When the Internet Archive released its collection of historical software it was generally applauded by commentators in the blogosphere. Yet, one criticism seemed to prevail the enthusiasm. As it is the software collection is not easily usable. Browsing or searching the collection is difficult and time consuming since the individual items of the collection in most parts lack contextual information which would make the archive more easily searchable and would allow researchers and other users to make better sense of what they find. To be fair Jason Scott – the main person behind the software project at Internet Archive – noted this shortcoming duly in his blog post announcing the release of the collection. He acknowledges that the software collection is not yet perfect, but Scott makes a thriving call for people to dig into what he and his colleagues made available:

Where are the students of computer history who needed primary source material, downloadable images and PDF files of every description from which to make their thesis statements and reports?

I have to admit that I like Scotts attitude towards publishing this collection even if it’s not perfect to a great extend. Yet, what’s the digging of researchers, bloggers, or fans worth if it has to be done over and over again? Wouldn’t it be nice to give users the possibility to feed back their research into the archive and to let them contribute to improving the archive? Or wouldn’t it be great if users could easily create exhibitions out of the source materials in order to tell a story. For sure this is – to a certain extent – already possible for tech savvy people using the JSON API of the Internet Archive. But bottom line it’s not that easy and one has to put in some effort in order to realize this. Things become even more difficult if one wishes to use the holdings of multiple digital archives and libraries to put together his or her own meta collection for the purpose of publishing it alongside a research paper or thesis.

This idea is not entirely new. Back in 2005 Moritz Baßler proposed in Die kulturpoetische Funktion und das Archiv a method for studying cultures by assembling, structuring, traversing and linking archives. Thus he argued for the need to not just publish research outcomes, but their respective archives as well. Up until now this call seems to have remained largely unanswered in the humanities. However, with the Open Access movement gaining momentum and more and more digital collections put online it might be the right time to put Baßler’s idea into practice by working on standards and easy to use software applications that enable users to bridge the gap between research publications on the one hand and digital collections on the other. The question here is not so much about the dynamics and mechanisms of how research outcomes are becoming a part of digital collections eventually, but how to create, process, and publish meta collections of the resources individual humanities scholars or research teams rely on in their research, and how these meta collections could be used to augment the digital archives of our cultural heritage as a whole.

In the course of this post I pointed out some shortcomings of the Internet Archive’s software collection. Some are self-induced and I am sure they are working on them. Nevertheless the more general point I tried to make is not limited to this specific digital collection and could in my opinion not be solved by digital archives alone. It is rather a challenge as well as a possibility that is situated in between humanities scholars and digital archivists and digital librarians respectively. There are already some projects on their way dealing with these kind of issues. One that comes to mind is the Hyper Image project which is developed by members of the Lab. But I am sure there are more projects out there. Or at least there should! Any pointers?

Open Data excuses Bingo Card

Two british scientists have just been writing some great stuff on how to counter concerns about opening up data. Here is a pick of arguments i am sometimes confronted with:

Argument: People will misinterpret the data

- Document how it should be interpreted
- Be prepared to help and correct such people; those that misinterpret it by accident will be grateful for the help
- Publishing may actually be useful to counter willful misrepresentation (e.g. of data acquired through Freedom of Information legislation), as one can quickly point to the real data on the web to refute the wrong interpretation.

Argument: We might want to use it in a research paper

- I’ve heard this about datasets produced in crystalography
- One option is to have an automatic or optional embargo; require people to archive their data at the time of creation but it becomes public after X months. You could even give the option to renew the embargo so only things that are no longer cared about become published, but nothing is lost and eventually everything can become open.

If you find this interesting, you also have to read this great post on the Data Pub-Blog: Closed Data… Excuses, Excuses.