David Germano, Priscilla Offenhauer and Joanne Rudof

QUESTION: A question for David... Since you're constructing this very wonderful and complex publication, do you have a plan for a kind of long-term archiving and preservation of it? Where will it be ten years from now?

DAVID: That's been one of the major issues that haunts all of these projects is where they sit ten years from now and how they're sustainable and what happens when the car hits me as I walk out of this building and so forth. And we've been trying to address these in a variety of manners. Basically, the project in its current incarnation has existed for five years and -- with the roots going back a little bit farther. So, during those five years, we've confronted a number of sets of problems and for the next five years, we have a different set of problems.

The way we've been addressing that is in several different ways. One is all of the work I've tried to key to the library, per se, because the library at the University of Virginia is really the place to be thinking about where these materials get collected. What's astonishing is there are so many high-profile faculty projects that are out there that are almost exclusively digital, nobody's collected them. They don't have any kind of permanent home anywhere, including projects that you would hardly believe about it; you've heard so often they're so elaborate and so forth.

So we've really been focused from the start on working together with the library, with selectors, with people in different digital settings, and so forth, with the idea of these materials being collected, at the very least, by the University of Virginia Library so they sit in their permanent repositories, even as we may continue to develop them in more provisional work spaces or play spaces off to the side. So that's one strategy that we've tried to pursue.

The other strategy has been, until now, with all of these hundreds of projects, I've been the only person who knows them all and has something to do with each one of them. So what we've been trying to do right now, is kind of regularize the process by which review takes place within the process. Not simply like the review of scholarly pieces, but also the review of projects: the review of when we take a project that's been going on for five years and we decide, okay, this version is going to be collected, then to set up a process of how this gets reviewed, who is the gatekeeper for the initial admission of projects, and so forth. So we've been trying to set up an administrative hierarchy that's flexible, but also one anybody could just drop out of and still there would be a kind of institutional consortium of people involved that would allow this process to keep moving. So those are perhaps two of the larger ways that we try to deal with this.

Also, everything we've done, for the most part, is open-source and we have been successful at getting people involved. A lot of us talk about open source, but we don't actually pursue open source as a social practice, we just say it's open source. So we've tried very hard to register everything we do within source forage or other open-source repositories in trying to get programmers involved. That's more of a financially sustainable issue. And we have been successful at getting people to simply volunteer massive amounts of time because of those commitments and because of following, you know, standards and registering things properly, and so forth.

QUESTION: A number of the archives that we've talked about today are things that serve double-duty: One for scholarship, but also, an increasing number of them seem to be for other purposes, like the prosecution of war crimes, addressing human rights issues, those kinds of things. Our standards for preserving archives have always been shaped by the library community. I wonder, is there any standard for evidence coming from these other entities, like tribunals, World Court, that kind of thing? Because it seems like part of the reason, at least, that we're preserving some of these things is for litigation or government action. It seems to me that's a different user behavior than what we're used to.

RUDOFF: Maybe I didn't dwell on that enough - I may have passed a remark. Basically, we don't supply the evidence, if you will, but we forward a letter, because we protect the anonymity of the people who have given us testimonies. But if someone in the Office of Special Investigations of the Department of Justice says to us we've done some research in your database and we've identified, potentially, fifteen witnesses who may be able to testify in a deportation hearing, they will forward a letter to us. We will forward a letter to these fifteen people. And part of our cover letter is you can respond or not respond. But that's as far as it goes. The testimony itself is not evidentiary, in any sense of the word.

QUESTION: Right, but there are other things like the statistics on human trafficking. Some of the archives in human rights organizations that were spoken about at a conference a couple of months ago at Duke University are things that have really great dual purpose: they're for history, but they're also for action. I'm sure that the World Court will accept microfilm as evidence, but will they accept digital and to what extent? What kind of requirements would they impose on the integrity of evidence that's presented in digital form or preserved in digital form. It has a lot to do with what we're losing or whether we're losing important content.

KIERNAN: Just a couple of quick points. One is that often documents have to be authenticated by expert witnesses, so there's a combination of different media that lawyers use. In fact, the major problem that we came across was prosecutors, or potential future prosecutors, saying please don't go and interview people, because that might contaminate their future testimony. If they've already been interviewed once and a record's been established, the defense might use it to show inconsistencies, and so on. But in terms of records and documents that already exist, I don't think it's such a large problem, as long as the original exists somewhere, it can be used in the authentication of the testimony.

QUESTION: So it will link back to the original, the chain of evidence, is, so to speak, the important test, part of the standard, I guess.

KIERNAN: Right, The Chain of Custody.

QUESTION: This is part observation and perhaps partly a question to consider and it builds on what's just been said. I'm wondering how both historians and the other researchers, the academics who are using new materials, searching out archives that may be in danger, and the librarians and archivists who are working with them, how we can build a consciousness, an awareness, amongst the people who are producing this material and preserving it. And, Graham, as part of your own activity, the importance of keeping the source material in its place of origin, that we want to be very respectful to that principle, yet, at the same time, how do we inculcate an understanding among the originators themselves that they need to preserve this material? How they can preserve it. What can we do? Pricilla, when you go and read some of these websites which you feel were going to disappear, do you talk to the people who've created them and communicate in some way?

PRICILLA: No. In putting together this presentation, I realized I don't do that. I've just been kind of taking the model from the pre-web-based sources and applying it, with uneasiness, to what I use now, without actually doing any consulting. Even the things that I assume are stable, like government reports, I've never attempted to track down and really ascertain whether they are or not, if they're produced by those authoritative organizations. So I realize that that's a gap in the way I've been thinking about using web-based materials.

The other thought that occurred to me in this is that the originators, say, in the State Department or the UN or whatever need an awareness of longevity and how to get it, and I, as a user, need to know more about that system that ensures longevity, if any. Of course, there are going to be a lot of people that will still fall outside of it, like the musical organizations I mentioned that just won't be party to this discussion, probably, for a long time. Not until there gets to be standardization or something like that. I haven't gotten very far in my thinking about how that's all going to work, I just kind of came up against the issue.

DAVID GERMANO: We have dealt with that a little bit in the kind of local sense of people involved with Tibetan and Himalayan things who have the same problem. We have the problem not only of vanishing materials, but also of brittle URLs where you're making things and things are sort of disappearing because they are changing their servers. So what we've tried to do -- which is a kind of embryonic project -- is create the kind of basic name server where people in the community are contacted about some significant resources on the web and they're encouraged to participate in this process where, basically, you have to register your resources and then the resources allow people to link through their community server, which uses URNs that then go off to wherever URLs are currently registered for them. That does involve a significant commitment on a community. It would be very hard for you to stay in contact with all of these different people, but in local targeted ways, it does point to a way for us to begin to move more towards a system based on URNs that are reliable and persistent, rather than just URLs.

QUESTION: I'd just like to follow up on what Dr. Offenhauer talked about, the question of websites disappearing. When you say they are unstable, do you mean that they're not just updated properly?

OFFENHAUER: Well, I just mean that if you cite a URL and try to go back to it, even a short time later, the chances that it's not there are very great. I think everybody that uses URLs as citations has encountered that. The time span is very, surprisingly, short that they serve at all. I mean, the next day you can go back and check your own materials and some portion of them will not be available. So that's that uneasiness that I was trying to mention.

QUESTION: I think it's also a problem with student papers, because it's absolutely impossible to check your references and sometimes they disappear overnight, even when they were there in the first place.

OFFENHAUER: This may be a topic for another conference, but it does bring up the point of how to verify the materials. I think there has to be some sort of system set up so we can make sure this was verified, not hacked into, not changed. And even material that looks very official is sometimes bogus. And it's very easy to set up sites like that. People have access to different types of logos and such that we trust, within organizations, but on their own site, which is in a disagreement with the official site. I think that this conference and others need to address some system of verifying sites.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Right. What everybody that I know does, when they do a particular research project, is word copy whatever site they have on the web, put it into a word document. So everybody has their own little personal archives, usually collected with no system. They're just taking the text from the individual URL and hope for the best. But that's the kind of back-up that everybody relies on. And it did occur to me, too, that those are, in themselves, valuable sources, potentially. And it might be useful to not just think of those as own personal back-ups, but also materials collected by someone who knows something about a given subject.

QUESTION: I wonder whether the verifiable source might be a paper document.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: I think things usually get saved that way, too, but they all mean that it's in the hands of the researcher and not really out in the public domain for anyone to track down.

MODERATOR: I think we've come to the end of our session. I know there are other folks with questions and I know our panels will be with us throughout the day, so won't you join me in thanking them once again.