The privatization of public memory: National archives and the monetization of AI data

“ In contradistinction those public documents which were issued in closed form under seal were known as “close letters,” litterae clausae.
Such public documents belong to the state archives of their several countries, and are the monuments of administrative and political and domestic history of a nation from one generation to another. In no country has so perfect a series been preserved as in our own. Into the Public Record Office in London have been brought together all the collections of state archives which were formerly stored in different official repositories of the kingdom. ”

“ The spreading desire to know something of paleography is very remarkable, and is much to be commended. For all persons who interest themselves in the documents to which they may have access in the possession of private persons, or in repositories not generally known, are helping in the grand work of making clear the laws and customs and mode of living of our ancestors, and thus constantly come across information, not to be found in our more public collections of records, which often throws light on many dark passages of history. ”

“ The UK’s galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAMs) hold an immense breadth of cultural heritage in trust for the public. In stewarding these collections, GLAMs produce new materials, like documentation, images, scans, data and metadata, research data and publications, and other types of media and knowledge. Many GLAMs extend access to collections and associated materials through websites or external platforms. Open access to digital collections is thus an essential tool to reduce barriers and enable wider public participation. ”

“ These, with the legislature itself, are the departments of government in which our archives originate.
Archives we have defined as the records, the business papers, of the province having a permanent value. All archives need not be of historical value in the narrow sense. Public documents may have a business or record value apart from history, yet it would be hard to say that any given document might not be found useful in some way in connection with history. The main value of a document is as an evidence of truth. ”

“ Federal record includes all books, papers, maps, photographs, machine-readable materials, or other documentary materials, regardless of physical form or characteristics, made or received by an agency of the United States Government under Federal law or in connection with the transaction of public business and preserved or appropriate for preservation by that agency or its legitimate successor as evidence of the organization, functions, policies, decisions, procedures, operations, or other activities of the Government or because of the informational value of data in them. ”

“ The bulk of this massive accumulation of documents relates to administrative matters, but there is considerable material on individuals that is too rarely explored by literary biographers. Although lacking the tradition of important discoveries made in the Public Record Office and thus not as well known to literary researchers, the National Archives repositories are an obligatory stop for biographers of writers associated with the federal government, whether by election, through employment, or under surveillance. ”

“ Modern technology now permits improved acquisition, distribution, and utilization of geographic (or geospatial) data and mapping. The National Performance Review has recommended that the executive branch develop, in cooperation with State, local, and tribal governments, and the private sector, a coordinated National Spatial Data Infrastructure to support public and private sector applications of geospatial data in such areas as transportation, community development, agriculture, emergency response, environmental management, and information technology. ”

“ To promote continued job growth, Government efficiency, and the social good that can be gained from opening Government data to the public, the default state of new and modernized Government information resources shall be open and machine readable. Government information shall be managed as an asset throughout its life cycle to promote interoperability and openness, and, wherever possible and legally permissible, to ensure that data are released to the public in ways that make the data easy to find, accessible, and usable. ”

“ In mass digitization cases involving books—Google Books and HathiTrust, for example—courts have largely focused on how those projects enabled transformative access to information by enabling text search, as well as research uses such as text and data mining. ”

“ Linked data and semantic web technologies promise the creation of new information by deep integration of an increasing number of datasets of growing complexity, and finding new ways of re-using them. It is not our purpose to examine all the consequences of the huge growth in the volume and scope of the data that researchers gather, create and use. Many of the implications are considered in the Royal Society’s report on Science as an Open Enterprise referred to earlier. [18] We note, however, that data is increasingly important in its own right as an output of research ”

“ All the principal nations of Europe, and even the Dominion of Canada, have an archivist, or custodian of manuscripts, responsible for keeping, indexing, and increasing these collections, whose importance as original documents illustrating the history and biography of the nation can hardly be overrated. ”

“ The people's governments at all levels shall enhance the archival work, incorporate the cause of archives into national economic and social development plans, finance the cause of archives with government budgets, and ensure that the development of the cause of archives is compatible with the development of national economy and society. ”

“ State organs, groups, enterprises, public institutions, other organizations, and citizens may, according to the need for economic development, building of national defense, education, scientific research, and other work, access to restricted archives of archival repositories and archives in the custody of organs, groups, enterprises, public institutions, and other organizations pursuant to relevant regulations of the state. ”

“ The creation of a common European data space for cultural heritage will give the cultural heritage institutions the possibility to build on the scale of the single market, in line with the European data strategy. It will foster the reuse of content and spur creativity in various sectors, with value for the whole economy and society. In particular, it will provide high quality content and efficient, trusted and easy-to-use access to European digital cultural heritage assets. ”

“ Linked to this, probably the biggest change is Wikidata: and how we now have our long wished for centralised data place, and can pull metadata, including links, images, etc., which means with some of our creating/updating of author templates we can auto-populate. Much of the power of that automated data is really still to come, and we still haven't been the best denizens there populating our data/knowledge. ”

“ Correspondingly, archivists present metadata as the most critical resource for preventing the small data cemeteries mentioned above from being merged into huge data cemeteries. At this stage it becomes clear that, even with direct community involvement in compiling the corpus, digital archiving does not comply to the ideal of a dialogical research exercise with no power differentials. Clearly, the researchers who formulate the metadata (specifying participants, location, genres etc.) ”

“ There is consensus among institutions that the future of this reciprocal relationship with data will be very advantageous and valuable as the catalog moves to new forms of discovery in libraries (Bartholmei et al., 2016) . In 2019, the Association of Research Libraries released a white paper by a task force of library professionals and expert Wikidata users with recommendations for librarians to use Wikidata to advance discovery of their collections, faculty, and institutions. Many cataloging systems do not produce linked data and cannot make data available as open linked data. ”

“ However, as I have argued elsewhere (Widlok 2010) , the new electronic archives are not simply a quantitative extension of existing modes of data collection, but they qualitatively alter the relationship between researchers and their products and, as a consequence, also the relations between the researched and these products and the relationship between researchers and their partners in the field. The new possibilities of Internet-based digital archiving and online databases are much more than "just technical" innovations. ”

“ Improving public access policies across the U.S. government to promote the rapid sharing of federally funded research data with appropriate protections and accountability measures will allow for greater validity of research results and more equitable access to data resources aligned with these ideals. To promote equity and advance the work of restoring the public’s trust in Government science, and to advance American scientific leadership, now is the time to amend federal policy to deliver immediate public access to federally funded research. ”

“ There are 4 billion cell phones in use today. Many of them are in the hands of market vendors, rickshaw drivers, and others who’ve historically lacked access to education and opportunity. Information networks have become a great leveler, and we should use them together to help lift people out of poverty and give them a freedom from want. ”

“ On their own, new technologies do not take sides in the struggle for freedom and progress, but the United States does. We stand for a single internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas. ”

“ Importantly, almost all of these mechanisms are aligned with more efficient and effective scientific progress: increased data use, facilitated credibility determination, earlier access, improved discoverability, and a focus on best work through data availability are good for both investigators and the science community as a whole. ”

“ The larger scientific community also benefits: sharing data encourages multiple perspectives, helps to identify errors, discourages fraud, is useful for training new researchers, and increases efficient use of funding and patient population resources by avoiding duplicate data collection.
Making research data publicly available also has challenges and costs. Some costs are borne by society: For example, data archives must be created and maintained. Many costs, however, are borne by the data-collecting investigators: Data must be documented, formatted, and uploaded. ”

“ Making it easy for researchers, students, and the general public to learn about and make use of the billions of items in our collection is clearly a challenge. Free and open access to the records of government will always be the work of this agency. ”

“ In the domain of Political Economy, free scientific enquiry meets not merely the same enemies as in all other domains. The peculiar nature of the material it deals with, summons as foes into the field of battle the most violent, mean and malignant passions of the human breast, the Furies of private interest. ”

“ They can use this information to improve their map accuracy, but Google has already announced that is going to use this information to track the correlation between searches and where you go. With 500 million Android phones, this is an enormous amount of information collected on the individual level about people’s habits whether they’re taking a casual stroll, commuting to work, going to their doctor, or maybe attending a protest. Certainly we can’t ignore the societal implication of so much data in the hands of a single entity, no matter how benevolent they claim to be. ”

“ Publicly funded institutions must not be transformed by the market logic of neoliberalism. The role of archives, museums and other cultural institutions, is more and more challenged by capitalism. They need to redefine themselves in ways that allow cultural commodities to be archived, described and shared in the frameworks of open access and open science. ”

“ West-style firms were famous for Cadillac-priced data. Opperman’s company had set up collections of court opinions and slapped a proprietary system of citations on them. The meter typically ran at $4 a minute or more, adding up to millions from Feds and taxpayers alike.
Haunted by a group called the Taxpayer Assets Project, the Justice Department had proposed an electronic database with public-domain citations to help users locate material. But West had lobbied away the plans. Nothing must deprive Al Gore’s friend, and so many other politicians’ friend, of a chance to turn a buck. ”

“ For agencies in the information business, such as the Library of Congress, the National Archives, and many others, the dual challenges of dealing with legacy formats and how to face a digital future have been overwhelming. In many cases, the agencies have turned to what they call public-private partnerships, so-called "no cost to the government" deals that have proven to be especially troublesome. ”

“ Because journals have become the de facto rights holders to the articles in which new scientific research is published, they are also in a position to license access to these materials to university libraries, research institutions, and the public—typically for a significant fee. This leads to a cyclical situation in which for-profit publishers essentially sell back access to the scientific and scholarly record that academics originally produced through public grants. ”

“ Private information is practically the source of every large modern fortune. ”

“ Another prominent feature is the love of ‘smart’ dealing: which gilds over many a swindle and gross breach of trust; many a defalcation, public and private; and enables many a knave to hold his head up with the best, who well deserves a halter: though it has not been without its retributive operation, for this smartness has done more in a few years to impair the public credit, and to cripple the public resources, than dull honesty, however rash, could have effected in a century. ”

“ The scope of the task, however, is massive and daunting. Even the best organized (and best funded) efforts, such as the Google Books project (currently the subject of copyright litigation [2] ) and the Library of Congress’s efforts to scan American historical documents, [3] can only scratch the surface. Indeed, the Library of Congress recently estimated that, at its present pace, it will take almost two thousand years to digitize the nine billion text records it presently holds in its collection. ”

“ At least one example extends this claim to even the persons depicted in the artwork. The combined effect across GLAMs is to significantly limit the ways in which the public can use digital collections for a range of typical purposes, as well as atypical and innovative purposes, like computational data and/or as a medium to create new cultural works and knowledge. ”

“ The policy does not consider that copyright in digital surrogates and data may frustrate these goals by erecting new boundaries that are geographic (e.g., UK copyright law) , cultural (e.g., Museum oversight around reuse) and economic (e.g., licensing fees to access and reuse images) . Instead it focuses on digital access (rather than open access) around an ambition “to create full machine-readable metadata and digital surrogates of our unique collections and make them available and discoverable online, and to preserve and safeguard them for future generations” (italics added) . ”

“ Good intellectual property policy will not save our culture. But bad policy may lock up our cultural heritage unnecessarily, leave it to molder in libraries, forbid citizens to digitize it, even though the vast majority of it will never be available publicly and no copyright owner can be found. Would you not prefer the world in which your children could look at the Library of Congress online catalogue and click to get the book or film or song that otherwise languished as an "orphan work"? Good intellectual policy will not necessarily give us great new music. ”

“ This is the real reason copyright gets extended, history repeats itself, over and over again, and "those who do not study history are condemned to repeat it." What they want is to ensure you do not study history, so they can do the same things over and over, because that is the easiest way for them to make money. Change, especially the kinds that are happening in the computers' world, is what scares them. When changes comes along, they try as hard as they can to keep things the way they were, and nowhere is it more obvious than now. ”

“ Daily politics cares little for the limitations imposed by constitutions or for the structural principle the Court describes—that we should leave facts free for others to build upon. Since 1991, a few database companies have lobbied the Congress strenuously and continuously to create a special database right over facts. Interestingly, apart from academics, scientists, and civil libertarians, many database companies, and even those well-known property haters, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, oppose the creation of such a right. ”

“ Opponents of open licensing fear reputational damage, which is the core currency for academics, and the erosion of academic citation norms, let alone the potential economic consequences for publishers. Yet the core questions that I will address later are, from the advocate’s perspective, whether the time-limited copyright monopoly, when free of financial gain, was ever intended to be used to protect the integrity of work. ”

“ It should be noted that a demand for such technologies creates a market for restrictive interfaces that replicate barriers to the public domain, rather than a market for permissive interfaces that support new types of public reuse, knowledge generation and innovation. The effect is to further direct public funding into a private sector that responds to such demand, rather than building new technologies that emancipate the potential of the UK’s outstanding cultural heritage collections and support public demand. ”

“ A huge part of what's missing is the technical tools and epistemic frameworks that will allow us to take our archives and make them accessible and allow greater engagement in them that will then create positive change in our societies. And to me, being able to involve a large segment of people in one archival creation and to activating those archives is a crucial step in building a democratic society. ”

“ An inevitable trade-off in this development is that researchers partly lose control over the end product and, potentially, so do their informants. The researcher may be able to discuss publications with informants before they get printed, and will seek consent before things are recorded and put into an archive, but there is no way that a constantly growing and changing body of data that is subject to collective work and revision could be controlled in the same way. ”

“ Technically, the question of access rights to the collected data is solved in the sense that the archive allows researchers to categorise their data into different levels of access. Funding agencies like the Volkswagen Foundation would like the default level to be set at open and public so that all data (and not just the metadata) is openly accessible unless a specific reason is given to make it a temporarily restricted source. In fact, most project teams tend to see it the other way around. They open up very few selected show pieces for which there is open access. ”

“ They increasingly reflect the expectations of globality and often apply mediation, task distribution, and interactivity. Electronic modeling is applied, simulation methods are tried out. The new methods of accessing information free the legislative politician from the time-consuming task of accumulating data. Consultants and staff members make use of powerful knowledge filters in order to involve in the political process only information pertinent to the subject. Politicians know that knowledge, at the right time and in the right context, is power. ”

“ In fact, political parties develop competitive processing programs that will give politicians pursuing their goals more convincing arguments in a public debate, or in discussions leading to legislative vote. The transparency brought about by means in the civilization of illiteracy ensures public access to the debate. The competitive edge is provided by the intelligent use of data. Power, that elusive aspect of any political activity, comes from the ability to process, not from the amount of information stored. ”

“ Whilst the benefits derived from the labours of discoverers, flows chiefly in the form of money into the hands of wealthy manufacturers, and finally gets locked up in the possession of capitalists and landowners, it is hardly to be expected that the Government will be in possession of funds necessary to promote research unless some such plan as this is adopted. ”

“ Politics has also to address the new forms of property and their impact on political values in the new pragmatic framework. For instance, the real power of information processing is in the interaction of those able to access it. One should not be forced to apply rules originating from the feudal ownership of language, or from the industrial ownership of machines, to the free access to information, or to networks facilitating creative cooperative efforts. The challenge is to provide the most transparent environment, without affecting the integrity of interaction. ”

“ Because the truth is that promoting science isn’t just about providing resources – it’s about protecting free and open inquiry. It’s about ensuring that facts and evidence are never twisted or obscured by politics or ideology. It’s about listening to what our scientists have to say, even when it’s inconvenient – especially when it’s inconvenient. Because the highest purpose of science is the search for knowledge, truth and a greater understanding of the world around us. That will be my goal as President of the United States – and I could not have a better team to guide me in this work. ”

“ As we peer into society's future, we—you and I, and our government—must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow. ”

“ And that's something that we need right now because historically, there has been, in the past half a century, there has been a very systematic process of destroying democratic institutions in the region. And our mission in creating new archives and documenting whatever is missing is that we are engaging a larger public in the democratic process of building new archives and activating those archives in order to understand ourselves better. ”

“ These quantitative analyses miss some important aspects of open access, however. This article will establish that providing access to people who would otherwise lack it is a crucial role for libraries in sustaining the public sphere. Libraries fail to make the argument for why they are a social good if they ignore the altruistic impacts of repositories. This is an important consideration for institutions funding repositories based on their institutional character or mission of social justice or social responsibility. ”

“ The sentiment, that there is a common property in the productions of genius, making possession a trust for the public welfare, will increase among those by whose taste and wealth they have been accumulated. Masterpieces will cease to be regarded as the selfish acquisitions of covetous amateurs, but, like spoken truth, will become the inalienable birthright of the people,--finding their way freely and generously, through the magnetic influences of public spirit and pertinent examples, to those depositories where they can most efficaciously perform their mission of truth and beauty to the world. ”