific areas of expertise but usually their know-how doesn’t extend to information technology or programming. So the book has a few articles on data modelling and the kind of networking rules that are needed.
Then there are the challenges at an organisational level. The integration of a web service into a database involves a chain of tasks that bears no resemblance to the looking up of facts and photocopying and scanning that a scientist used to do in the past. Digitisation has changed our work processes, which in turn is affecting our organisation. We were barely able to touch on that aspect, though.
The third level is made up of the legal challenges that come with digitisation.
Now that we’re engaged in digitising and making material accessible in the digital medium, now that everything relating to digitisation is, by nature, a copy of something and hence has some form of copyright implication, these institutions are faced with the task of settling legal questions. They have no expertise in the matter, nor do they have the funds to do so or the capacity to fully resolve these tricky issues. In fact I’ll go further and say that it’s really not what they are there to do. They are there to make cultural heritage accessible and not to spend time settling legal questions. Which is why the framework conditions should change to allow cultural institutions to fulfil their mandate and should relieve them of the burden of settling points of law.’
Ellen Euler: ‘There’s a need for an institutional update on all levels. The publication cannot be a set of guidelines and shouldn’t try to be. It’s a snapshot of the discourse so far, but we’re certainly also thinking of making it a platform for the discussion of experiences. There are best-practice examples and one can build on what’s there and on what has already proven successful.’
Frau Euler, Herr Klimpel, you are not just the publishers; you also appear as authors. Can you tell us what issues you have addressed in your articles?
Paul Klimpel: ‘I wrote on the uncertainty surrounding the copyright status of older works. It’s not just with orphan works where it’s unclear who was the author and who transferred the rights to whom and who owns them now. This uncertainty exists for all older works, especially because user rights relating to digital evaluation were never an issue back then and in many cases weren’t transferred. That means we can formally say the following: we need to have a clear chain of copyright starting with the author, who transfers his user rights to someone, who transfers them to a third person, and so on to a fourth, so that at the end it’s quite clear whether we have a certain freedom or not.
In practice, though, we’re often working with fictions. You enter into an agreement with a holder of certain rights, where it seems plausible that he owns the rights. But in copyright law there is no such thing as a bona fide purchaser or transferee. Just because you’re confident that you’ve signed an agreement with the right person doesn’t mean that you have secured the user rights. My article is about this discrepancy between law and reality and the role of fiction in the ascription of rights.’
Ellen Euler: ‘We are of the opinion, along with Thomas Dreier, a well-known professor of copyright law, that the human right to cultural participation in the 21st century, the digital century, encompasses access to culture and knowledge. Digitisation is not just nice to have, it’s a must have, and cultural institutions are obliged to digitise cultural material and make it accessible.
On the other hand, this human right also extends to the protection of cultural services, so it works both ways. There has to be an effective law covering copyright and patents. In the analogue world the interests of participants on the one hand and protectors on the other are in healthy equilibrium, but in the digital environment the balance is upset. In other words, everything you do in the digital medium is simultaneously a replication, with a legal implication for user rights that depends on the indulgence of the rights holder, if no one can claim privilege.
A practical example: if I acquire a physical book, I can lend it to whomever I please, I can give it away, I can do whatever I want with it. If I acquire an e-book, the owner of the rights – the publisher – decides how I can use the book, i.e. how many devices I can read it on and how often I can view it. The same goes for libraries, which have wide-reaching freedom to make stuff freely available in the analogue sphere due to library royalties. In the digital sphere it’s a different story; the freedoms are different to those in the analogue environment. But here, too, there has to be enough scope for an artistic, creative approach to culture and knowledge, in order to facilitate the production of new material. Professor Dreier and I have looked at the real-life case of Onleihe and the Virtual Exhibitions and shown what it means in practice and what has to be done.’
Paul Klimpel: Another thing, since the book was cited as an example: this book is special insofar as the articles are all ‘open-licence’ texts (Editor’s note: Creative Commons attribution licence CC BY). They can and should be copied in both analogue and digital mediums because we have an active interest in the book’s contents being propagated widely.’
‘A Future for the Past’: let’s round the interview off with an appraisal. What’s your assessment of the current state of the digitisation of cultural heritage and how do you see it in the future?
Paul Klimpel: ‘It has to be said that the process is still in its infancy. Only a minute percentage of material has been digitised so far. If we are to make great strides, I’m convinced that we have to first alter the legal framework. Whether it’s the United States or Norway, the countries that are further along the road of digitisation, where the entire inventory of the national library has been digitised, have only been able to do that because they have legal frameworks that make it possible.
As long as we lag behind on this, increasing our funding won’t help at all, because the sticking point will always be the same. And I’m hoping that people will become more aware of this, since we know of countries where the tangled process of balancing legal interests and fixing them in legislation is further advanced and where pragmatic solutions have been found.’
Ellen Euler: ‘If you ask me, the digitisation of cultural heritage is irreversible. Some people may regret this, but you have to make allowances. There’s an expression that perhaps best describes the status quo: ‘The old beauty is no longer true, and the new truth is not yet beautiful.’ That’s to say: the transformation is not yet under wraps and we still have to get used to the shapes and forms of this new digital participation. Twenty years on and we’re still newbies in all this. But that’s a good thing: we still have a chance to steer the process and do things properly.’
Do you have a query or comment relating to this discussion? We like to receive feedback w.hauschildt [at] hv.spk-berlin.de (subject: Feedback%20Publikation) (via Mail), on Twitter orFacebook!
Press Release Book Launch and Reception 'A Future for the Past'; Leipzig Book Fair