nakata - indigenous digital collections
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Indigenous Digital CollectionsTRANSCRIPT
This article was downloaded by: [University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign]On: 22 October 2014, At: 11:33Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
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Indigenous Digital Collections: An EarlyLook at the Organisation and CultureInterfaceMartin Nakata a , Vicky Nakata b , Gabrielle Gardiner c , JillMcKeough d , Alex Byrne e & Jason Gibson fa Director, Jumbunna Indigenous House of Learning , University ofTechnology , Sydney, PO Box 123, Broadway , NSW 2007 E-mail:b Researcher, Jumbunna Indigenous House of Learning , E-mail:c IT Manager UTS Library , E-mail:d Dean of Law , University of Technology , Sydney E-mail:e University Librarian , University of Technology , Sydney E-mail:f Southern Region Coordinator, Northern Territory Library , GPO Box42, Darwin NT , 0801 E-mail:Published online: 08 Jul 2013.
To cite this article: Martin Nakata , Vicky Nakata , Gabrielle Gardiner , Jill McKeough , AlexByrne & Jason Gibson (2008) Indigenous Digital Collections: An Early Look at the Organisationand Culture Interface, Australian Academic & Research Libraries, 39:4, 223-236, DOI:10.1080/00048623.2008.10721360
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00048623.2008.10721360
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INDIGENOUS DIGITAL COLLECTIONS: AN EARLY LOOK AT THE ORGANISATION AND CULTURE INTERFACE
Martin Nakata, Vicky Nakata, Gabrielle Gardiner, Jill McKeough, Alex Byrne and Jason Gibson
This article identifies and provides some commentary on the key issues emerging from research into the digitisation of Indigenous materials in collections conducted in collaboration with three state libraries. It situates the research project within the broader context of related activity aimed at addressing the ongoing challenges of access, preservation and protection pertaining to Indigenous materials in libraries. It examines some of the practical issues that institutions have to engage with to respond to Indigenous needs and interests in the digitisation process. Some suggestions for future progress in the area are made.AARL December 2008 vol 39 no 4 pp 223-236.
Martin Nakata, Director, Jumbunna Indigenous House of Learning, University of Technology, Sydney, PO Box 123, Broadway NSW 2007. E-mail: [email protected]. Vicky Nakata, Researcher, Jumbunna Indigenous House of Learning. E-mail: [email protected]. Gabrielle Gardiner, IT Manager UTS Library. E-mail: [email protected]. Jill McKeough, Dean of Law, University of Technology, Sydney. E-mail: [email protected]. Alex Byrne, University Librarian, University of Technology, Sydney. E-mail: [email protected]. Jason Gibson, Southern Region Coordinator, Northern Territory Library, GPO Box 42, Darwin NT 0801. E-mail: [email protected]
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In 2004, researchers from the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) conducted a review of the ATSILIRN (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Libraries and Information Resource Network) Protocols for Libraries,
Archives and Information Services.1 The protocols had been available for a decade, but no assessment had been made of their usefulness or impact. The findings were presented in 2005 to the ATSILIRN conference in Canberra. Many participants in that review expressed, or confirmed, a need for an additional section to give guidance on the digitisation of Indigenous materials. It was clear from these comments by professionals, and confirmed by a subsequent exploration of the issues in a 2005 evaluation of the Northern Territory Library’s model for Library and Knowledge Centres,2 that digitisation of Indigenous materials posed some complex issues for organisations. Briefly, for the purposes of this study, these complexities emerge in the intersections of Indigenous and Western knowledge management systems and between the expectations of Indigenous communities and professionals in collecting institutions. They include, for example, the challenges posed by the need to accommodate different access conditions for materials that contain sensitive Indigenous knowledge and by the need for institutions and communities to deal with conflicts around different concepts of intellectual property associated with Indigenous and Western knowledge systems. These complexities emerged in addition to the routine challenges being dealt with in the evolving area of digitisation practice.
The general literature has been growing in the digitisation area, as have national and international activities that focus on the digitisation of collections for enhanced access and preservation of high-demand, fragile or rare materials. The literature generally indicates a concern in the information profession about the need for consistent standards and protocols in digital repositories across institutions3
and includes discussion of the role of digital libraries and archives,4 intellectual property5 and copyright issues,6 digital rights management,7 knowledge webs8 and banks,9 changing technologies, and more.
Alongside these discussions, there is growing international demand for Indigenous knowledge10 and, in turn, concern to safeguard and protect this, including in the digital domain, as a vital resource of Indigenous communities.11 The UN has been active in this area12 and IFLA, more recently, has taken the issues on board through a Presidential Committee. At the ATSILIRN conference in Sydney in 2006 a small workshop was organised with ATSILIRN members and other colleagues to focus discussion on the emerging concerns, with particular regard to the digitisation of Indigenous materials in Australia.
While there is some confidence and progress with regards to technical standards for the conversion of materials to digital forms,13 there is still much uncertainty when dealing with other fundamentals, such as how to traverse public access and use of materials in the context of intellectual property and copyright regimes and how to respond to the needs and concerns that Indigenous people express about materials that relate to them. Questions in need of answers include:
To what degree do ‘generic’ practices and processes need to be adapted to ensure appropriate public use of Indigenous knowledge materials in digital collections?
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How will institutions deal with materials in ways that safeguard the interests of Indigenous peoples? What can be relied upon to inform best practice in this area? Will accepted practice deal satisfactorily with materials already in the public domain but which have contested Indigenous intellectual property interests? How will works whose copyright holders cannot be located (orphan works) be dealt with? What will inform consistent and fair processes when copyright expires and traditional knowledge information comes into the public domain? How will diverse or conflicting views within the Indigenous community be negotiated by institutions? How can institutions be certain that they are meeting the expectations of Indigenous communities?
The 2006 National Summit organised by the Collections Council of Australia to consider a framework for digital collections prioritised the need for consistent standards and protocols for digital repositories across the collecting sector for similar uncertainties.14
The priority for specific standards, practices and protocols for Indigenous digital collections is, however, still to gain traction in this process. This led the UTS researchers who undertook the ATSILIRN Protocols review to pursue a collaborative project with three state institutions: The State Library of New South Wales, the Northern Territory Library, and the Library of Queensland. The project aimed to provide a preliminary investigation of the practical issues being grappled with by institutions when digitising materials generally and when digitising Indigenous materials in particular. Our key objective was to gather a variety of institutional experience, with general approaches to digitisation and the fit within general approaches of Indigenous Australian materials, in order to highlight the issues and to describe some approaches to dealing with Indigenous materials in the digitisation process. On-site discussions and interviews were held with library personnel involved in all stages of the digitisation process, from policy development, through project scoping, selection of materials, workflow design and technical processes, ongoing management systems and issues, and Indigenous community consultation and communication processes. The personnel interviewed were identified by the institutions, but in all institutions there was also consultation with Indigenous library staff, including those not directly involved in the digitisation process but with broader roles in Indigenous heritage and reference services, client services and community outreach. The identification by staff of difficult or unresolved issues provided opportunities for further exploration of these issues to assist the development of protocols for dealing with them. To this end the project has also drawn from a range of sources of knowledge/information/practice/expertise to address some of these challenges.
Beyond this current project, the end goal is best practice guidelines for developing and managing Australian Indigenous digital collections. Our long-term aim is to extend the collaboration into another project to focus on the issues across
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cultural institutions that collect and hold Indigenous materials. A common goal must be, at the end of the day, to set high-level practices for engagement with Indigenous materials in all collecting institutions.
IndIgenous mAte s And dIgItIsAtIon Issues In p tICe
Digitisation of collections in libraries has been an evolving area of practice. Early on, the main, and practically necessary, focus was on technical issues and standards to achieve a consistent format in the digitisation of items. As these issues have been sorted and become part of established routines, other aspects of the digitisation process are now receiving attention. One of these is the need for focussed priorities and efficiencies in the design of workflows at every point in the digitisation process: from selection, through conversion and on into systems management of digital collections. The convergence of these demands on practice with those that relate to Indigenous items and collections generally adds to the layers that professionals must work through to facilitate access to Indigenous materials.
Legal and Sensitivity Issues: Indigenous-Western Tensions in Practice
As a general digitisation principle, libraries quite understandably prioritise for digitisation those items that do not require complex negotiations for permission to digitise. At the top of copyright criteria are items out of copyright or items for which institutions own the copyright. While this is logical and practical, it does not always work in the interest of Indigenous concerns.
Indigenous people now claim the right of ownership and access to their own cultural heritage.15 They claim recognition for their intellectual effort in the representations of Indigenous knowledge – collected from them, documented by others (often, in the past, without informed consent) and deposited in collecting institutions. As well, Indigenous people now seek access to this archive ‘about them’ for their own purposes. The engagement of Indigenous people with collecting institutions has drawn attention to the differences between Western and Indigenous systems of knowledge management. Indigenous customary rules for knowledge access can place clan, moiety, age, gender, initiate status, role and specialisation restrictions on access to certain knowledge. Increasingly, the original or descendant Indigenous custodians of knowledge held in collections seek to negotiate the terms of access and use of Indigenous materials through negotiations over forms of representations, attributions and appropriate use of some materials. Digitisation of materials increases the likelihood of inappropriate access to materials that should be restricted from full view to all but particular users. Set against this, there are many Indigenous materials that are buried in institutions’ collections which Indigenous communities wish to access more easily. Digitisation is an enabling technology that permits virtual repatriation without institutional relinquishment of heritage materials. Whether the aim is to restrict or enable access, however, Western copyright terms may be a barrier to satisfying the contested vested interests in Indigenous materials.
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To meet Indigenous expectations, institutions are under increasing pressure to assess the intellectual property status of Indigenous materials on criteria wider than copyright status. Two primary legal/ethical questions are raised and have to be given consideration: What significance or value does this item or collection have for members of the Indigenous community? And what Indigenous cultural and intellectual property rights are vested in an item or collection? These questions signal a consideration of an Indigenous priority or need ahead of copyright status. To uphold the Indigenous priority means that professionals are likely to engage with conflicting terms and conditions attached to the access and use of materials. When negotiating Indigenous interest with copyright interests, professionals find themselves moving between a rock and a hard place. If they ignore the terms and conditions of use to meet Indigenous needs or expectations, they risk infringement of copyright or of other applicable legislation. If they provide inappropriate access to Indigenous materials, they risk breaching Indigenous customary rights or offending Indigenous people by perpetuating the circulation of sacred, derogatory and racist depictions of Indigenous people. If they withhold materials because of these issues, access for Indigenous people to materials that relate to them is severely compromised.
Protocols for handling Indigenous materials help to uphold Indigenous interests by developing standards for ethical professional practice. However, they do not provide legal protection for institutions. Nor do they provide any legal framework for Indigenous Australians who want their cultural and intellectual property rights protected. So, in legal terms, developing ethical professional practice in Indigenous-Western intellectual property intersections is currently about managing a range of risks associated with breaches of both Indigenous customary and Western intellectual property rights, including moral rights.
Risk management can be considered along a continuum: from total avoidance of any contest between copyright and Indigenous interests (by withholding materials from digitisation) to one more open to the risk of breaching both legal and cultural principles, with the risk to be managed through sets of disclaimers, warnings, and mechanisms for withdrawal of materials that interested parties do contest. The other end of the continuum – business as usual and complete disregard for Indigenous interests – is, fortunately, not endorsed by the library profession.
Institutions had different approaches to risk management. One has been risk-averse but committed to getting appropriate and workable processes in place for managing Indigenous permissions before providing public access. This has included the development of institution-specific protocols in tandem with principles of the ATSILIRN Protocols. The current project, now underway, is to step policy and protocols down into workable processes for gaining cultural clearances to facilitate the digitisation of Indigenous materials. This work has delayed digitisation of Indigenous materials in the interests of maintaining good relationships with the Indigenous community.
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The other two institutions in this study have been more open to risk but employ a range of strategies to manage and minimise risks. These include a range of consultation measures and take-down policies, notably:
gaining verbal permission where possible if written permission is too difficult;notifying Indigenous individuals, families, communities;acknowledging permissions on the webpage;where the copyright holders or cultural custodians cannot be found, acknowledging copyright or cultural interests on the webpage and asking for people with information to come forward;using Indigenous professionals, community contacts and researchers for guidance;inviting Indigenous people in to view digitised exhibitions and responding to any concerns raised; andemploying an Indigenous liaison person to encourage interaction between the collection management or heritage sections and Indigenous people.
These strategies were used for determining legal and culturally sensitive judgements and for maintaining good relationships. Though effective, some shortcomings were acknowledged. These mostly centred on a lack of formal documentation, including the lack of detail of the various elements required for a clear process for managing risk. Documentation of these strategies and their inclusion in a broader risk management process were recognised as necessary to build consistent practice and to meet due diligence requirements. It was clear to us that practical guidelines are needed here.
Whatever the approach to risk that is taken by institutions, the questions to be considered in any practical guidelines are:
What processes will promote the most enhanced public access for the minimum of risk of legal infringement? What processes will be acceptable for the Indigenous community? andWhat processes will meet ‘due diligence’ requirements for institutions in this shared space of legal and cultural interpretation?
Two positions need highlighting when determining a course of action: Whose interests are at stake, and what is the risk being managed?
It may be useful for the profession if guidelines were to include a table to sort out the issues and to explore approaches to manoeuvre around the copyright issues in order to ensure Indigenous interests are upheld. This may help provide the sort of framework organisations could use to determine approaches in a range of cases.
So, for example, we can take a practice such as ‘avoidance of orphan works’, or a problem such as ‘item is significant but cultural custodians cannot be determined’, or a question about ‘derivative works’, and present briefly what that means from an Indigenous perspective, the professional perspective, and offer some best practice approaches to resolving the issues.
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We think it useful to then state what level of legal and cultural protection is being afforded via any approach. It has to be conceded that resolution is likely to be quite imperfect. In this case, both Indigenous stakeholders and institutions need to understand the risks and weigh up each other’s level of risk. It is also critical to understand what particular approaches mean for the digitisation process. What does it mean for the technical conversion of materials and the ongoing management of them in repositories or online? And therefore what information has to be captured? And when, and by what means, and where in the process does this information have to be captured and recorded?
In addition, the implications for managing complaints about infringements have to be built into any risk management approach. Questions for the process might include:
What has to be documented? What has to have formal agreement or broad agreement? What information has to be gathered about what is high risk material likely to offend or attract litigation?What information has to be publicly displayed? and What process has to be demonstrated and transparent to reduce legal risks and so on?
This is a way of instituting exceptions for Indigenous materials in the absence of, or ahead of, any appropriate legal provision in legislation.
We think that setting this out as a practical guide should also help dialogue between Indigenous and institutional stakeholders because it clarifies the positions of both, and situates the compromise in a way that promotes better understanding of all that is at stake. This space must be mutually intelligible and a common language needs to develop. So consistency is useful in this regard as well.
To encourage development of such an approach and to guide practice in this area, some professionals drew attention to the need for some supporting materials, perhaps by way of information sheets. These might well include:
Broad principles for due diligence for orphan works containing Indigenous materials;Ways to deal with in-perpetuity copyright when it inhibits Indigenous access;Creative Commons and non-exclusive rights issues and approaches for Indigenous materials;Constructing a take-down policy that works as a process;Examples of statements and disclaimers for various things;Examples of the sorts of information that need to be gathered at the point of acquisition or deposit of Indigenous materials, or at the initial selection point;Examples of what information to include in headers and footers of digital files, and the benefits of working towards that as best practice;Examples of what and how to include the existence of some items for searching purposes but not for viewing online;
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Lists of what not to digitise; andSummaries of the issues in Indigenous-Western knowledge management intersections that explain the Indigenous perspective; for example, Indigenous notions of in-perpetuity collective rights that adhere to inter-generational transmission of the oral knowledge tradition.
An Indigenous professional in our project argued that there needs to be some attempt at institution level to resolve the ownership questions more broadly. This requires acceptance by the profession that digitisation of Indigenous materials, as a matter of course, involves dealing with contested access and use issues.
Imp tIons foR the dIgItIsAtIon pRoCess
Although differentiated practice is seen by the profession to pivot on the legal and sensitivity issues, our conversations in the three institutions also drew attention to the challenges associated with incorporating these requirements into the overall digitisation process. That is, the thorn in the side of established practice is not just the onerous burden of gaining permissions and clearances to satisfy legal compliance and Indigenous interests. Attending to the legal and cultural sensitivities issues has an impact on all aspects of the decision-making process:
selection;copyright and Indigenous clearances;decisions about what has to be captured in cataloguing and metadata for accurate descriptions, for enhanced access, use and reproductions that also protect Indigenous interests, and for ongoing management and administration; andwhat it means for time and costs.
This is the case for all materials, but, because there are different and sometimes conflicting interests with regard to Indigenous materials, a careful approach is required to layer in Indigenous issues.
So professionals have to sort out, early in the digitisation process, the flags, prompts or pop-ups that identify Indigenous materials which then direct professionals to supplementary information or checklists that ensure appropriate practice is followed. These flags and pop-ups need to be inserted in, or related to, the standard forms, processes and workflow design of the decision-making sequence so that a routine approach to Indigenous materials can be streamlined within the overall digitisation process. This has to be done in a way that protects legal and Indigenous interests, which implies there has to be enough documentation of process to demonstrate due diligence in relation to risks.
For example, at the selection point for digitisation, a pop-up in generic selection criteria should ask the question: Does the item under consideration hold significance or value for an Indigenous group or community or contain Indigenous knowledge? This should refer professionals to a list of further considerations or checks which prioritise Indigenous interests:
Does this item/collection fit within Indigenous priorities identified in digitisation or collection development policies?
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Does this item/collection contain Indigenous cultural and intellectual property interests?Is there information attached to this item/collection?Does this item/collection require consultation with Indigenous professionals, community members, others? Does the significance of this item/collection to an Indigenous group warrant extra time and costs in gaining permissions and managing access and use?Does the item/collection lend itself to digital repatriation to the source community?
This would turn professionals back to look up a deposit form or, where there is no deposit form, to an additional process for gathering and recording the information required. Information gathering is important given that much Indigenous material is in heritage collections which may or may not be catalogued, and may or may not have an electronic record. In turn, that information would signal the need for further enhanced forms along the process, for example, in the copyright criteria or copyright clearance checklist, or in the short and long records for cataloguing and metadata, including for web accessibility.
So, whether we are collecting information at the deposit stage (the process for contemporary acquisitions) or whether we need to generate this information for materials already in collections, before a final selection decision can be made another checklist is required that sets out what sort of information is required about future access and use conditions, including digital access:
Who holds copyright?Who is the relevant cultural reference point, including inter-generational reference points, for Indigenous customary rights? Other information for identification and description of the materials so metadata can be developed to ensure appropriate access and risk management.
It is current practice in the institutions we visited to collect information at the time of acquisition and deposit, but some exemplars of best practice with regard to Indigenous materials would still be useful to enhance the information gathering process.
However this is approached, the management strategy must first be to indicate information capture, by establishing:
What information should be captured at the point of deposit or at the point of initial selection for digitisation? What should be reflected in the short/long record and in the technical conversion process, for example? What needs to be attached to the digital file? What needs to be reflected on web pages, or on downloads and print-outs and so on?
Secondly, the management strategy must also identify where more micro-sets of processes are needed along the digitisation process. For example:
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What is the process for permissions clearances? Who is first point of contact?Who is involved in final decision making in relation to an item? Are there different processes for different formats? What are high-risk areas to be avoided? What aspects of the process need to be formally documented, recorded, or publicly displayed to constitute due diligence?
Institutions that were managing risk identified another example where the micro-process needs to be clear. It is easy to ‘take down’ materials and name that as a risk-management practice. But it requires more work to build consistent practice that will also contribute to a due diligence approach. For example, what is the process to be followed for ‘take down’ of materials should there be complaints? A number of issues were raised about this:
Are they to disappear altogether, or would the Indigenous community and the integrity of collections be better served by blocking out and inserting an appropriate message, as, for example, AIATSIS (Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies) does? What if the item is still publicly accessible in other places, such as on Picture Australia, for example?What process should follow any ‘take down’ to assess if items should stay down, or if the request was unreasonable? How is the time frame for putting back up materials associated with ‘sorry business’ to be managed? What do all these issues mean for the technical conversion stage?
Whether institutions were risk-averse or risk managers, they had all identified the need for clearly-identified processes to manage issues relating to Indigenous materials. The difference among the institutions related to whether they were tidying up these loose ends before or after the fact of digitisation and upload for public access.
So, it is clear that any future digitisation guidelines for Indigenous materials need to attend to the issue of where points of differentiated practice have to be flagged in the workflow design and to the sort of information to be captured at these points to facilitate best practice.
pRIoRItIsIng IndIgenous mAte s
As noted already, legal and cultural sensitivity issues affect the selection process because they help determine what can be digitised and what cannot. This is a challenge for Indigenous priorities, because dealing with the intellectual property issues incurs more than risk. It incurs additional time and costs and can mean circumventing materials which might be significant to Indigenous people or might build useful Indigenous collections.
Different institutions organise selection criteria according to their collections and locations, but they have in common the consideration of the following:
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the content in terms of significance, intellectual value, and uniqueness; copyright issues; user demand for items/collections; the physical condition and format of materials; the availability of adequate descriptive information; andcost.
If the main focus of any planned digitisation activity, whether it be for an exhibition, of a particular collection, or of images, is on Indigenous materials only, then, in our view, generic criteria are acceptable because the decision to select according to an Indigenous priority has already occurred. Selection is focussed on choices among different Indigenous materials. Throughout the weighing-up process, selection is assumed to consider and support Indigenous needs, expectations, and interests according to priorities set out in policy. But digitisation of Indigenous materials also occurs when it is incidental to a larger project or a proportion of overall digitisation targets. This highlights wider selection and prioritisation questions relating to the basis on which Indigenous digitisation is considered amongst all the other competing priorities for digitisation.
Is it on a comparative basis with the broader Australian population? Is it determined by an investigation of what is contained within collections? Is it determined on grounds of general historical interest? Does it come up for consideration incidentally when other collections of general heritage interest contain Indigenous materials? Does it default to a collection development policy? Are Indigenous priorities set out in digitisation policy?
The point here is an important one from the Indigenous perspective.
Although the funding constraints in collecting institutions have to be acknowledged, Indigenous people do not, on the whole, accept the ‘percentage of population’ argument.16 Nor does the rationale that places Indigenous Australians as another ethnic group in the vast multicultural mix that is now Australian society gain much support in Indigenous circles. From the Indigenous perspective, Indigenous Australians are the first peoples, the original inhabitants. This uniqueness should not be bundled in with ethnic compositions. Almost everything that supported traditional social structures for tens of thousands of years has been turned upside down by colonial intervention and, as a result, many Indigenous communities remain in social, economic and emotional crisis. If the pattern of prioritising the needs of Indigenous Australians as if they were just one of many ethnic groups in Australia continues, then one clear fact of this approach must be owned up to – institutions still don’t know the extent of what is held on Indigenous people in cultural collections around the country. ‘Business as usual’ has proved this approach does not work.
Indigenous interest in the digitisation of Indigenous materials is not just based on a nostalgic yearning for the past, nor is it based on arguments about national significance. Digitisation is a practical means for reconnection with knowledge
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and information produced about Indigenous groups, collected from them and now dispersed through cultural collections across the country. This is knowledge and information Indigenous people want to access for future utility, for creative endeavours and, importantly, for emotional and spiritual restoration of a people.
Indigenous Priorities and Digitisation Policy
If the digitisation schedules in libraries are going to reflect some priority for materials that are significant to Indigenous communities and people, then something needs to be said about the connections between policy and priorities for digitisation and how these inform selection and decision making in the preliminary stage of the digitisation process. However, this does not necessarily mean developing separate policy and guidelines in the area. That approach creates an unnecessary duplication of work, and we doubt that it helps in the day-to-day practice of busy professionals.
We consider it more efficient, and more encouraging for inclusion of Indigenous issues as core business, if primary policy positions include specific reference to Indigenous materials within them. This already occurs at some levels, for example, in collection development policy in the institutions we visited. Indeed, institutions articulated Indigenous collection development priorities very clearly and quite comprehensively in general policy. It would be strategic, however, to extend this to digitisation policy areas and to best practice digitisation guidelines.
some ConCLudIng RemARks
There are some key critical points which future institutional activity needs to address. Firstly, from the institution’s perspective, the legal and sensitivity issues are reported to be the major point of disjuncture from standard digitisation processes. These issues are central to Indigenous people as well, in order to ensure appropriate preparation, handling and management of materials. However, they can also work to reduce the selection of Indigenous materials, and, therefore, the value of Indigenous digital collections for Indigenous people. The immediate task is to focus on resolving some of these issues through the development of guides and procedures in the next project and to test them over a period of time in a greater number of cultural organisations to inform sustainable configurations for Indigenous virtual repositories.
Secondly, the Indigenous preference, without a shadow of doubt, would be to begin at a different primary point for selection – that is, the need for Indigenous access and use of Indigenous materials in collections. This underlines the urgent need to identify Indigenous materials in collections. While we can say this objective is assumed by institutions, and while it is the case that this informs all that they do, progress towards this goal is patchy. So, as practice moves forward, it is all-important that the broader goal of Indigenous access to materials held in collecting institutions is not submerged in the process of working out the micro-issues of managing the digitisation process.
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Finally, it is important to ensure that digitisation of Indigenous materials progresses as a higher priority despite legal and cultural sensitivity challenges. One way to ensure this is to place emphasis on the digitisation of Indigenous materials for preservation. The grounds for prioritisation would be that Indigenous materials constitute the documentary heritage of the first peoples of Australia and, therefore, hold unique significance both for the nation and for Indigenous Australians. As such, they form an important basis for the ongoing Australian narrative. These materials need to be preserved for future access and preservation in digital form. Beginning from this premise means that materials can be identified and made domain-ready in preparation for another layer of decision making around the terms, conditions and technologies for access. In this way we can also build the rationale for a national approach, which can be supported by the federal government, to accommodate the networked approach necessary to connect Indigenous peoples and communities to their materials now scattered across institutions.
ACknowLedgement
The authors would like to acknowledge and express appreciation for the assistance given to them by the management and staff of the State Library New South Wales, State Library of Queensland and the Northern Territory Library.
A Byrne, A Garwood, H Moorcroft & A Barnes Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Protocols for Libraries, Archives and Information Services Canberra ALIA 1995; M Nakata, A Byrne, G Gardiner, V Nakata ‘Mapping the Impact of the 1995 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Protocols for Libraries, Archives and Information Services’ unpublished report Sydney UTS 2005.
M Nakata, V Nakata, J Anderson, V Hart, J Hunter, S Smallacombe, C Richmond, B Lloyd & G Maynard Evaluation of the Northern Territory Library’s Libraries and Knowledge Centres Model Darwin Northern Territory Library 2006 at http://www.ntl.nt.gov.au/_data/assets/pdf_file/0018/4680/nakata_finalreport.pdf
Declaration of Principles from the World Summit on the Information Society, Building the Information Society: A Global Challenge in the New Millennium UN Document WSIS-03/Geneva/Doc/4-E, 12 December 2003 at http://www.itu.int/wsis/docs/geneva/official/dop.html
For example, P Brophy Digital Library Research: Final Report London Library and Information Commission 1999; G Chowdhury & S Chowdhury ‘Digital Library Research: Major Issues and Trends’ Journal of Documentation 1999 vol 55 no 4 pp409–448.
R Sullivan ‘Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property Rights: A Digital Context’ D-Lib Magazine 2002 vol 8 no 5 pp1-6.
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notes
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E Hudson & A Kenyon Copyright and Cultural Institutions: Short Guidelines for Digitisation Melbourne IPRIA 2005.
For example WIPO Copyright Treaty 1996 at http://www.wipo.int/documents/en/diplconf/distrib/94dc.htm and US Digital Millennium Copyright Act 1998 at http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=105_cong_bills&docid=f:h2281enr.txt.pdf
For example The Knowledge Web 2004, UK Museums, Libraries & Archives at http://www.mla.gov.uk/resources/assets//I/iik_kw_pdf_5292.pdf
For example, Knowledge Bank: A Knowledge Sharing Resource for Victorians in Education at http://www.sofweb.vic.edu.au/knowledgebank/
For example, M Nakata ‘Indigenous Knowledge and the Cultural Interface: Underlying Issues at the Intersection of Knowledge and Information Systems’ IFLA Journal 2002 vol 28 no 5/6 pp281-291.
For example, J Anderson ‘Indigenous Knowledge and Intellectual Property: Access, Ownership and Control of Cultural Materials‘ Unpublished Part A-Research Report to AIATSIS 31 March 2006; J Anderson ‘Access and Control of Indigenous Knowledge in Libraries and Archives: Ownership and Future Use’ Paper presented for the American Library Association and the MacArthur Foundation, New York Columbia University 2006; E Hudson, Cultural Institutions, Law and Indigenous Knowledge: A Legal Primer on the Management of Australian Indigenous Collections Melbourne IPRIA 2006; T Janke Our Culture Our Future: Report on Australian Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property Rights Surrey Hills Michael Frankel & Co 1998; D Mellor and T Janke Valuing Art Respecting Culture Sydney National Association for the Visual Arts Ltd 2001.
See annex to WIPOGRTKF/IC/9/5 Revised Provisions for the Protection of Traditional Knowledge: Policy Objectives and Core Principles 2006 at http://www.wipo.int/edocs/mdocs/tk/en/wipo_grtkf_ic_9/wipo_grtkf_ic_9_5.doc; J Anderson Framework for Community Protocol Canberra AIATSIS 2006.
Liauw Toong Tjiek ‘Desa Informasi: The Role of Digital Libraries in the Preservation and Dissemination of Indigenous Knowledge’ The International Information and Library Review 2006 vol 38 pp123-131.
Collections Council of Australia Summit 2006 – Digital Collections at http://www.collectionscouncil.com.au/summit+2006+-+digital+collections.aspx
M Nakata & M Langton (eds) Australian Indigenous Knowledge and Libraries Canberra Australian Academic & Research Libraries 2005.
See Australian Indigenous Digital Collections: First Generation Issues 2008 at http://hdl.handle.net/2100/631
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