Journal of Information Ethics最新文献

{"title":"An Exploratory Analysis of Time on the Cross and Its Archival Implications","authors":"R. Gibbs","doi":"10.3172/JIE.19.1.99","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3172/JIE.19.1.99","url":null,"abstract":"IntroductionRobert Fogel and Stanley Engerman's 1974 publication, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery, was a reappraisal of the fiscal sustainability of institutional slavery. Predicated on the scientific method of quantitative data analysis, the work classified the U.S. slave system as a mutually beneficial exchange of services and commodities between plantation owners and slave laborers. Because of its inflammatory statements, the book quickly gained prominence in popular culture and instigated a maelstrom of public and scholarly debate. Economic historians openly questioned the authors' research methods while social analysts castigated the book's reinterpretation of slavery's cultural impact. Traditional historians were hesitantly diplomatic in their responses; professional archivists abstained from the debate entirely. The sustained absence of an archival response and the continued dearth of literature about the case are inexplicable given the book's notoriety and topical relevance to two important archival issues: the need for diverse representation in collections and the public role of the professional archivist.An example of limited historical data used as conclusive social evidence, Time on the Cross is the worst-case scenario for cultural archives that do not regularly appraise their collections or accession materials to present alternative perspectives to the master narrative. Without inclusive acquisition models, historically marginalized groups are precluded from being documented in the cultural memory. Recognizing the social power inherent in the archival record requires archivists to discard the self-appointed role of neutral observer and actively engage in public interpretations of their collections.As intermediaries between the user and the record, archivists are also uniquely positioned to advocate for the legitimate use of archival material as evidence. However, the absence of an archival response to Time on the Cross and the continued contemporary debate about the appropriate degree of abstraction from the Schellenberg practice model indicates that the scope of professional advocacy is still an unresolved issue in the archival community. Should archivists, in fact, bear some responsibility for the cultural impact of their collections?As a public narrative based on historical records, Time on the Cross has strong archival implications, especially in regards to appraisal and its relationship to collection diversity and professional responsibility. This paper explores both of these topics and, based on the case study, examine the relevant schools of thought and literature that address the archivist's role in creating culturally representative collections and the scope of archival responsibility.Time on the Cross: A Brief Case HistoryIn the collaborative effort, Time on the Cross, Fogel and Engerman attempt to bridge the cleft between cultural studies and the hard sciences by contributing an economic analysis","PeriodicalId":39913,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Information Ethics","volume":"19 1","pages":"99-109"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69755054","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Writing for Eternity II","authors":"J. S. Fulda","doi":"10.3172/JIE.19.1.5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3172/JIE.19.1.5","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":39913,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Information Ethics","volume":"19 1","pages":"5-6"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69754371","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Seeing No Evil: The Archival Profession's Failure to Respond to the National Archives' Breaches of Professional and Ethical Duties","authors":"K. Eriksen","doi":"10.3172/JIE.19.1.157","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3172/JIE.19.1.157","url":null,"abstract":"Eric Ketelaar (1998) has argued that the primary duty of archivists is to maintain the integrity of the archives. This principle is included in the mission statement of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), which reads in part: \"[NARA] serves American democracy by safeguarding and preserving the records of our Government, ensuring that the people can discover, use, and learn from this documentary heritage. We ensure continuing access to the essential documentation of the rights of American citizens and the actions of their government.\" The Society of American Archivists (SAA), in accordance with its status as the largest archival professional association in the U.S., declares that its mission is \"to provide leadership to ensure the identification, preservation, and use of records of historical value.\"Some commentators believe that SAA has turned a corner and in recent years has taken more of a leadership role in speaking out on matters of import to the archival profession (Montgomery, 2009a). However, two recent controversies involving NARA suggest otherwise, indeed, suggest that SAA lacks the will to take any role whatsoever in matters involving archival ethics and professional standards of practice. In 2006, an independent researcher brought to light that NARA had entered into secret agreements with several government agencies to pull and reclassify publicly available records from its open shelves; the agreements stipulated that NARA would hide the reclassification program from the public. In 2008, another independent researcher made public his unsuccessful attempts to access NARA's own records, those of the Office of Presidential Libraries. He documented a course of improper handling of the records, unprofessional responses to his requests for information, and inappropriate withholding of these records.SAA's failures to take a leadership stance with respect to these situations were compounded and enabled by the majority of individual archivists who chose to remain uninformed, and silent, about issues raised that were of critical importance to their profession. Howard Zinn commented on this phenomenon thirty years ago, arguing that \"professionalism is a powerful form of social control\" (Zinn, 1977). He described professionalism as \"the almost total immersion in one's craft, being so absorbed in the day-to-day exercise of those skills, as to have little time, energy or will to consider what part those skills play in the total social scheme\" (Zinn, 1977). He defined social control as \"maintaining things as they are, preserving traditional arrangements, preventing any sharp change in how the society distributes wealth and power\" (Zinn, 1977). Zinn's conception of professionalism as social control is played out in the failures of archivists to speak up and take action when confronted with activities antithetical to the foundational principles of their profession.The Reclassification ScandalBackgroundIn 1995, President Clinton sig","PeriodicalId":39913,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Information Ethics","volume":"19 1","pages":"157-171"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69754393","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"From Film Restoration to Digital Emulation: The Archival Code of Ethics in the Age of Digital Reproduction","authors":"L. K. Mattock","doi":"10.3172/JIE.19.1.74","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3172/JIE.19.1.74","url":null,"abstract":"Walter Benjamin laments the loss of the \"aura\" of the original work of art in his 1936 essay, \"The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction\" (Benjamin, 1969). Artist Douglas Davis revisits Benjamin's premise in his essay, \"The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction,\" suggesting that the mutability of the original has spawned a new era of creativity (Davis, 1995). As digital records quickly replace analog records, archivists are facing new challenges in preserving, describing, and providing continuing access to these new forms of digital multi-media. Traditional archival theory has centered around paper-based records for which archives have physical custody. These records are produced on a stable, human-readable medium. Digital records, however, are technologically dependent, unreadable to the human eye, and do not exist in a physical form. The preservation of these complicated records requires a rethinking of theory and practice and presents ethical challenges for which current codes of ethics provide little guidance.Moving image and other audiovisual archivists have faced many of these same challenges posed by digital documents through their work with analog media. The myriad formats incorporated under the umbrella term \"audiovisual media\" are also plagued by obsolescence and technological dependence. In addition, as analog formats become obsolete and information must be migrated and reformatted, archivists face a number of ethical decisions similar to those faced by archives preserving digital records.Currently, the Society of American Archivists (SAA) and other similar organizations provide little guidance for archivists working with audiovisual records. For this reason, the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) has been working to develop its own code of ethics to establish a stronger professional identity within the archival profession. The organization provides important resources including The Moving Image, a journal \"dedicated to the crucial issues surrounding the preservation, archiving, and restoration of film, video, and digital moving images\" (Association of Moving Image Archivists, n.d). The International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) also provides important resources, including The Journal of Film Preservation, and ethical guidelines for moving image archivists. A number of film history and theory journals (Film History, The Velvet Light Trap, and Cinema Journal) also offer outlets for audiovisual archivists to publish their research. Increasingly, audiovisual archivists must look outside the mainstream archival literature, which focuses on text-based records.On an Archival EdgeFilm has historically been marginalized as a distinct and separate medium in archives and other collecting institutions. Examples of this notion can be found at the beginnings of film history. To obtain copyright for their works, early filmmakers were required to submit paper-prints, copies of their films printed on rolls of phot","PeriodicalId":39913,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Information Ethics","volume":"19 1","pages":"74-85"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69754620","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Last Hand: Restrictions on Martin Heidegger's Papers in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach","authors":"Eliza Livingston","doi":"10.3172/JIE.19.1.110","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3172/JIE.19.1.110","url":null,"abstract":"Martin Heidegger, one of the twentieth century's most influential philosophers, left very specific but publicly inaccessible instructions when he bequeathed his considerable legacy of unpublished papers, lecture notes, and correspondence to the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach, Germany. This essay considers the interesting case study of Heidegger's sequestered writings by examining how issues of archival access and publication are affected by questions of privacy and publicity, history and responsibility, collective memory, the author's intentions, the demands of scholars, and general archival policies.Questions of legacy and of the author's and his or her family's degree of control over the author's own works raise interesting challenges for archivists. Archival institutions may have crystal-clear policies regarding access restrictions, but what archivist would not be tempted to bend such rules to accommodate the special requests of a major intellectual figure? There are numerous cases in which archives have allowed donors and family members to have \"undue control\" over who is allowed to access collections (O'Toole and Cox, 2006, p. 127). Such, apparently, was the case when Martin Heidegger bestowed his collected works on the Deutsches Literaturarchiv. His son, Hermann Heidegger, became his literary executor, but with only rare and seemingly arbitrary exceptions, Hermann has not allowed any scholars to view unpublished materials within the archives. Restrictions on the Heidegger collection stipulate that no scholar can view Heidegger's unpublished texts until they are published, and the publishing house, Vittorio Klostermann, affirms \"the will of the author to bring his life's work into the collected form that he himself outlined\": by his own decision, Heidegger's collected works \"should be an edition of the last hand,\" unedited and un-indexed (Klostermann 2009, italics in original). To complicate matters, the publication schedule is incomplete, exceedingly protracted, and prone to long delays. Meanwhile, scholars of Heidegger bemoan the fact that thousands of pages of his philosophy remain \"still unpublished, and not even planned for publication, but just gathering dust at the Marbach Archives\" (Eldred, 2007).Martin Heidegger may have had specific reasons to want to restrict his own legacy. Although he is widely regarded as a groundbreaking and visionary philosopher, during World War II when he was serving as the rector of Freiburg University he made compromises with Hitler's regime and supported Nazism. Although his publicly available texts suggest that he never explicitly espoused anti-Semitism in writing or endorsed any of Hitler's most abhorrent policies, Heidegger's 1933 address delivered on his assumption of the rectorship of Freiburg University speaks of German students' obligation to create a national destiny, asserting, \"it is our will that our Volk fulfill its historical mission\" (Heidegger, 1933, p. 38). Heidegger resigned from t","PeriodicalId":39913,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Information Ethics","volume":"33 1","pages":"110-125"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69754558","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Discovering Records Beneath the Robes: Canonical Protection and Civil Resurrection of the Boston Archdiocese Secret Archives","authors":"A. Pike","doi":"10.3172/JIE.19.1.86","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3172/JIE.19.1.86","url":null,"abstract":"A Brief History of Clergy Sexual Abuse and the Mandates of Canon LawSex crimes have been prevalent within the Roman Catholic Church for centuries. It is a long-standing, recurring, and widespread problem existing throughout the entire history of the Catholic Church. As early as the 305 A.D. Council of Elvira, official church records document an institution absorbed in regulating the sexual conduct of its clergy-revealing not only immoral behavior, but also criminal (Doyle, Sipe, & Wall, 2006, p. 295). Through the early medieval period to today, the Catholic Church has been regulating sexual behavior and thoroughly documenting the clergy's sexual violations. Despite evidence of violations, there was no official system of law to address this problem within the Church until the early twentieth century (Doyle & Rubino, 2004, p. 562). At this point, sexual abuse continued, but the new mandates of Canon Law enforced an elaborate system of documentation to record allegations, investigations, and other related activities regarding sexual abuse.All cases concerning sexual violations in the Church, recent and past, have been well documented within the records of the institutional church, described as the \"single most powerful element in proving its pattern and practice of protecting abusers, concealing offenses from those who had a right to know, neglecting to warn and protect parishioners, and failing to report crimes\" (Doyle et al., 2006, p. 217). Not only did the church maintain thorough and detailed accounts of sexual misconduct, the Code of Canon Law enforced a veil of secrecy so great that these records were intentionally concealed to protect the reputation of the Church at the risk of perpetuating patterns of abuse.Canon Law distinguishes between two record types: the diocesan archives and the secret archives. The diocesan archives are considered ordinary, secular, and public by nature. Specific record types include priests' files, containing \"seminary records, transfer indications, letters of commendation and complaint, and other related matters\" (Doyle et al., 2006, p. 134). Regarding access to these collections, \"Canon 487 states that only the bishop and chancellor may have keys to the archives and permission for entry must be obtained from the bishop, the moderator of the curia, or the chancellor\" (Doyle et al., 2006, pp. 134-135). Despite these measures of security, it is important to note that the records held in the diocesan archives are unrestricted due to their secular nature.A parallel set of restricted records is kept within the secret archives, and these are \"mandated\" to be kept \"completely closed and locked, from which documents cannot be removed\" (Cafardi, 1993, p. 96). For as long as recordkeeping has existed within the church, dioceses were expected to maintain these secret collections, with the practice that the \"documents placed in the secret archives have no secular use or existence\" (Cafardi, 1993, p. 97). Furthermore, because t","PeriodicalId":39913,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Information Ethics","volume":"19 1","pages":"86-98"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69754686","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Teaching, Researching, and and Preaching Archival Ethics Or, How These New Views Came to Be","authors":"R. Cox","doi":"10.3172/JIE.19.2.20","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3172/JIE.19.2.20","url":null,"abstract":"Defining the BasicsIf one wants to get poor teaching evaluations, challenge students with a topic such as professional ethics. This is not to imply that ethical behavior in the workplace or any profession is unimportant. Treating people with integrity and respect, protecting the broader public against wrongful behavior by all kinds of organizations, and having the sense of any professional community's necessary bond to support a broader public good are all attributes we must address in the academy, professional conferences, and public venues (see Allen, 2004; Paul and Elder, 2003). Challenging students about such matters is necessary, but it will not always lead to acclaim by students or professional colleagues. Indeed, it has the possibility of making you a controversial figure. Doing this puts you in the position of needing to make critical assessments of your field and your colleagues (soon to be former colleagues), considering difficult issues that can veer far from the practical nuts-and-bolts matters many students want and expect, and running the risk of making you sound like a pompous ass.There are many ways to consider how to address approaching ethical issues (see Buchanan and Henderson, 2009). We can study beliefs about morality and ethics, making no judgment (descriptive). We can approach ethical matters in a normative fashion, discoursing about how people ought to act. We can consider ethical issues, and this makes considerable sense in a professional community, in an applied manner, investigating ethical issues as they play out in real-world situations. And we study ethics itself, probing into what ethics means and dissecting the language of ethics itself (meta-ethics). Looking at the range of ways we can consider ethical concerns discourages many archival educators and practitioners from contending with the ethical realm. They feel that it is too conceptual, leads them into the murky waters of religion and metaphysics, and drains their time from more important practical matters. Many students agree with this assessment.Not to deal with ethics is, in my opinion, potentially far worse than trying to wrestle with this area. Two commentators on information ethics provide an explanation about why this might be the case: \"If we accept the importance of information, the power of information, then, we, as information professionals, are dealing with enormous power on a daily basis. We should know the value of what we've dealing with and be able to defend our actions and positions within these positions of power\" (Buchanan and Henderson, 2009, p. 21). Given the nature of records, with both their information and evidence, it stands to reason that such an assessment applies equally to archivists and what they handle.Scholars and commentators considering ethics in the modern information age argue that the rapid advances in information technologies are accelerating the density of ethical issues and even creating new ethical challenges. They point","PeriodicalId":39913,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Information Ethics","volume":"19 1","pages":"20-32"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69754759","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"You Shouldn't Have Been That Sentimental: Film Restoration Ethics in Hitchcock's Vertigo","authors":"S. Kilcoyne","doi":"10.3172/JIE.19.1.57","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3172/JIE.19.1.57","url":null,"abstract":"The intricacies of motion picture restoration tend to mystify the greater public. Indeed, it is not uncommon for individuals to register outright surprise that there remains any point to preserving motion picture film, as we move inexorably toward some vague digital utopia. Already we have come to covet our moving images on a small disk, a tangible commercial good to own and consume on a relatively small screen, at our convenience, in the company of our choice. We also appreciate these products for their ability to add layers to the film experience, to supplement our understanding and enjoyment with materials such as alternative endings, international versions, audio commentary tracks, and exclusive interviews. Many promise to be the definitive edition of a given film, returning the original artistic vision of the director who may have been victimized by censors, studios, or producers, with inferior or incomplete results masquerading as the final version for years. Arguments over what is the authentic version tend to play themselves out in this scenario. In other instances, the film was released as planned, but decades of travel, projection, or inadequate storage have decimated footage, leaving modern audiences to interpret a mangled text.Film restoration and preservation can encompass all of these issues and many others. It must also be noted that movies allegedly \"restored\" for DVD release may not have undergone any physical restoration or preservation of the original film elements, but were instead scanned onto a hard drive and digitally corrected. This is not simple or cheap, but it is outside the scope of this paper, which will focus exclusively on film restoration as a process ultimately acted out upon celluloid through either analog or digital techniques (Koeber, 2003).1 Practice is complex, and so is the language. Before discussing the issues we will visit the problem of terminology, so that we have a proper mapping of the terrain when considering the ethical challenges of practice, which will be the subsequent undertaking. Finally we will explore one of the more physically and ethically difficult examples in film history: the James C. Katz and Robert A. Harris 1996 restoration of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo.Although we are principally concerned with restoration, preservation is a good concept to begin with, since the process of restoring a film often results in de facto preservation. Karen F. Gracy observes that \"in the film archives community, the meaning of preservation is mutable and elusive\" (Gracy, 2007, p. 141). Literature on the subject would indicate that she is absolutely correct, since definitions become difficult to fix when the agendas of various constituencies within the preservation community tend to overlap or compete with one another. Still, there are core practices which can be considered as preservation, and the definition supplied by the National Film Preservation Foundation (NFPF) encompasses a range of meanings while ","PeriodicalId":39913,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Information Ethics","volume":"19 1","pages":"57-73"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69754415","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Raising Money Raises Questions: The Ethics of Generating Revenue from Archival Materials","authors":"Elizabeth Druga","doi":"10.3172/JIE.19.1.141","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3172/JIE.19.1.141","url":null,"abstract":"Although archives have frequently been associated with treasure troves or viewed as stores of cultural gems, those responsible for maintaining them know that their operation and care can cost as much as a king's ransom. Funding archival work has perennially been a difficult issue to address. Recessions exacerbate financial problems, and, as the current economic downturn has shown, bring budgetary concerns to the forefront. During tough times archives and other cultural institutions have turned to their own collections, deaccessioning and selling valuable items to cover operating costs; such moves, however, often raise public ire and generate negative publicity for the institution. Some archives have chosen instead to follow in the footsteps of museums and raise funds by mining their holdings for materials that they can license, particularly those dealing in new forms of media based on the repackaging of existing content (Loe, 2004, p. 58). Although not as controversial as deaccessioning, archives must still contend with a multitude of legal and ethical issues when using items in their collections to generate revenue.Charging Fees or Generating RevenueAs with other predominantly cultural institutions like libraries and museums, archives have traditionally been viewed as nonprofit organizations intended to serve the greater good of society and scholarship. Their willingness to share the information they hold supported an intellectual barter system in which scholars could use archival materials in their works in return for acknowledging the source and depositing a copy of the final product. Permissions fees were usually charged only when materials were used in commercial or profit-seeking ventures. Changes in program funding, however, made it necessary for institutions to develop other ways of supporting their normal activities (Browar, Henderson, North, & Wenger, 2002, pp. 124-25). The introduction of fees for services like copying served a double purpose, helping both to recoup the cost of such activities and to moderate requests that could be potentially damaging to materials (Blais, 1995, p. 50). Advances in digital media also spurred archives to think of their holdings as potential sources of revenue. Through Corbis Corporation, Bill Gates illustrates how profitable fine art and archival images could be when they are digitized and actively marketed (Butler, 1998, p. 65); greater numbers of requests on the part of documentary filmmakers and others drawing upon the past for their creative works demonstrated that \"the growing global demand for media content has also increased the perceived value of iconic cultural assets\" like those lining many institutions' shelves (Ivey, 2008, p. 33). Realizing the potential of their holdings as well as the possibility that commercial companies could exploit their materials if they do not, many archives have decided to implement their own revenue generation programs.Some distinction must be made, however, betwee","PeriodicalId":39913,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Information Ethics","volume":"19 1","pages":"141-156"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69754358","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Digitization as Repatriation?: The National Museum of the American Indian's Fourth Museum Project","authors":"Michelle Crouch","doi":"10.3172/JIE.19.1.45","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3172/JIE.19.1.45","url":null,"abstract":"IntroductionOn February 2, 2009, the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) announced the launch of its searchable online collection, part of an ongoing effort to digitize all of its artifacts and photographs. This event marked a milestone in the institution's \"Fourth Museum\" project-a reference to the \"museum without walls\" that serves the public outside of its three facilities in New York, Maryland, and D.C. (NMAI, 2009). With a particular focus on the digitization of the museum's photographic archives, this essay situates the Fourth Museum in its historical context, and then explores the possibilities and problematic issues of making these materials available on the Internet.NMAI and NAGPRAThe creation of the Fourth Museum is only the latest in a series of dramatic changes that NMAI has undergone in its ninety-three years of existence. NMAI began as the pet project of wealthy industrialist George G. Heye. The museum, arranged on the model of other established anthropology and natural history museums, displayed his personal collection of over 800,000 Native American artifacts purchased or collected on archaeological expeditions he financed. Many of the photographs were taken on these expeditions. The level of documentation of the acquisition of these objects varied, often depending on whether Heye purchased a large preexisting collection (in which case any prior documentation was often lost) or whether his field researchers collected the objects individually (in which case he required the inclusion of field notes) (Jacknis, 2008, p. 10).Initially displayed at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archeology and Anthropology, Heye moved his collection to New York and formally founded the Museum of the American Indian as an independent entity in 1916. During the Great Depression and the Second World War, the museum fell into a period of stagnation and financial troubles that lasted until Heye's death in 1956. These problems plagued successive directors over the next three decades. Frederick J. Dockstader, who served as director from 1960 to 1975, was accused of unethically deaccessioning and selling portions of the collection in order to fund new acquisitions (NMAI, n.d.).Over the second half of the twentieth century, the fields of history and anthropology underwent radical changes; new historians presented the experiences and stories of underrepresented groups-told in their own words-as a challenge to the focus on the \"Great Man\" in history. Ethnographic observations of \"exotic\" cultures recorded by Westerners came into question. Political activism was often tied into ethnic identity and representation; the Red Power movement, for example, sought greater respect and equal treatment for Native Americans. This shift towards multiculturalism affected the traditional conception of the museum as well. Many essays on the topic reflect a postmodern self-consciousness in the museum world, a desire to draw attention to the \"constr","PeriodicalId":39913,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Information Ethics","volume":"19 1","pages":"45-56"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69754669","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}