Despite having completed my #citylis Masters dissertation on the subject it seems I haven’t yet got rid of the Copyright bug and so I found myself booking onto CILIP’s Copyright Conference, which took place on the 27th April. The event was hosted in the rather cool looking Cavendish Conference centre, which featured a stylish glow in the dark effect and provided guests with their own water bottle and bowl of sweets.
Quite a nice space for a conference, I like the illuminated desks! Plus I didn’t get wrongly guided into a building site by Apple maps like last year… #CILIPCopy18pic.twitter.com/ZdtWdm0I71
The conference featured a wide variety of talks focussing on many different aspects of Copyright and licensing and included several 5 minute ‘Lightning talks’ to help break the day up. The day was hosted and MC’d by Naomi Korn, who already I knew through Twitter and as the author of a report into Orphan Works and risk management but had never had the fortune to meet until now.
In welcoming us to the event Naomi talked about a photo she had taken of herself with a friend at the recent unveiling of the Dame Millicent Fawcett statue by Gillian Wearing in Parliament Square, to examine the many copyright issues surrounding rights ownership, ethics, licensing and the use of copyright exceptions. (You can read about it in Naomi’s blog post) It was a really good example and amazing to think how many different issues can be contained in that one simple photo, if you were to really follow it through.
The opening keynote Open: Unlocking value was from Jodie Fraser (@josiefraser) and looked at the value that Open Licensing such as the use of creative commons licensing can provide to organisations and society as whole. In addition to talking about Creative Commons, she also discussed the growth of Wikipedia as a tool for open knowledge, and talked about open data.
An interesting question she posed was about whether Data is the new Oil. She examined the many similarities but noted that unlike oil, data is not a finite resource and that the value from data is gained by combining it with other data to provide new solutions and new uses, whereas adding oil to oil just give you more oil!
Is data the new oil? Slide from presentation by Jodie Fraser
After sharing some great examples of what can be accomplished using Open Data and Open Licensing such as the Citymapper app and the Hero Arm from Open Bionics she ended by highlighting the benefits of Openness and suggesting some questions that could be asked to help foster openness in organisations.
Open makes things possible that would otherwise be impossible says Jodie Fraser
Sticking with the subject of openness Chris Banks (@ChrisBanks) gave an overview of the development of the UKs-Scholarly Communications License. (UKSCL) She explained that currently there are a myriad and often contradictory of Open Access policies, set out by the different stakeholders from funders to publishers and research institutions, which make it difficult to determine which open access deposit option is optimal for an output.
Chris Banks discusses the challenge of the UK’s “policy stack”
The UKSCL, has been developed in partnership with publishers and funders and is based on a model developed by Harvard University. It is intended to simplify the many funder and publisher OA (open access) provisions, by establishing a standard model license to be adopted by institutions that would allow depositors the retention of re-usage rights to their research (via a CC-BY-NC license) whilst remaining compliant with policies for the REF.
It allows authors to retain the right to make their author accepted manuscript (the final draft of an article which has been accepted for publication by a journal, incorporating any suggested changes from peer review, but prior to copyediting, typesetting and proof correction by the publisher.) publicly available for non-commercial use (CC BY-NC 4.0) from point of publication.
Authors who choose to (or whose only option is to) self-archive. It also enables immediate compliance with both funder OA requirements and helps to ensure outputs are eligible for the REF (the scheme used to assess the quality of research in UK higher education institutions). It also allows authors greater retention of the rights to their work whilst still allowing them the freedom of choice over where they can publish (including in non-OA journals).
Some of the questions surrounding the development of the UK SCL
Banks explained that work on developing the SCL is continuing, and is currently focussed on working with funders such as UKRI are looking to examine how best to utilise further funding for open access. There is also focus on engaging with academics around self-archiving, slef-deposit and open access, as well as continued discussion with publishers and stakeholders such as learned societies.
In addition to the main presentations the conference also had some interesting Lightning talks:
Advice for researching to clear rights in film… Expect the unexpected, keep a record and explore your film (especially the credits) #CILIPCopy18pic.twitter.com/gC5S8S2RHy
Corinna Reicher gave some “Top on clearing rights in moving images”, which included studying the credits for details of Copyright and making use of national film archives for help in tracing rights owners. Carrying on with the theme of rights clearance Ben White, head of IP at the British Library, gave another lightening talk on rights clearance in Libraries/cultural heritage organisations. Drawing on the experiences of the British Library’s digitisation projects, he highlighted the difficulties that arise from clearing rights in collections such as the BL’s archival sounds projects, which took an average of 4 hours works to clear one item (out of 100,000).
#CILIPCopy18 5 minutes about rights clearance from Benjamin White, British Library. Average rights clearance takes 4 hours per item. BL project digitising sound archives, inc wildlife, music, oral history = 100,000 items online. Individual rights clearance required in most cases.
Following the end of the morning’s talks, there was a panel discussion with the speakers taking questions from the floor, followed by a break for lunch.
After lunch the presentations continued, with an interesting talk by Ruth Morris from law firm Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer which gave us an overview of the key contract and license management in a law library, mentioning that even users of the law library are often unaware of the restrictions around reuse of material. She gave us an insight into the types of information requests that the library deals with and spoke about the range of licenses, (such as CLA and NLA) the library requires.
Contract and licensing management issues in a law library – key issues
She then talked about types of commercial licenses the library holds with vendors of online legal and business resources and spoke about the key contract clauses that were required. These can cover a range of issues from common clauses relating to interruptions in the services to specific terms governing what happens to the agreements in the event of a merger or access by outsourced staff.
Ruth also spoke about what she saw as the key trends in license agreements saying that there was a shift away from single user licenses for resources and that vendors were increasing looking to find new ways to limit the ability to share content through what she enhanced copyright policies. It was definitely an interesting insight into the various issues involved in licensing content, and some of it was familiar to me having worked with eResource licenses in the past.
Other presentations of interest where Debbie McDonnell’s presentation on her efforts to increase awareness of Copyright among staff at the British Council. She showed us some of the materials that were created to raise awareness, which led to 77% of staff stating they confident in their understanding of copyright (up from 65% in 2012). Strategies included a Copyright month.
Wrapping up the day’s presentations was Alex Fenlon, Head of Copyright and Licensing, Library Services, University of Birmingham. His talk gave us an insight into the kinds of activities and duties that took up most of his time as opposed to what he would ideally be wanting to focus on, as head of Copyright and Licensing. In particular he said that currently he is having to spend a lot of time in discussions about the licensing of resources for students that will be based at their new Dubai campus. Other major demands included preparing for the (then) incoming GDPR legislation and discussions around the possible implementation of the UKLSCL. He also provided some useful tips around advocacy, such as making it relevant using current examples of Copyright cases, and had the curious honor of being the only person of the day to mention Naruto the monkey.
Once again it was another informative talk that rounded off the day nicely. Overall I really enjoyed the day, there were lots of great and informative talks and even orphan works got a few mentions and I expect to be attending next years and several others like it in my new role, as Assistant Librarian Subscriptions and Licensing at University of Arts London, which I started today!
I started this post many months ago, but never got round to finishing it. Inspired by a recent post on fair use by fellow #citylis student @olivianesbitt I thought I’d dust of this post and finish it with a sprinkling of orphan works for good measure.
When the European Commission published its i2010 digital Libraries initiative, announcing its intention of creating a single European digital library providing online access to European cultural heritage, it was clearly operating under a desire to avoid the legal wrangling faced by Google over its Google Print Library Project (Google Books). As Durantaye (2010:161) notes that:
In trying to resolve the problems surrounding orphan works, the European Commission has closely followed the procedures that the United States has used to evaluate the extent of, and possible solutions for, the orphan works problem. (Durantaye 2010:169)
She later refers to a speech by former Commissioner for Information Society and
Media Viviane Reding evoking Google Books “in order to induce member States to “act swiftly” and to find “pro-competitive European solutions on books digitisation.” (Durantaye 2010)
Conceived by Larry page and Sergei Brin in 1999, the Google Books project was intended to use a “web crawler” to index and analyse the content of vast collections of digitised books. In 2004 Google announced Google Print Library Project a partnership with several large public and research libraries, with the aim of scanning and digitizing 15 million books from collections. Their aim was to create a vast database from the collections of major research libraries, that enabled users to search for words or phrases and read snippets of text.
This effort however fell foul of various rightsholder organisations and in 2005 Authors’ Guild and the Association of American Publishers sued Google over the project arguing it infringed their rights. Google argued that their use amounted to fair use, especially since they were only displaying snippets of the book and that converting texts into a database amounted to transformative use (a key provision of the fair use argument.) This argument was not wholly convincing to many as this New Yorker article illustrates.
In 2008 a settlement was reached in which Google agreed to compensate rights holders whose works were scanned, in return the represented parties agreed not to sue Google.
The settlement would have represented a form of ECL(extended collective license) agreement, in that the represented rights holders agreed to Google’s continued use of their works in return for compensation and Google agreeing to install terminals in libraries on which the works were to be viewed. The settlement was not universally accepted, with critics arguing that it would give Google a monopoly on online out-of-print books, and the settlement was rejected by in 2011 by the district court.
After the case proceeded on merit through to the second circuit it was eventually ruled by Judge Denny Chin that the project qualified as fair-use under US Copyright law. A subsequent appeal by the Authors’ Guild was rejected by Supreme Court in 2016, finally laying the case to rest.
The crux of Google’s defense centered on the notion of fair use, a “judicially developed limitation on the scope of copyright, now codified in 17 U.S.C. ’107.” (Zimmerman 2015) In considering whether Google’s use could be considered fair use, the court considered four factor set out in 17 U.S.C. ’107:
The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
The nature of the copyrighted work;
The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
Zimmerman (2015) describes the each of the four factors as representing:
a continuum, tilting more or less strongly for or against a finding of fair use. Factor Four ‘ concerning the economic impact of the use, and particularly whether it represents a substitute for the original work ‘ is often said to be the most important consideration.
Fair use is as Meyer (2015) say’s a ‘distinctly American concept’ , in the UK a less flexible doctrine of fair dealing exists that allows a user to “make use of a limited, moderate amount of someone else’s work” (Intellectual Property Office 2014a) for the purposes of :
Research and study
Criticism or review
Reporting of current events
Parody, caricature and pastiche
Quotation
Whereas fair dealing is codified in the US Copyright Law, fair use has no statutory definition meaning as the UK Intellectual Property Office(2014b) says:
it will always be a matter of fact, degree and impression in each case. The question to be asked is: how would a fair-minded and honest person have dealt with the work?
Unlike fair dealing the uses that can be considered fair use are far wider, in an article for the Harvard Law Review (Leval 1990) Judge Leval sets out the use of a work that could be considered Transformative Use, he writes:
Transformative uses may include criticizing the quoted work, exposing the character of the original author, proving a fact, or summarizing an idea argued in the original in order to defend or rebut it. They also may include parody, symbolism, aesthetic declarations, and innumerable other uses.
In his deliberation on the case of Google Books, Judge Leval found that the Google’s use was indeed fair and transformative saying:
Google’s unauthorized digitizing of copyright-protected works, creation of a search functionality, and display of snippets from those works are non-infringing fair uses. The purpose of the copying is highly transformative, the public display of text is limited, and the revelations do not provide a significant market substitute for the protected aspects of the originals. Google’s commercial nature and profit motivation do not justify denial of fair use.
“If, instead of making digital copies, Google had employed six million elves to scour the text of the books and furnish information [to users] there would’ve been no question of infringement. The mere fact the Google supplies that information through a digital copy, as opposed to employing six million elves, does not convert the lawful provision of information into infringement.” (Albanese 2017)
And while authors groups may have been disappointed with the ruling, for librarians and other groups seeking to rely on fair dealing, the judgement provided a greater sense of how fair dealing operates.
Returning to the issue of Orphan Works, a report for the US Copyright Office (Hansen 2015) states that while the Office believes:
“fair use and orphan works liability limitation provisions should coexist in the statute. In practice, however, the use of most orphan works is one in which the would-be user believes it is necessary to seek permission or a license, to either ensure peace of mind, avoid unpredictability, or, more likely, to avoid exposure to liability”
It goes on to state that, while some groups like the Libraries Copyright Alliance had argued against the need for orphan works legislation, based upon the fair use outcomes in the Google Books and HathiTrust Trust cases:
“several stakeholders from the library, archives, and museum communities prefer
orphan works legislation to an exclusive reliance on fair use. ” (Hansen 2015;43)
When it comes to Orphan Works and fair dealing, Hansen alludes to the constantly evolving nature of fair use, as being a reason not to rely on it, saying:
Office does not believe that reliance on judicial trends, which may turn at any point, is a sufficient basis to forgo a permanent legislative solution.
Ultimately, it seems there is a trade-off between the US and the UK in terms of copyright exceptions, the US have the flexibility of fair use doctrine, as defense against copyright infringement, but no orphan works legislation. While the UK has the more limited fair-dealing, but benefits from two, albeit flawed, orphan works solutions. (The EU exception, and IPO Orphan Works Licensing Scheme).
In my last post I wrote a brief introduction to my #citylis dissertation, a study of the effectiveness of current Orphan Works legislation. To recap Orphan works are Copyrighted material for which the copyright holder is unknown or unable to be located. The collections of cultural heritage institutions such libraries and archives hold a significant amount of such material. As they are unable to contact the rights holder to gain permission for using this material, institutions have chosen to not digitize these works. This has led to what is known as the 20th century black hole
My dissertation seeks to determine how effective the legislative solutions to Orphan Works have been in enabling cultural heritage institutions to digitize and make available online the parts of their collections that contain Orphan Works.
1) Why is it important?
Without, an effective solution much of our global cultural heritage will remain hidden and inaccessible to anyone unable to visit the institutions containing so many of these valuable works. A Collections Trust report (2009) claimed that:
The huge scale and significant impact of Orphan Works, conservatively estimated to be some 25 million items across public sector organisations, has led to a ‘locking up’ of content with little or no prospect of these items ever making a meaningful contribution to a knowledge economy without potentially complex and costly ‘due diligence’ processes.
Baker (2016) claims that the inability to clear the copyright of works whose authors could not be located, has hindered various mass digitization projects including Europeana and Google Books. This is echoed by Van Gompel and Hugenholtz (2010) who state that:
By impeding the clearance of copyright and related rights, the orphan works problem may frustrate entire reutilization projects and prevent culturally- or scientifically-valuable content being used as building blocks for new works
David R Hansen (2017) believes that it is a problem that is worth solving claiming that:
As long as it remains unsolved, a significant fraction of our culture will be hidden or suppressed. The problem is not that we can’t put our hands on the works themselves. Most are sitting on library shelves, just as, conversely, most works sitting on library shelves may be orphans. The problem is that we are not legally allowed to make them more accessible and usable, even when the rightsholders would welcome us to do so.
2) We don’t really know how big a problem it is, but it’s big:
In a 2010 study on orphan works and the costs of rights clearance Vuopala argues that:
The first and fundamental challenge when dealing with the issue of orphan works is to quantify the extent of the problem, i.e. to establish reliable figures on the amount of orphan works within collections of cultural institutions in Europe.
Various studies give estimates about the proportion of Orphan Works in the collections of cultural heritage institutions. A 2011 rights clearance exercise for the British Library found that 43% of a sample of 140 books published between 1874 and 2010, were Orphan Works. Meanwhile, a 2009 Collections Trust study meanwhile reported that ‘the average proportion of Orphan Works in a collection overall was measured at 5% to 10%’, whilst certain sectors, such as libraries and archives likely to have much higher. Based upon estimates they calculated that the UK museums sector was likely to include holdings of over 25 million Orphan Works. Furthermore, 26 of the 503 respondents to the survey reported that their collections contained over 1 million Orphan Works.
When these vast collections are taken into account, analysis to calculate the volume of Orphan Works represented in this survey alone starts to become mind-boggling. Individual estimates suggest that there are single organisations in the survey sample that hold in excess of 7.5 million Orphan Works. (Jisc 2009)
Overall they estimated that 503 UK institutions could hold in excess of 50 million orphan works. Vuopala (2010) argues that:
It is hard to establish reliable figures on the amount of orphan works, because at the moment there is no easy way to establish that a work is orphan. Hence, very little systematic research has been done and hardly any empirical data has been available about problems related to orphan works.
3)Why do works become Orphaned?
There are several reasons why works become orphaned including:
The work has insufficient information to identify the creator copyright holder.
The original copyright holder can no longer be located at the original address and there are no records of a new address
Copyright has been assigned to a new owner
The copyright holder has died or the business has ceased to exist
The copyright owner does not realize that they benefit from copyright
Length of duration of copyright in unpublished text based works in the UK
A major reason why there are so many Orphan Works is that there is no register of copyrights requiring creators to register their works. This is because copyright is automatic the Berne Convention states that there should be no formalities to the granting of copyright. Article 5(2) of the Berne Convention states that:
The enjoyment and the exercise of these rights shall not be subject to any formality ; such enjoyment and such exercise shall be independent of the existence of protection in the country of origin of the work.
Greenburg (2012) claims the rise in the number of Orphan Works has resulted from the:
shift away from formalities coupled with the explosion of instant authorship and the expansion in scope and duration of copyright,
As Baker(2017) notes the Orphan Works problem has led to calls for a system of copyright registration to be reintroduced (until the 1923 Copyrighted works had to be registered with the Stationers Company) however such a suggestion would be impractical in the current age of digital and social media. Any return to a system of copyright registration would create a situation whereby creators such as bloggers, photographers would need to apply for copyright protection for their posts on a daily basis. As Greenburg (2012) argues any return to registration would lead to a situation, whereby due to the costs involved in a formal registration with the Copyright office, a creator such as a blogger would be unable to determine at the point of creation which if their works were likely to be commercially successful or not. Consequently, he argues they would likely not to register any works.
Furthermore, in order to be of value to potential users of Orphan Works, any such register would need to be updated to record any transfer of intellectual property rights. A voluntary system of registration exists in the United States whereby creators can submit their work for registration with the Copyright office, however, this is optional and does not grant them any additional rights. It does, however, provide a public record of the copyright claim, and is necessary prior to any infringement claims (U.S. Copyright Office 2012).
EDIT someone pointed out to me that under US copyright law, a rights holder can only sue and collect damages for infringement if one they have registered a property for copyright, the right to sue (for damages) is important, especially as a deterrent to use of the work without permission or licensing.
One of the recommendations of the 2009 report on Orphan Works, ‘In from the Cold An assessment of the scope of ‘Orphan Works’ and its impact on the delivery of services to the public’ (Jisc) was the creation of an ‘official national database’ such a database they suggested should be:
…on an ‘opt-in’ basis, so that copyright holders would be responsible for making sure that they put their works into the database if they want to benefit and that, otherwise, organisations could use works as they see fit.
The Gowers’ Review of Intellectual Property (Gov.uk 2006) made a similar recommendation for the establishment of a voluntary register of Copyright, possibly in partnership with existing rights holder databases. However, there is a difference between a voluntary register and a formal register that would require rights holders to opt out if they didn’t wish their work to be used. Such a system would likely be in breach of the Berne convention as it would represent a formality.
N.B. it could be it’s referring to a form of Extended Collective Licensing, but it’s not clear.
4) The length of Copyright is damaging our cultural heritage
As William Patry (2012) argues in How to Fix Copyright one of the main causes of Orphan Works is the length of Copyright term, as he says:
If you can’t track down who owns rights in the work, you can’t use it no matter how socially beneficial your use may be and no matter how likely it is that the copyright owner has lost all interest in exploiting the work. This was not a problem when
the term of protection was short: those who argued for a longer term of protection selfishly thought only of themselves, not thinking or caring that the longer the term of protection, the greater the loss to society from the inability to create new works based on old works, and an inability to preserve old works. The long term of protection is seriously damaging to our cultural heritage.
When the first act of Copyright, the Statute of Anne was enacted in 1709, it granted authors a protection of 14 years, 21 years for books already in print. At the end of the 14 years if the author was still alive then the copyright was renewed for another 14 years. Over time authors and authors rights societies have sought to lengthen the term of protection afforded by Copyright.
Today the length of Copyright today stands at life +70 (70 years after the death of the author/creator) this means the copyright in most works published today and within the last century won’t expire and enter the public domain for a considerable length of time. This means that for CHIs to digitise them, they will need to track down the creator or current copyright holder. The further away from the date of creation the greater the chance that the work will become orphaned.
Patry (2012) proceeds to claim that there is no Orphan Works problem, rather a problem with the length of Copyright term, arguing that the longer copyright term makes it harder to use works:
Short of contacting each author about each work, there is no longer a way to determine which works the author desires to protect and which works he, she, or it (in the case of companies) doesn’t wish to protect: All works must be treated as under protection, requiring permission before use.
COMMUNIA, an international association advocating for policies that expand the public domain and increase access to and reuse of culture and knowledge, have called for a reduction in the length of term of Copyright.
Communia policy recommendation calling for reduction of Copyright term
They argue the excessively long duration of copyright protection in combination with a lack of formalities has a detrimental effect on the accessibility of our shared, stating that:
There is no evidence that copyright protection that extends decades beyond the life of the author encourages the production of copyright protected works. Instead the requirement to obtain permission for works by authors that have long died are one of the biggest obstacles for providing universal access to our shared culture and knowledge.
5)It’s all about risk
Perception of risk and tolerance or intolerance to risk is an important factor in the selection of material for digitisation. The greater the tolerance of risk the more materials that are likely to be included in digitisation. The risk may be as much do with concern for reputational damage, as the concerns regarding financial penalties arising from infringement. Well known and prestigious CHIs may be less willing to risk their reputation in digitising material without permission from rights holders. Favale, Schroff, and Bertoni (2017) point to differing approaches to risk among institutions dealing with Orphan Works, stating that:
Most risk-averse institutions do not digitize or do not publish orphan works whereas others take the risk to use the works without clearance. Others try their best to locate the rightholders of these works, to a different extent.
In his report looking into legal strategies for digitising Orphan Works in the United States Hansen(2017) notes that risk and uncertainty are two of the main reasons why so few of the estimated millions of orphan works in libraries and archives are made available online, saying that:
Librarians, archivists, and others want to digitize orphan works and make them available for free online, but often don’t because of risks associated with legal action and, specifically, copyright infringement actions. If the rightsholder of a work that the digitizer thought was orphaned were to later come forward with a copyright infringement claim, the result could be devastating.
Reputational damage, arising from an act of infringement could impact on the ability to secure participation from rights holders for future digitization projects, as Deazley & Stobo (2013) noted when discussing the Codebreakers digitisation project at the Wellcome library:
Damaging your reputation as a trusted and reliable repository is indeed a serious risk, if you consider that the reputation of the Wellcome Trust and by extension the Library, was important in securing the participation of rights holders in Codebreakers in the first place.
6) Impact:
Where risk/copyright is a factor that leads to the exclusion of material from digitisation projects, this creates the possibility of a skewed public digital record. In an age where the primary access to the public record and cultural heritage is online, the exclusion of a category or categories of material could lead to a distortion towards material that requires little or no rights clearance.
As Stobo et al (2017) noted this has several impacts: first, because digital is now the primary means of access for CHI users they may be unaware of what is missing from said digitised collections. Second, research using online materials is skewed on the basis of what is available, this is especially significant for disciplines such as the Digital Humanities that rely on large data-sets for their research. Lastly, if material is not accessible due to copyright, this has implications for access and preservation since preservation may only be prompted when there is a request to use the material. In other words preservation may also be hindered by the inability to facilitate rights clearance for online access.
Rosati (2013) notes the impact of Copyright :
there have been significant instances in which the copyright status of the various works that could be potentially included in digitization projects, along with difficulties arisen in clearing the relevant rights, have either impeded or significantly altered the scope of digitization projects.
7) Part of a larger problem
The orphan works issue can be seen as a symptom or manifestation of the larger issue of how Cultural Heritage Institutions go about clearing rights for digitization projects. Orphan works may comprise only a small percentage of a collection that is being digitized, or it may not be apparent before the start of a project whether works are orphaned or not. Ringnalda (2011) says this in claiming that orphan works issue is:
not the main hurdle on the way to a successful Europeana. Instead, the orphan works problem is only a symptom of a much larger issue: the inability to clear copyrights for the mass digitization and online dissemination of entire library collections.
Meanwhile, Vuopala (2010) notes the cost of clearing rights can amount to far more than the cost of digitizing the material, especially for smaller institutions. While, the cost of digitizing is reduced as projects are scaled up, the more items digitized the cheaper the cost per item, the cost of clearing. Furthermore, the process of rights clearance for large scale digitization projects can be extremely time consuming and laborious, as Ringnalda (2011) argues:
Licensing on an individual scale seems to be too much to ask for. If we have to wait until the copyright owners for all the works in library collections have been found or looked for, we will not see a digital library in the near future, with or without orphan works. Waiting for all those works to pass into the public domain would be more efficient, and probably quicker, too.
While it may be more efficient and quicker to wait for works to pass back into the public domain this does nothing to resolve the issue of the 20th Century Black hole. The question facing legislators has been how to resolve the issue.
Communia Policy recommendation the need for an efficient pan-European solution to the orphan works problem
8) The i2010 Digital Library initiative and the need for a legislative solution
In 2005 the European Commission’s Information Society and Media Directorate published its i2010 digital Libraries initiative, stating the intention of creating a single European digital library providing online access to European cultural heritage. Launched in 2008 Europeana acts as an aggregator for Europe’s digitised cultural heritage and offers direct access to digitised books, audio and film material, photos, paintings, maps, manuscripts, newspapers and archival documents that are part of Europe’s cultural heritage.
The EU has been considering the issue of orphan works since 2006 when it established a High Level Expert Group (HLEG) on Digital Libraries. An interim report “Report on Digital Preservation, Orphan Works and Out-of-Print Works” adopted by the group in 2007 stated that a solution to orphan works was desirable for at least literary and audio-visual works. It proposed that non-legislative solutions to orphan works should include the creation of dedicated databases concerning information on orphan works, improvements to rights holder metadata in digital material, and enhancements to contractual practices, particularly for audiovisual works. The Subgroup also recommended that Member states give appropriate support to contractual arrangements that take into account the role of cultural institutions.
In the UK the Gower’s Review of Intellectual Property (2006) considered the problem of orphan works and made various recommendations on how to resolve the issue, including proposing an ‘orphan works’ provision to the European Commission that would enable creative artists to reuse orphaned material. Anticipating future legislation to resolve the situation, it also recommended that clear guidance be issued by the Patent Office regarding
the parameters of a ‘reasonable search’ for orphan works, in consultation with rights holders, collecting societies, rights owners and archives,when an orphan works exception comes into being.
Lamentably, many of the recommendations made by the Gower’s Review had failed to be implemented by the time of Sir Hargreaves Review of Intellectual Property and Growth (2011) which noted that only 25 of the 54 recommendations made by Gower’s had been implemented. Hargreaves seems to imply that the reason for this was down to the effectiveness of groups acting on behalf of rights holders whose lobbying ‘”has been more persuasive to Ministers than economic impact assessments.”
Hargreaves’ report would also attempt to tackle the issue of orphan works himself suggesting that the creation of a Digital Copyright Exchange, which would facilitate the sale of licenses by rights owners, claiming that automation would speed up and reduce the cost in the process. The will result in:
…a UK market in digital copyright which is better informed and more readily capable of resolving disputes without costly litigation.
The need for a legislative solution to the issue of orphan works is illustrated by Ringnalda(2011) who argues that given that infringement is a criminal offence in many European countries, allowing users to simply start using the works after an unsuccessful attempt to locate the rights holder would not be appropriate. He says:
Inducing public libraries to wilfully violate criminal law by having them use orphaned works without permission would therefore clearly violate public order and policy. Self-regulation cannot suffice. A legal solution is required.
While the i2010 strategy and the Europeana platform that it gave birth form the background to the adoption of the Orphan Works Directive in 2012, Janssens & Tryggvadóttir(2016) note that particular attention to preservation and making available of European cultural heritage, was also driven by Google’s book project, arguing that this was the spur behind the European Digital Library initiative. Rosati (2013) agrees that Google Books settlement encouraged the development of orphan works legislation and wider reforms relating to digitisation of works, citing a 2009 speech by, then Commissioner for Telecoms and Media Digital Europe, Viviane Reding, in which it was claimed that:
lacking a reform of EU rules on orphan works, digitization of works and the development of attractive content offers (including the Google Book Library Project) would not have taken place in Europe.
An 2008 report of the Copyright Subgroup of the HLEG identified four conditions that should be met by potential users of orphan works:
A user wishes to make good faith use of a work with an unclear copyright status;
Due diligence has been performed in trying to identify the rightholders and/or locate them;
The user wishes to use the work in a clearly defined manner;
The user has a duty to seek authority before exploiting the orphan work…
By 2011, when the EU began to consider again the development of a legislative solution to enable the use of orphan works, they considered various options that fit into two categories, the first is based on extended collective licensing (ECL) and the second is modelled on a non-exclusive license. Ringnalda (2011) claims that, of the five options considered by the European Commission four would:
Prescribe modalities of either an exception or a limitation, of a statutory licensing scheme
The fifth and preferred solution as one that allowed member states to devise their own legal technique to enable libraries to make their orphaned works available online, as long as prior permission was given for each work. Any work recognized as orphaned in on member state must be recognized as an orphan in all in order to ensure they are available throughout Europe, a principle is known as mutual recognition. This is necessary to ensure that a user need not comply with the rules of orphan works in 27 member states.
Rosati (2013) outlines possible options considered by the Commission, including the adoption:
of a legally binding standalone instrument on the clearance and mutual recognition of orphan works, a specific exception to be added to Directive 2001/29 (the ‘InfoSoc Directive’), or guidance on cross-border mutual recognition of orphan works.
The favored solution was one that allowed member states to devise their own legal technique to enable libraries to make their orphaned works available online, as long as prior permission was given for each work. Any work recognized as orphaned in one member state, fooling a diligent search must be recognized as an orphan in all in order to ensure they are available throughout Europe, a principle is known as mutual recognition. This is necessary to ensure that a user need not comply with the rules of orphan works or conduct a diligent search in 27 member states. As Rosati (2013) argues:
On this basis, it would have been possible to make orphan works available online for cultural and educational purposes without prior authorization, unless (or until) the relevant right holder put an end to the orphan work status.
Besides the options outlined above legislative solutions to the orphan Works problem can include reducing liability for infringement resulting from the use of Works. And limitation of damages that can be claimed by rightsholders. These approaches were included in a proposed Orphan Works Bill which failed to make it through Congress in 2008. (At the Orphan Works Symposium in Bournemouth Prof. Peter Jaszi regaled us with a tragic tale about US attempts to introduce orphan Works legislation)
The eventual approach taken by the European Parliament was the adoption of an Orphan Works Directive on 25th Oct 2012, establishing a new exception to copyright exclusive rights for a number of orphan works. The final text incorporated minor amendments from the initial draft, these included articles 3, which states that a diligent search should be carried out in good faith, 5(1A) which states that a diligent search should be carried out in good faith and only prior to the use of the work, and provisions for the right to fair compensation for reappearing rights holders.
The purpose of the directive was to ensure a legal framework that ensured the lawful cross border online access to orphan works contained within the collections of institutions such as libraries, museums, archives, educational establishments, film heritage and public broadcasters with a public as part of their public interest mission. A directive was necessary to ensure cross border access, reduce transaction costs and facilitate the identification of rightsholders, in doing so it would advance the wider aim of building the knowledge economy. (Rosati 2013)
The eventual directive also restricted the overall scope of coverage, by excluding standalone artworks.
A flawed directive?
Despite the efforts of the EU Parliament to create a directive to enable the widespread digitization of orphan works, there are several flaws that mean it’s impact has been limited. Below I will briefly outline the main issues.
A structural problem?
As outlined above the issue of clearing orphan works is part of the wider problem of clearing the rights of in Copyright works for mass-digitization. All digitization projects that require individual rights clearance of works, face the possibility of high transaction costs that result from both seeking out rights holders and negotiating usage. In many cases rightsholders may request a fee for use of their works.
Conducting the diligent search can be time consuming and costly, not least because as many studies, have, highlighted (Borghi, Favale and Erickson, 2016, Favale, Schroff and Bertoni 2015, Favale, Homberg, Kretschmer, Mendis and Secchi 2013, Ringnalda ) the requirements are either too vague or too onerous, leading to institutions facing. excessive time costs spent trying to meet the requirement, to establish certainty.
Part of the problem is that unlike the UK Licensing Scheme there is no independent body to certify a search as diligent, organisations are left to judge for themselves to determine what constitutes a diligent enough search. Consequently, as Stobo, Patterson and Erickson (2017) highlight many institutions did not view a completed diligent search as sufficient to enable digitisation, relying instead on additional risk assessments. This because as Baker(2016) says:
Though the regulations require that a diligent search be conducted to determine the orphan status of a work, and set out relevant sources to be consulted for each category of relevant work, they fail to specify whether consulting each of the specified sources will automatically guarantee operation of the exception.
Project design
Rightsholder search
Exhibition
Selection of material
Cost of exhibition development (calendar time, scheduling, space)
Knowledge costs related to identifying and handling IP
PR / reputation costs arising from embarking on infringing activity
Subscription fee to database required for DS (Favale et al. 2016)
Labour cost of examining works (Dickson, 2010)
Labour cost of searching for rightsholders / DS (Dickson, 2010)
Labour cost of corresponding with rightsholders (Covey (2005; Stobo et al, 2016))
Material cost of communicating w/ rightsholders (Covey, 2005)
Alterations to project design incurred by rightsholder requests
Fees paid to rightsholders located by DS
Fees paid to license orphan works in UK scheme or ECL
Alterations to display of work at request of rightsholder
Takedown of work on rightsholder re-emergence (Schofield & Urban, 2015)
Compensation paid on rightsholder re-emergence
TABLE 1: Characterising costs of rights clearance in three phases (Borghi, Erickson & Favale (2016)
A further issue with the directive highlighted by Baker(2016) concerns provisions relating to the reappearance of rightsholders. The regulations state that a reappearing rightsholder may put an end to a works orphan status, by providing evidence of ownership, but fails to make clear what standard of evidence is required or what form it should take form this should take. Furthermore, whilst mutual recognition of a work’s orphan status is guaranteed in the directive, it doesn’t make clear that there is mutual recognition of the termination of a work’s orphan status.
According to Ringnalda (2013) the proposed Directive intended to:
“ameliorate the burden of diligent search efforts by referring to a number of sources that should be consulted before a search is considered to have been sufficiently diligent.”
However, such an approach he argues fits the problem of orphan works but fails to resolve the issue of mass rights clearance.
“It may provide a legal technique that allows orphan works, but if libraries will be required to clear copyrights for each individual work we shall not have to worry about the orphan before their copyrights have already expired”
Stobo, Erickson and Patterson(2017) reported that whilst many institutions such as the BFI, and the British Library have made efforts to engage with the orphan works directive, several others including Wellcome Library, National Portrait Gallery, National Library of Wales, and National Library of Scotland have not made use of either the Orphan works Directive or the UK IPO Orphan Works Licensing scheme, instead relying on their own internal risk management policies.(See also Stobo et al 2013)
Next Steps
In my next post I will look at the proposed diligent search crowdsourcing platform (ENDOW) as a solution to the issues around diligent search. I also aim to report on the survey I am going to conduct of UK cultural heritage institutions to establish how they are approaching the management and use of orphan works in their collections. This research will contribute to an understanding of the effectiveness of the orphan works legislation and help to determine if it has been effective in enabling mass digitization as intended.
References
Baker, K. E. (2016) It’s a hard knock life: a critique of the legislative response to the orphan works problem in the UK. UCL Journal of Law and Jurisprudence DOI: 10.14324/111.2052-1871.061
Borghi, M., Erickson, K. and Favale, M. (2016) ‘With Enough Eyeballs All Searches Are Diligent: Mobilizing the Crowd in Copyright Clearance for Mass Digitization’, Chicago-Kent Journal of Intellectual Property, 16(1). Available at: http://scholarship.kentlaw.iit.edu/ckjip
Deazley, R. and Stobo, V. (eds) (2014) Archives and Copyright: Developing an agenda for reform Digital proceedings of RCUK symposium. Available at http://www.create.ac.uk/archivesandcopyright
Janssens M., Tryggvadóttir R. (2016) Orphan works and out-of-commerce works to make the European cultural heritage available: are we there yet?. In The Future of Copyright. A European Union and International Perspective. Stamatoudi I. (eds.) Wolters Kluwer , pp. 189-209
Ricolfi, M. (2008) ‘Final Report on Digital Preservation, Orphan Works, and Out-of-Print Works The present report follows an Interim Report on Digital Preservation, Orphan and Out-of-Print works, presented by the Copyright Subgroup at the second meeting of the High Level Expert Group on 17 October 2006 and the Report on Digital Preservation, Orphan Works, and Out-of-Print Works presented at the third meeting of 14 April 2007’. Available at: http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/digital_libraries/doc/hleg_minutes/copyright/interim_report_16_10_06.pdf
Rosati, E. (2013) The Orphan Works Directive, or throwing a stone and hiding the hand. Journal of Intellectual Property Law & Practice, Vol. 8, No. 4. pp 303-310.
Ringnalda, A. (2011) Orphan Works, Mass Rights Clearance, and Online Libraries: The Flaws of the Draft Orphan Works Directive and Extended Collective Licensing as a Solution . Medien und Recht International , Vol. 8 pp. 3-10. Available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2369974
Stobo, V., Deazley, R. and Anderson, I. G. (2013) Copyright & Risk: Scoping the Wellcome Digital Library Project’, 10(December). doi: 10.5281/zenodo.8380.This.
Stobo, V., Patterson, K., Erickson., K. (2017) I should like you to see them some time’: an empirical study of copyright clearance costs in the digitisation of Edwin Morgan’s scrapbooks (Journal of Documentation – forthcoming)
van Gompel, S. and Hugenholtz, P. B. (2010) The Orphan Works Problem: The Copyright Conundrum of Digitizing Large-Scale Audiovisual Archives, and How to Solve It, Popular Communication. Taylor & Francis Group , 8(1), pp. 61–71. doi: 10.1080/15405700903502361.
The end of my #citylis journey is nearing. After almost two years I’ve finished all my taught modules, written 8 essays, sat through roughly 240 hours of lectures, attended all sorts of fun events after hours, such as library carpentry, the British Library roadshow, took a trip to a cemetery (because you know Library science?!) and met lots of great people. Of course it’s not really the end, after all #citylis is really for life not just for Christmas, just because you finish the course doesn’t mean you can’t still be involved in #citylis. #citylis is more of a community than a just a course. Also, there’ still the matter of the ‘dreaded’ dissertation to complete, 15-20,000 or so words worth of LIS researchy goodness.
For dissertation topic I ended up landing on a subject that was completely unrelated to my previous ideas. Having spent most of last year thinking of writing about the history of printing, and collecting quite a bit of material to that end, I tossed that idea on the basis that it’s an area that’s already been thoroughly explored. My second choice up until the end of last month was on the concept of libraries in the seventeenth century, I became interested in this after reading about La Bibliotheque Mazarin (see my last blog post).
Then whilst studying the Information Law and Policy module, with the very knowledgeable Paul Pedley I encountered the subject of orphan works.
Little lost Orphans
What are orphan works? I hear you ask. Well the UK Intellectual Property office defines orphan works as:
“creative works or performances that are subject to copyright – like a diary, photograph, film or piece of music – for which one or more of the right holders is either unknown or cannot be found.” (IPO 2016)
Orphan works have proved to be a proverbial spanner in the works for library digitization projects, libraries can’t obtain permission to make use of these works. Any organisation wanting to use these works risk infringing copyright and could face an expensive lawsuit from a reappearing rightsholder.
This is because Copyright grants rights-owners (which may not always be the creator) exclusive rights over the Reproduction, Distribution, Public Performance and Communication to the Public of their work(s).The Intellectual Property Office’s guidance: The rights granted by copyright (IPO 2015) states that Reproduction includes scanning, whilst Communication to the public covers “communication of a work to the public by electronic transmission. This would include broadcasting a work or putting it on the internet.” Since digitization involves both scanning and making a work available online doing so without permission of the rightsholder would result in an infringement of their exclusive rights. As Padfield (2015) states a rightsholders rights are unconditional and can therefore take action against any infringing use, regardless of whether or not they intend to exploit the work themselves, and regardless of whether “the infringement has caused harm or brought any economic benefit to the infringer”
The scale of the problem is revealed in a report by the British Library, which estimated that around 43% of in-copyright material in its collections were orphans(Stratton 2011), whilst the Imperial War Museum holds 2 million photographs with no identified owner.² The high proportion of orphan works in the collections of cultural heritage institutions has had a major impact on digitization projects research conducted by the University of Glasgow reported that institutions spent an average of 2.58 hours searching for rightsholders in books at a cost of £31 per work. For newspaper and magazine clippings the time spent searching for rightsholders was 1.52 hours at a cost £23 per work. Similarly the British Library estimated that based on a representative sample of 140 books it would take a single researcher more than 1000 years to check the entire collection.(Stratton 2011)
The uncertainty around the use of orphan works has given rise to a phenomenon known as the “20th century black hole“, as libraries are unable or unwilling to digitize 20th century material. This phenomenon is illustrated by data from Europeana which found a dramatic fall in the availability of material from the second half of the 20th Century.
The directive provides a Copyright exception to enable and allow cultural heritage institutions(CHIs) to digitize and make available online orphan works in their collections, following a search for rights holders, also know as a diligent search. The exception covers literary, cinematographic and audiovisual works as well as sound recordings, but does not permit the use of standalone artistic works such as photographs, maps and paintings. A key limitation is that the usage must be non-commercial, although institutions are able to make a charge to recover the costs. Furthermore, the exception requires any CHI that uses orphan works to register that work in the EU Orphan Works database, now managed by the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO). Once a work has been established as an orphan in one member state, it is recognized as an orphan across the whole of the EU.
Orphan Works License scheme
The limited nature of the exception led the UK the Government to introduce a licensing scheme for orphan works. The licensing scheme allows any individual or organisation to purchase a non exclusive license for either commercial or non-commercial usage of orphan works. The cost of license includes an administration fee and ranges from 10p upwards. All prospective licensees must conduct a diligent search for the rights owner as part of the application process and are required to record the details of their search. Details Once a license is granted it lasts for 7 years and the details are recorded in the UK orphan works register. The register includes details of all applications including those that were unsuccessful or withdrawn, but doesn’t give details as to why they were rejected or withdrawn. The license fee is set aside for 8 years as fair compensation in the event of the rights-holder reappearing ,
A comparison of orphan works legislation
UK license scheme
EU Orphan Works Directive
Who is eligible to use it
Anyone
Cultural Heritage Institutions
What works does it apply to?
All Works
Text based works, embedded artistic works, and audio-visual works which have been published or made publicly available by a relevant body.
What uses are covered?
All uses
Making available and reproductions for the purposes of digitization, making available, indexing, cataloguing, preservation or restoration.
Diligent Search
Yes, using guidance and specific forms
Yes, self-certified
Fees
Minimum £20 application fee, plus 10p minimum license fee
None
Rights holder claims coverage
IPO the IPO will pay licence fees
User must pay license fee
Duration
Up to seven years
Until expiration of Copyright or rights holder appears
Coverage
Uk only
EU-wide
Source: Oconnell (2015)
Formulating a research question
Now that I have outlined what orphan works are and why they are a problem I need to talk a little more about what I am actually going research. My intention is to determine how effective is the current orphan works legislation in enabling institutions to use orphan works.
Since the intended aim of the exception was to enable CHIs to digitize and make orphan works in their collection available, I intend to determine whether the legislation has had the desired effect.
Already, I have found evidence that it hasn’t been successful as intended.
My initial research suggests it hasn’t, largely because the burden of the diligent search is to strict or the costs of carrying out searches are still too high. Some authors have argued that the reason for the orphan works problem lies in the length of Copyright which is currently set at 70 years after the death of the ‘author’. Of course with orphan works the problem is that the ‘author’ can’t be located or identified, it can be impossible to determine whether a work is still in Copyright.
Article 3(2) of EU directive states that:
The sources that are appropriate for each category of works or phonogram in question shall be determined by each Member State
The UK Intellectual Property Office provides detailed guidance for the different categories of works on its website, with separate guides covering Film & Sound, Literary Works, and Still Visual Art. Each guide lists the many different sources that CHIs and potential users of orphan works should check as part of the diligent search process.
For literary works alone there is a checklist of 36 sources that should be checked:
Orphan works’ registers
Legal deposits, library catalogues and authority files
Society of Authors
Writers’ Guild of Great Britain
Association of Authors Agents
Publishers Association
WATCH (Writers Artists and their Copyright Holders)
ISBN (International Standard Book Number)
Authors Licensing and Collecting Society
Publishers Licensing Society
Copyright Licensing Agency
Public Lending Right register
Virtual International Authority Files (VIAF)
Credits and other information appearing on the work
FOB (Firms Out of Business) database
Companies House
The provenance of a work (i.e. where the work was found)
General internet searching
Records of literary agents
International Standard Text Code (ISTC)
Copac
Author and book info database
Poetry Library
International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI) database
Books in Print database
Copyright Hub
Academic and scientific databases
Online databases and catalogues
Digitised newspaper archives
Genealogy websites
Wills – searching for family members or connections of the author
Archives
Treasury solicitors
Biographical directories
Author directories online
Other sources identified
Along with the aforementioned guidance the checklists provide detailed and extensive direction for those undertaking the search. Deazley (2017) references the fact that some believe that diligent search is in fact an exhaustive search, in that where a list of sources has been issued it becomes necessary for all those sources to be checked in order for a search to qualify as diligent. However, as he points out the IPO guidelines state that a search should be context specific depending upon the type of work.
One proposed solution to burden of diligent search is proposed by Borghi, Erickson & Favale (2016). After discussing the issue of orphan works and examining the legislative responses, they examine the costs of rights clearance and diligent search that are borne by CHIs seeking to use orphan works. They propose the use of crowdsourcing platform to spread the cost and workload of a diligent search, stating that:
A legally compliant and rigorously designed crowdsourcing solution could reduce risks to cultural institutions and help overcome perceived challenges associated with mass digitization.
Such an initiative, they argue could also enable cultural heritage institutions with little or no experience in rights clearance, to conduct diligent searches of their own, thereby providing them with the potential means to identify and use orphan works in their own collection.
Guided by platform users would be lead to three possible outcomes.
the work is in the public domain;
the work is in-copyright but the rightholders cannot be located:
the work is in-copyright and the rightholders are traceable.
As the authors state, for outcomes 1 and 2 it would be up to the institution to verify the status of the work. In the case of the third the platform will generate a report for the user and the host institution containing information about the rightsholder(s). It would then be up to the institution to contact the rightsholder or their representatives and negotiate a license for use.
Next Steps
Once I have finished my initial literature review, I intend to conduct a survey of libraries and archives on their attitudes towards the current orphan works legislation. I am interested in finding out whether it has impacted on their digitization projects (positively or negatively) and whether as the literature shows the burden of the diligent search is an issue in terms of time and resources. I will also examine the EnDOW (“Enhancing access to 20th Century cultural heritage through Distributed Orphan Works clearance”) project, which builds upon the research about crowdsourcing diligent search. Specifically it states that it
“aims at designing, implementing and testing an efficient and cost-effective system for determining the “orphan work” status of library, archive and museum material, according to the requirements of the recently implemented European Directive on orphan works.” (Diligentsearch.eu., no date)
I will also look at a recent project called Digitising the Edwin Morgan Scrapbooks, which examined the current orphan works legislation, through a “rights clearance simulation on a culturally significant set of unpublished scrapbooks created by Edwin Morgan, the first Scots Makar.” The project which can be found at http://www.digitisingmorgan.org/ concluded that “mass digitisation and diligent search are fundamentally incompatible”, so I will be examining the reasons for that conclusion. Then on 23 June this year Bournemouth University is hosting an International Symposium: New Approaches to the Orphan Works Problem: Technology, Regulation, Practices. This is a free event which will:
“bring together the findings of EnDOW researchers and those of fellow scholars around the world, in order to explore innovative approaches to the problem of orphan works. Technology, legal regulation and best practices will be thoroughly discussed and tested by the participants.”
I’ve booked a place and hope to learn plenty about the EnDOW project and current thinking on Orphan Works legislation. I hope be able to speak to some of the presenters and get their opinion on the initial findings of my research. This will help inform the next stages of my research.
I hope to post periodic progress reports here, so watch this space.
-Fin –
References
Deazley, R. (2017) Digitising the Edwin Morgan Scrapbooks: Conclusion
O ’connell, A. (2015) Copyright in Unpublished Works: 2039 and Orphan Works. Library and Information Research, 39(121).
Padfield, T. (2015) Copyright for archivists and records managers, Fifth edn, Facet Publishing, London.
Patry, W.F. (2011)How to fix copyright, Oxford University Press, Oxford;New York. via Oxford Scholarship Online DOI: 10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199760091.001.0001
Rosati, E. (2013) The Orphan Works Provisions of the ERR Act: Are They Compatible with UK and EU Laws? European Intellectual Property Review, (Forthcoming.) Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2323393
Schroff, S., Favale, M. & Bertoni, A. (2017) The Impossible Quest – Problems with Diligent Search for Orphan Works . doi:10.1007/s40319-017-0568-z
Stratton, B (2011) Seeking New Landscapes: A rights clearance study in the context of mass digitisation of 140 books published between 1870 and 2010. The British Library Board
Literature
Arnold, R. (2015). The need for a new Copyright Act: a case study in law reform: The Herchel Smith Intellectual Property Lecture 2014. Queen Mary Journal of Intellectual Property, 4, 5(2), pp. 110-131.
Baker, K. E. (2016). It’S a Hard Knock Life: a Critique of the Legislative Response To the Orphan Works Problem in the Uk. s.l.:s.n.
Christo, C. (2015). Mass Digitization and Copyright. information today, 32(10), pp. 1,28-9.
Collections Trust, (2009). In from the Cold, Collections Trust
Cornish, G. P. (2015). Reform of UK copyright law and its benefits for libraries Reform of UK copyright law and its benefits for libraries. Interlending & Document Supply, 43(10), pp. 14-17.
Linklater, E (2015). Make me an offer I won’t regret: Offers to license works on acceptable terms cannot block libraries’ “right” to digitize for access on dedicated terminals: Technische Universität Darmstadt. Common Market Law Review, 52(3).
Favale, M., Schroff, S. & Bertoni, A., (2015). The Impossible Quest: Problems with Diligent Search for Orphan Works Marcella Favale, Simone Schroff, Aura Bertoni *. SSRN, Volume July.
Gangjee, D., S. (2016) Copyright Formalities: A Return to Registration?. In R Giblin and K Weatherall (eds), What if We Could Reimagine Copyright? (ANU Press, 2017) 213.. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2923897
Hansen, D. R.,(2014). Copyright Reform Principles for Libraries, Archives, and Other Memory Institutions. Berkeley Technology Law Journal, Volume 29, pp. 1559-1594.
Hudson, E. & Kenyon, A. T., (2007). Melbourne Law School Without Walls: Copyright Law and Digital Collections in Australian Cultural Institutions Without Walls: Copyright Law and Digital Collections in Australian Cultural Institutions. 4(2).
Hugenholtz, B.,(2013). Is Harmonization a Good Thing? The Case of the Copyright Acquis. In: J. Ohly, Ansgar; Pila, ed. The Europeanization of Intellectual Property LawTowards a European Legal Methodology. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2013., pp. 57-73.
Intellectual Property Office, (2014) Government response to the technical consultation on orphan works.
Kevin L. Smith, J. & Powell, H. J., (2009). Copyright Renewal for Libraries: Seven Steps Toward a User-Friendly Law. portal: Libraries and the Academy, 10(1), pp. 5-27.
Pallante, M. A., (2012). Orphan Works & Mass Digitization: Obstacles & Opportunities. Berkeley Technology Law Journal, 27(3), pp. 1251-1258.
Patry, W., 2012. The Length of Copyright Is Damaging Our Cultural Heritage. In: How to Fix Copyright. Oxford: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
Pedley, P., (2015). Practical copyright for library and information professionals. London: Facet.
Rivers, T., (2014). A Fuss About Something?. European Intellectual Property Review, 35(3), pp. 155-169.
Rosati, E.,(2013) Copyright issues facing early stages of digitization projects. Mobile Collections Project Cambridge
Senftleben, M., (2014). Comparative Approaches to Fair Use: An Important Impulse for Reforms in EU Copyright Law. In: G. B. Dinwoodie, ed. ‘Methods and Perspectives in Intellectual Property’. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, p. 25.
Stannard, E., (2015). A Copyright Snapshot: the Impact of New Copyright Legislation on Information Professionals. Legal Information Management, 1, 15(4), pp. 233-239.
Stobo, V., (2016). Copyright exceptions for archivists and librarians in the UK. Art Libraries Journal, 41(01), p. 3–10.
Van Gompel, S., (2010). Formalities in the digital era: An obstacle or an opportunity?. SSRN, pp. 395-424.
Van Gompel, S. & Hugenholtz, P. B., (2010). The Orphan Works Problem: The Copyright Conundrum of Digitizing Large-Scale Audiovisual Archives, and How to Solve It. Popular Communication, 4 2, 8(1), pp. 61-71.
As an undergraduate I studied history and developed an interest, some might say an obsession, in the French King Louis XIV, also known as the Le Roi Soleil or The Sun King, as a result of his carefully managed image. Louis’s reign was the longest of any European monarch, lasting 72 years and was the high watermark for the style of monarchy known as absolutism. It was the notion of Louis’s absolute monarchy, which triggered my interest and which saw my first essay on the Sun King discussing Louis’ proclamation “L’état c’est moi“(I am the state/the state is me). As it turns out this proclamation was apocryphal and Louis’s absolute monarchy was not all-powerful as nineteenth century scholars led us to believe. As Parker says:
It is highly arguable that absolute power really rested on a compromise with the families and groups who controlled the key institutions of central and provincial France. In return for the latter’s political conformity the monarchy sustained their material interests through a system of patronage from which both parties benefited.¹
Louis’s first minister Cardinal Mazarin was the owner of a great library, known as the Bibliothèque Mazarin, is today France’s oldest public library. The library was run by Gabriel Naudé, writer of the first modern treatise. In this blog I will delve into the history of Mazarin, his library, and his Librarian Naudé.
Portrait of Cardinal Jules Mazarin (1602-1661) by Pierre Mignard c1660
Giulio Raimondo Mazarini, an Italian by birth, was born in Pescine, Aquila in 1602, and would study at Jesuit School in Rome. Having served as a captain in the papal army from 1624, before becoming a papal nuncio in Paris between 1632 and 1636. It was during this time that he attracted the attention of Cardinal Richelieu, chief minister to French King Louis XIII, who took him under his wing. Having become a naturalised Frenchman in 1639, Mazarin’s service to France was recognised and rewarded with the granting of a Cardinal’s hat in 1641. Two years later following the deaths of Richelieu (1642) and Louis XIII(1643) he was chosen by Anne of Austria, the Queen Regent, to be first minister.
The Fronde and exile
As first minister Mazarin continued many of Richelieu’s policies, which proved unpopular with the nobles and judiciary. They resented him for impeding their access to the royal government, through restrictions on the sales of offices of state, which were traditionally a source of income for many nobles. Many were also suspicious of him, due to his Italian birth. Printed pamphlets, known as Mazarinades circulated, attacking the Cardinal, accusing him of jumping into bed with the Queen or being homosexual.
Folger call number DC124.M2925 var. Cage. A Mazarinade from 1651. The title roughly translates as “Unfortunate Prosperity, or the short history of Cardinal Mazarin, in which is set forth all the ruses and all the trickery that he used to achieve his prodigious fortune, with a relation of all the causes of his disgrace.“
Between 1648 and 1653 France was embroiled in a period of unrest and civil war known as the Fronde. On one side was Mazarin and the monarch, on the other the parlements, the noblesse d’robe. Initially Mazarin agreed to make concessions to avoiding a head on confrontation. However, when he and Anne arrested several deputies, including the popular figure Pierre Broussel, rioting broke out and a mob barricaded the streets of Paris, an event know as the journées de barricades (day of the barricades). Anne, Mazarin and young Louis XIV were forced to leave the city and raise troops to retake the city. With the end of the Thirty Years’ War, marked with the Peace of Westphalia, the Royal army was deployed to put down the Frondeurs. In March 1649 the Peace of St Germain was agreed bringing an end to what became known as the Fronde Parlementaire.
Many frondeurs such as Gondi were unhappy with the peace, and a second period of civil war known as the Fronde des nobles ensued from 1650-1653. During the ensuing conflict Mazarin, fearing reprisals from the parlement was forced to flee the country, when the frondeurs allied with the forces of the Prince Condé. Whilst in exile Mazarin was able to sway the great General Turenne, whose forces were then arrayed against Condé’s. By September 1651 Louis had reached the age of his majority, following his thirteenth birthday and Mazarin was recalled to France.
A second brief exile occurred before a triumphant Louis reentered Paris in October 1652, with Mazarin following in February 1653. Mazarin continued to serve Louis until his death in 1661, by which time he had:
“…negotiated lasting peace treaties with both the Holy Roman Empire and Spain (securing valuable territorial and dynastic rights in the process), preserved the “absolutist” innovations of Richelieu and Louis XIII, and trained those who would direct the century’s most spectacular reign, including Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Michel L Tellier, and even Louis XIV himself.“²
Les bibliothèques de Mazarin
Mazarin owned three libraries during his lifetime, the first one was established in Rome before he moved to France in 1639. Following his move to Paris he tasked his librarian Gabriel Naudé with establishing a second considerably larger library, which was dispersed during the Fronde in 1652. Lastly, the library which was reassembled on his return from exile in 1653 and which today forms the core of the current Bibliothèque Mazarine, following the instructions of Mazarin’s will.³
Mazarin’s new Library was to be located within L’Hôtel Chevry-Tubeuf, situated close to the Palais Royal, where Anne of Austria and the young Louis XIV resided. Mazarin set about extending and refurbishing the building, including two galleries by François Mansart to house his art collections, constructed between 1642 and 1644 (today they form the Galleries Mansart and Mazarine of the Bibliothèque National de France). Between 1646 and 1648 a new wing of the Palais Mazarin was constructed by Pierre Le Muet and Maurizio Valperga along the Rue Richelieu. Contemporary accounts show that this wing was about 190 toises (144 meters) long, with the lower floor comprising stables and the upper floor containing a library and living quarters.4
The Palais Mazarin with the library wing from the Plan de Paris par Bullet et Blondell 1676
French historian Henri Sauval (1621 – 76) provided a description written around 1655, but not published until after Mazarin’s death:
“This illustrious library is in a gallery of about thirty toises, about four and a half in breadth, covered with a vault of more than five, lighted by eight windows, and surrounded by two shelf arrangements. The first are full of books in-quarto and folio, and, moreover, are accompanied by a large desk breast high prevailing all around; and fifty Corinthian columns of wood, tall strong, and worked with the cleanliness. The balusters are placed above, where one goes up by four staircases practiced, and hidden in the four corners of the first shelves. This second ordinance occupies all the space which, from the first, goes as far as the birth of the vault, and is destined for the volumes, both in octavo and for the other little books; and for further enrichment and convenience, a small gallery the stone worn on the cornice and entablature Corinthian columns and closed with a painted iron baluster breast high.”5
Yann Sordet current director of the Bibliothèuqe Mazarin argues that the Mazarin’s new library was significant for several reasons, that it was the first library in France to housed in a purpose-built wing and that it was also:
The first library in France to be designed as a gallery: a rectilinear space, not segmented by desks, pulpits or cupboards, in which the books were not only pushed to the periphery, but also lined the walls from floor to ceiling. It was a functional, modern library, with as its sole decoration the mass of books and the shelving structures.6
Piquard provides more details about the design and construction saying that:
It was a matter of building along the Rue de Richelieu, on the edge of the Mazarin Palace, a long gallery in which the books would be placed On shelves fixed to the wall, while the middle of the room would be used to welcome the readers. The work was completed and the books in place at the end of 1649.7
He then quotes the principles set forth by Naudé in his Advis which recommends that the library should be built:
“In middle aisles so that the dampness of the earth does not produce the remorse which is a certain rot that attaches itself Insensibly to books “8
Naudé also talks about the importance of a well-lit library:
“But all these difficulties and circumstances are nothing to those which are to be observed for the giving light, and conveniently placing the windows of a Library, as well for being of great importance, that it be fully illuminated to the very farthest corners, as in respect likewise of the several natures of the winds which ordinarily blow, & which produce effects as different as are their qualities and the places through which they pass ; … “9
Naudé also made several recommendations concerning the interior design, which Le Muet would have followed:
Much less ought one to employ so much gold on the ceiling, Ivory and glass upon the Walls, the Cedar Shelves, and Marble Floor, seeing as this is not now in use; nor do they now place their Books upon Desks, as the antients did; but upon Shelves that hide all the Walls ; but in lieu of such gildings and adornings, one may supply it Mathematical Instruments, Globes, Mapps, Spheres, Pictures, Animals, Stones and other curiosities as well Artificial as Natural, which are ordinarily collected from time to time. 10
We have some idea of how the library looked based on architectural drawings discovered by Knud Bøgh, among the collections of the Royal Library of Denmark. The drawings are thought to have been made on the occasion of a visit by the future Christian V of Denmark, who stayed in Paris from December 1662 to May 1663. They are likely to have influenced the design of Frederick III’s Royal Library which began construction in 1665.
Architectural drawings of the gallery of the Bibliothèque Mazarin 1662-4 (Royal Library of Denmark)
In terms of decoration the Library was said to have featured varnished woodwork, probably the work of carpenter Pierre Dionys and inspired by the Roman libraries of Borromini.
The library was completed in 1653, but in 1668 was removed to its current site within the Palais de l’Institut de France, on Quai de Conti opposite the Louvre, in execution of the Cardinal’s will. This new library occupied a wing of the newly formed Collège des Quatre-Nations was created as a device by Mazarin to ensure his collection was not dispersed after his death as it had been during the Fronde. As Sordet points out, Mazarin:
Sparing himself the trouble of drawing up a deed of conveyance, he created an institution from scratch, which would perpetuate his person in the form of a college. The act of ‘foundation’ – as defined by canon law, allocating a mass of goods or assets to a perpetual service – consisted in forming a corporate body (a college) to receive it. It took over ten years for this idea to come to fruition: Mazarin first brushed aside Naudé’s proposal to entrust his library to the University of Paris (1649), he then preferred the King’s protection (1650); but his last will and testament (1661) brought the university back into the loop, as it were, because, as the library was attributed to a college, it automatically came under the University’s supervision.11
In 1668, seven years after Mazarin’s death, Mazarin’s library, with the exception of his collection of manuscripts which were taken by Colbert for the Bibliothèque du Roi, moved to the new site. The new library designed by Louis Le Vau, opened to the public in 1691, took the form of two galleries intersecting at right angles, rather than a single gallery. All the fittings, including columns from the previous library in the rue Richelieu, columns, pedestals, capitals, shelves and wood panelling, were transported and fitted into the new library.
Bibliothèque Mazarine
Gabriel Naudé
Gabriel Naudé. Line engraving by C. Mellan, 1765, after himself – CC BY 4.0 Wellcome Images
The size of Mazarin’s library at the time of his death was recorded in an inventory drawn up in 1661-2 by the executors of his will , totaled around 29,200 which included 2400 manuscripts and 26,800 printed books. This was smaller than the first Parisian Library that he had amassed before it was dispersed in the Fronde and which was though to total between 40,000 and 56,000.
The man entrusted with the position of Librarian to Mazarin’s new library was Gabriel Naudé, who was appointed in 1642. As Clarke says:
“One of this new minister’s first acts was to offer Gabriel Naudé a position as librarian in his household at a salary of 200 livres a year. He wished, Mazarin said, to build a library that would rank from its very beginning among the richest and most complete in Europe.”12
Born in Paris 1600, Naudé was well educated and was an avid reader of authors classic and modern. Having attended several colleges, and receiving the title master of arts he enrolled in the University of Paris to study medicine. Despite being named royal physician to Louis XIII in 1632 Naudé never practised medicine, perhaps for the because:
In the first half of the seventeenth century the practice of medicine centred in scholarly libraries and botanical gardens, not in hospitals or laboratories. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that although physicians trained at Paris were often learned men, their scientific ideas were rooted in the past. Understandably, the more intelligent among them escaped from medical practice into literature, philosophy, or the natural sciences.13
In 1620 published Naudé Le Marfore, ou Discours contre les libellés, his first book, at his own expense and it would be his writings that brought him to the attention of President Henri de Mesme, offering Naudé position of librarian.The library of de Mesmes was contain 8,000 printed books including many classics from the Aldine Press and was
…the venerable collection of one of the better established robe families in Paris. Particularly in the last half of the sixteenth century, the Hotel de Mesmes and its library had been at the centre of learned parlement culture. More than this, the de Mesmes library was one of a handful of robe libraries, the de Thou library among them, whose status as the private professional collections of public persons granted them, as sites of public scholarship and loci of Gallican and constitutional research, a quasi-public status in the Parisian intellectual community.14
Advis pour dresser une bibliothèque présenté à monseigneur le président de Mesme.. Par G. Naudé, 1627 – Source:gallica.bnf.fr
Instructions for erecting a Library
In 1627 Naudé wrote his famous Advis pour dresser une bibliothèque, in which he laid out his vision of the universal library. Addressed to “Monseigneur le President de Mesme” Naudé’s Advis is considered the first modern treatise on Librarianship. It consisted of nine chapters or poincts as Naudé called them:
One must be curious to set up libraries, and why.
How to learn and to know how to draw up a library.
The number of books which are required.
Of what quality and condition they ought to be.
By what expedients they may be acquired.
The disposition of the place where they should be kept.
The order which it is required to assign them.
Of the ornament and decoration necessary to be observed.
What should be the main purpose of the library.
Naudé’s stated reason for writing his Advis was a lack of suitable guidance on the selection of books, but he clearly had a particular vision of what a Library should be. In his Advis he appealed to De Mesmes’ sense of honour :
“And therefore, my Lord, it seems very much to the purpose, since you govern and preside in all signal Actions, that you never content yourself with a Mediocrity in things which are good and laudable; and since you have nothing of mean and vulgar, that you should also cherish, above all others, the honour and reputation of possessing a Bibliothèque, the most perfect, the best furnish’d and maintain’d of your time.”15
Naudé’s Advis was significant in that it advocated a move from collecting books for their material features, rich bindings and illustrations to a more reasoned consideration of their scholarly value. Unlike his contemporaries, such as Claude Clement, Thomas Bacon and Bodley, Naudé promoted what he considered a universal library:
a Library which is erected for the publick benefit ought to be universal, but which it can never be, unlesse it comprehend all the principal Authors that have written upon the great diversity of particular Subjects”16
A public library
As we see Naudé’s vision for a universal library also involved making it available to the public. Influenced by his experience of private libraries Naudé believed that the value of the library would benefit the public and that citizens should have access to as much information as possible. This was a radical idea since, as Lars Qvortrup say, at that time of writing it was widely believed that possession of knowledge was dangerous and should be limited to an educated few. Up until the 17th century libraries were mostly private institutions which sought to restrict access to books rather than promote. Naudé however subscribed to the Baconian theory that education of the human mind could transform society and that liberal public access to a well-stocked and organized library supported this. As Rovelstad states:
“Naudé’s user was everyone who may reap any profit from the library’s collection.”17
Naudé was able to convince de Mesme that creating and opening a great library to the public would bring him unique prestige and lasting fame:
“we first deduce, & explain the reasons which are most likely to perswade You, that it is to Your advantage, and that You ought by no means to neglect it. For not to go far from the nature of this Enterprise, common sence will informe us, that it is a thing altogether laudable, generous, and worthy of a courage which breathes nothing but Immortality, to draw out of oblivion, conferve, & erect (like another Pompey] all these Images, not of the Bodies, but of the Minds of so many gallant men, as have neither spared their time, nor their Industry, to transmit to us the most lively features and representations of whatsoever was most excellent & conspicuous in them.”18
The contents of the library
In his Advis Naudé makes many recommendations for the types of books that should be included in a library. For example he recommends buying not only works in their original language, but also their translations and commentaries:
“I Will now say notwithstanding, […] to omit nothing which may serve us for a guide, in this disquisition, that the prime rule which one ought to observe, is, in the first place to furnish a Library with all the chief and principal Authors, as well antient as modern, chosen of the best Editions, in gross, or in parcels, and accompanied with their most learned, and best Interpreters, and commentators, which are to be found in every facultie; not forgeting those which are lesse vulgar, and by consequent more curious.”16
Naudé was opposed to censorship of religious works and was in favor of the inclusion of controversial and heretical works in a collection. He believed that a good library must include works on all subjects and that scholars should be free to read these works because their contents and arguments had to be known in order to be refuted. As Paul Nelles states Naudé’s Advis signifies:
“a shift in contemporary experience of the library. It initiated a methodological discussion which supplanted the dominant bibliographical conception of the library as a static repository of existing knowledge with a recognition of the library as an institution actively engaged in the production of new knowledge. The Advis bears witness to the ongoing early modern redefinition of the central purpose of the library from one of determining the authority texts to one of evaluating the validity of sources.”20
Naudé would take a break from his work in theBibliotheque Memmiana to return to his medical studies. Around 1629 Guido de Bagni, the Vatican ambassador in Paris returned to Italy, and asked Naudé to join him as his librarian. He served Cardinal Bagni and then Cardinal Barbarini until 1642, when he was recalled to Paris to enter the employ of Cardinal Richelieu, who had been planning a royal library and invited Naudé to return to his native city. However, with the death of Richelieu, Naude came into the employ of the newly risen Cardinal Mazarin, who as we know was embarking on the creation of his first Parisian library. As Lemke says of their partnership:
“…there is little doubt that the right patron and the right bookman had come together and that neither Mazarin nor Naudé could have accomplished singly what they achieved in the next years together. Theirs was a genuine interest in learning, and Naudé, the implementor of their passion, was not dogmatic. Instead, he had come to the job with an open mind, a broad education, and a great joy of vocation.”21
With his new position Naudé now had the opportunity to put into practice the principles he had set out in his Advis. Naudé set about assembling the collection for the Bibliothèque Mazarin which was estimated to contain between 40,000 and 56,000 items at the time of its dispersal. Naudé set about amassing the collection through bulk acquisition of books and whole libraries, a method set out in his Advis. Clarke says that Naudé:
“…saw at once that the most practical method of acquiring books rapidly and in large numbers lay in block purchases by weight without regard for their condition or for duplicates. He knew that he must watch for large private collections to appear on the market and that he must also haunt the Parisian bookstores for suitable volumes.”22
To this end in 1643, Naudé acquired the collection of the late scholar from Limoges Jean Descordes, to form the basis of the Bibliothèque Mazarin. It consisted of 6,000 to 7,000 items including 1,700 volumes in folio, 2,000 in quarto, and 3,000 or 4,000 in octavo. Naudé was not restricted to buying books locally, having exhausted the bookshops of Paris, he travelled to Flanders, then Italy, Germany, and England. His friend Gian Vittorio Rossi, described his methods in a letter to Cardinal Chigi:
“Having purchased every last one of the books dealing in any language whatever with any subject or division of knowledge no matter what, he left the stores stripped and bare. Sometimes, it seemed as if he had come to these shops not as a buyer of books, but to ascertain the size of the walls for he measures with a rule all the books and shelves to the very roof, and names his figure on the basis of that measurement… [the seller]would wrangle, but in the end it is he [Naudé] who by insisting, by bullying, by blustering, and finally by sheer gall, gets his way so that he carries off the very best volumes cheaper than if they were pears or lemons, while the merchant, reflecting on this transaction, complains later that a spell was cast over his eyes and his hand forced, because he could have gotten a far better price for these books from the spice merchants for wrapping incense or pepper, or from the grocers for wrapping up butter or fish in sauce, and other pickled items.”23
In his Advis Naudé also suggested other means of acquiring book such as making the library known in order to attract gift, working with antiquarian book dealers, and consulting library and bookseller catalogues. He maintained an extensive network of contacts of scholars and friends, who were said to be alerted to donate and/or purchase new books for the Mazarin Library.
The order of books
Having acquired the books for Mazarin’s library, Naudé had to ensure they were arranged appropriately on the shelves. According to Paul Nelles, Naudé’s Advis:
“confronted the most pressing dilemma facing the universalization of the library in this period: the need to establish a nonhierarchical classification of knowledge that avoided the charge of arbitrariness but which could yet claim to accurately serve all disciplines of knowledge and provide a stable basis for investigation”21
Naudé would devote a whole section of his Advis to the arrangement of books titling the seventh Poinct or Chapter L’ordre qu’il conuient leur donner (The order which it is requisite to assign them.) He set out the importance of organising the Library saying:
“…for without this, doubtless, all inquiring is to no purpose, and our labour fruitless; feeling books are for no other reason laid and reserved in this place, but that they may be serviceable upon such occasions as present themselves; Which thing is not withstanding impossible to effect, unless they be ranged, and disposed according to the variety of their subjects, or in such other sort, as they may be easily be found, as soon as named. I affirm, moreover that without this Order and disposition, be the collection of books whatever, were it of fifty thousand volumes, it would no more merit the name of a Library than an assembly of thirty thousand men the name of an Army, unless they be martially in their several quarters, under the conduct of their Chiefs and Captains; or a vast heap of stones and materials, that of a Palace or house.”22
Naudé propsed a classification scheme for subject arrangement that mirrored the University Curricula and which he said were familiar mostly to readers:
“I conceive that to be alwayes the best which is most facil, the least intricate, most natural, practised, and which follows the Faculties of Theologie, Physick, Iuris∣prudence, Mathematicks, Humanity, and others, which should be subdivided each of them into particulars, according to their several members, which for this purpose ought to be reasonably well understood by him who has the charge of the Library.”23
He further established that arrangement would aid discovery saying that:
“…fourth & last, that all Books of like argument & subject be precisely reduced, and disciplin’d in their destin’d places; since in so doing, the memory is so refreshed, that it would be easie in a moment onely to find out whatever Book one would choose or desire, in a Library that were as vast as that of Ptolomy.”24
He was critical of alphabetical and symbolic classification schemes of libraries like the Ambrosiana and other libraries that arrange their books ‘pellmejle’ only to be located alphabetically in an author catalogue. Instead Naudé proposed two catalogues one arranged by author and one by subject:
“After all which it shall be very requisite to make two Catalogues of all the Books contained in the Library, in one whereof they should be so precisely dis- pos’d according to their several Matters and Faculties, that one may fee & know in the twinkling of an eye, all the Authors which do meet there upon thefirst subject that shall come into ones head ; and in the other, they fhould be faithfully ranged and reduced under an Alphabetical order of their Authours, as well to avoid the buying of them twice, as to know what are wanting, & satisfie.”25
To accomplish this Naudé recommends the employment of a Librarian, with experience of books to provide assistance to the readers and maintain the library. This man must be a learned and honourable person, who would add prestige to the library and be given an appropriate salary, along with the rank and title of librarian, in order to acknowledge his social standing.
The composition of the Library
We know from various accounts, including Naudé himself, that the first Library of Mazarin contained at least 40,000 items, which were amassed over a period of ten years as a result of Naudé’s efforts. We know from Naudé’s account of the surrender of the library that its rich and varied holdings included:
“Civil law philosophy in folio and books of theology in quarto…Medicine, chemistry and natural history in volumes of all sizes…Around two hundred Bibles in all languages, Greek, Hebrew and other oriental tongues, Latin, French, Italian, Spanish. German, Flemish, English, Dutch, Polish, Hungarian, Swedish, Finnish, Welsh, Hibernian and Rutenian and commentaries on the Bible in volumes of all sizes.”26
Naudé collected books in many different languages including Hebrew, Syriac, Samaritan, Ethiopian, Arabic, Greek, Spanish, Provencal, Italian and Latin. We also know that he advocated the inclusion of heretical texts and he lists books:
“in all languages including Lutheran, Calvinistic, Socinian and other heretical books in all languages, with many Hebrew, Syriac, Arabian , Ethiopian, and Oriental books of all sorts.”27
Later on he describes books on the history of many nations and other subjects:
“All the history, ecclesiastic and profane, universal and special, of every nation” and claims that “Italians, Germans, Spaniards, Englishmen, Polonians, Dutch, and other nations, found here the histories of their own nations, far more rich and better furnished than they could find in their several native countries…Books on mathematics to the number of thirty-five hundred volumes, the Fathers, Scholastics, controversies, sermons, books of the Louvre press and almost all of the humanities.” Lastly, “many large volumes of charts, prints, travels, voyages, tariffs, etc.”28
Once the Library was completed Mazarin instructed Naudé to:
“throw open the library doors to “every living soul” and to provide his readers “with all the books they desire in any language or on any subject.”29
And by 30 January 1644 the Gazette de France was reporting that Mazarin’s palace had been transformed into:
“an academy for all the learned and curious, who flock there on Thursdays, from mo rning till night in order to peruse his beautiful library.”30
Mazarin Library opened to the public with great fanfare. Clarke quotes that day’s Paris Gazette which reported that Mazarin:
“Welcomed in his library all learned and curious people every Thursday from morning to evening to “feuilleter”, literally “leaf through”, his rich collection.”whilst Naudé is described as the most”thoughtful, wise and hardworking librarian and scholar”, who possesses “perfect” knowledge of books. His library was soon called “without flattery, ‘une bibliotheque vivante’ “-a living, lively library.”31
Naudé, keen to let the patrons of his Library come and go with ease, persuaded Mazarin to install a second entrance to the Library, above which was to be placed the following inscription:
“In the prosperous reign of LouisXIV during the wise regency of Anne of Austria, most august mater castrorum, Julius Mazarin, Cardinal of the Holy Roman Church, a minister most pleasing to both councils, in his own good will wishing this library, so rich in books of all languages, arts, and sciences, to be an honour to the city, an ornament to France, and a promoter of knowledge, determined that it should be open to the public and, consecrating it as a gift, endowed it with permanent wealth and commended it to posterity”.32
Naudé and the Fronde
Naudé continued to serve Mazarin during the Fronde. When Mazarin was forced into exile, Naudé remained and in addition to fulfilling his duties as Librarian, took up the role of defender of the Cardinal. In September 1649 Naudé published his response to the attacks on the Cardinal made in mazarinades, Judgement of all that has been written against Cardinal Mazarin or La Mascurat as it was more commonly known. Rather than a direct defense of the Cardinal, La Mascurat takes the form of a dialogue between two characters St Ange, Librarie, and Muscarat, imprimeur, in which Naudé is St Ange and Mascurat is the Paris printer R. Camusat.33
On 14 February 1651, a few days after Mazarin’s exile, Naude was forced to surrender the keys of the Library to Monsieur Tubeuf Presidentof the Chambre des Comptes. Tubeuf had taken possession of the Palais Mazarin, as surety for a debt, owed him by Mazarin, but also in the hopes of saving the library. In his Remise de la bibliotheque de Monseigneur le Cardinal Mazarin par le Sieur de Naude entre les mains de Monsieur Tubeuf, Naude describes the sad scene in which he leads Monsieur Tubeuf from room to room, showing him each part of the library before surrendering the keys. He says:
“And having implored the said Sieur Tubeuf to use the utmost care to prevent as far as possible the dissipation of this the most beautiful, the best and the largest library which had ever been brought together in the world, containing, to my own knowledge, more than forty thousand volumes, of which more than twelve thousand were in folio, I withdrew, with tears in my eyes at the thought that the public was on the eve of being deprived of so great a treasure, and that the noble intentions of His Eminence were being so ill repaid..” 34
When the Parlement proposed to sell Mazarin’s Library, Naudé attempted , in vain, to avert disaster by proclaiming that the Mazarin intended to give the library to the public and saying:
Believe, if you please, that the ruin of this library will be more carefully marked in all histories and calendars, than the taking and sacking of Constantinople.35
Sadly, Naudé’s appeals and other attempts to save the library were in vain and the library was auctioned off. Mazarin’s enemies deliberately chose to sell it off in small discrete lots, to prevent the Cardinal from regaining possession. In 1652 having had to stand by impotently as his life’s work was rendered asunder, Naudé left France for Sweden to serve as Librarian to Queen Christina. The only part of the BibliothèqueMazarin which Naudé was able to save were the medical books which he personally bought at auction.
When Mazarin returned in 1653, one of his first thoughts was for his Library. He set about reconstructing the great collection of books that had been lost during the Fronde and Naudé was recalled from Sweden. Sadly Naudé died in Abbeville, 29 July 1653 before he could reach Paris.
The Mazarin Bible [Biblia latina]. Genèse-Psaumes. – [Mayence] : [Johannes Gutenberg et Johannes Fust], [c. 1455]. – In-folio. – 1er volume.Naudé was succeeded by François de La Poterie, who aided Mazarin in his efforts to reclaim what he could of his library, but as we know the library that Mazarin left to the newly formed Collège des Quatre-Nations, was substantially smaller than before the Fronde. The reformed library reopened to the public again in 1689 and remained open during the revolution even while the Collège was closed.
Naudé and Mazarin bibliographic legacy can still be seen today in the Bibliothèque Mazarine located at Quai Conti and its digital surrogate the Mazarinium digital library. Its manuscript collection was rebuild during the revoloution through the efforts of the Librarian Abbé Gaspard Michel, known as Leblond. Since 1945 it has been under the administrative authority of the Institut de France, which took over the buildings of the Collège.
Its collection have continued to grow and today contains roughly 600,000 items. Its collections include an exceptional heritage library, that comprises around 80,000 printed volumes prior to 1800, including 2,400 incunabula, 4600 manuscripts, a collection of works and works of art.35 Included amongst the collections is a Guttenburg Bible, also known as the Mazarin Bible holds the distinction of being the first copy discovered around 1760 in the library of Cardinal Mazarin.
Naudé’s ideas as expressed in his Advis represent the early origins of modern librarianship, representing a break with the religious orientation of libraries of the past. They represent an expression of an idea, that is resonant today, knowledge as a public good.
Yann Sordet. D’un palais (1643) l’autre (1668) : les bibliothèques Mazarine(s) et leur decor. Journal des Savants, De Boccard, 2015, p. 79-138.
ibid
Sauval, H. (1724) Histoire et recherches des antiquités de la ville de Paris. Tome 2 / .http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k1040563h/f196.item.zoom in Yann Sordet. D’un palais (1643) l’autre (1668): les bibliotheques Mazarine(s) et leur d’ecor.
Sordet,Yann (2016) Reconstructing Mazarin’s Library / Libraries in Time and Space Sources, Tools and Hypotheses Quærendo 46 (2016) 151-16
Sordet,Yann (2016) Reconstructing Mazarin’s Library / Libraries in Time and Space Sources, Tools and Hypotheses Quærendo 46 (2016) 151-164
Clark, Jack. A. (1969)Gabriel Naudé and the Foundations of the Scholarly Library.The Library Quarterly 39(4), pp. 331-343.
ibid.
Nelles, Paul (1997)The Library as an Instrument of Discovery: Gabrielle Naude and the Uses of Historyin Kelley, D.R., (1997) History and the disciplines: the reclassification of knowledge in early modern Europe, University of Rochester Press, Woodbridge, Suffolk;Rochester, N.Y.
Rovelstad, M. V (2000) Two seventeenth-century library handbooks, two different library theories. Libraries & Culture, 35(4), pp. 540-556.
Evelyn, J., & Naudé, G. (1661). Instructions concerning erecting of a library: presented to my lord, the President De Mesme.(Keynes.B.2.8)London, Printed for G. Bedle, and T. Collins … and J. Crook. [English Translation of Naude’s Advis]
19 ibid
Nelles
Lemke, A. B., 1991. Gabriel Naudé and the Ideal Library. The courier, Spring(280), pp.27-44
Clarke
De Rossi, Giovanni Vittorio.Epistolae ad neur 1602-1661, exposition organise’e pour Tyrrhenum et ad diversos.Cologne, 1749 in Clark, Jack. A. (1969) Gabriel Naudé and the Foundations of the Scholarly Library. The Library Quarterly 39(4), pp. 338
Nelles, Paul (1997)The Library as an Instrument of Discovery: Gabrielle Naude and the Uses of Historyin Kelley, D.R., (1997) History and the disciplines: the reclassification of knowledge in early modern Europe, University of Rochester Press, Woodbridge, Suffolk; Rochester, N.Y.
Evelyn, J., & Naude, G. (1661). Instructions concerning erecting of a library: presented to my lord, the President De Mesme.(Keynes.B.2.8)London, Printed for G. Bedle, and T. Collins … and J. Crook. [English Translation of Naude’s Advis
ibid
ibid
ibid
Clark, Jack. A. (1969)Gabriel Naudé and the Foundations of the Scholarly Library. The Library Quarterly 39(4), pp. 331-343.
ibid
Gazette de France. No. 13 (January 30, 1644) in Clark, Jack. A. (1969) Gabriel Naudé and the Foundations of the Scholarly Library. The Library Quarterly39(4).
Naudé, G., Richmond, V., & Dana, J. C. (1907).News from France or, A description of the library of Cardinal Mazarin, preceded by the Surrender of the library(now newly translated). Chicago, A.C. McClurg & Co [California Digital Library].
ibid
Evelyn, J., & Naude, G. (1661). Instructions concerning erecting of a library: presented to my lord, the President De Mesme. (Keynes.B.2.8)London, Printed for G. Bedle, and T. Collins … and J. Crook.
UPDATE 29/11/2016 – Dr Lyn Robinson has kindly cross-posted this piece to documentingperformane.com and provided a great introduction to the concepts of Documentation and what we mean by documents, please make sure you check it out here.
On 31st October #citylis hosted an fascinating event called The Future of Documents: Documenting Performance the one day interdisciplinary symposium was intended to “bring together scholars, researchers, artists and practitioners from the disciplines of library & information science and theatre & performance, to share and consider respective conceptual views of documents, and the processes and procedures associated with documentation“1
The event was ‘sold out‘ with attendees from a wide range of performance organisations as well as library and information scientists and a contingent of interested #citylis students, including myself, in the capacity of both technical support and attendee.
The event was organised by Dr Lyn Robinson and Joseph Dunne of Rose Bruford College, born out their mutual interest in the documentation of participatory experience, performance and partially-immersive, or complex documents, described by Robinson as:
“provide the reader (player, participant, viewer) with a compelling and realistic world, but one which is delineated to varying extents from actual reality. The reader knows that they, and the document with which they are engaging, are a part of the real world (for want of a better phrase). This is in contrast to the experience delivered by fully immersive-document (as yet theoretical) where the reader cannot distinguish between the unreality and reality, and the interface between human and computer is invisible and frictionless.”2
The day was arranged into 3 acts or sessions. In the first session, Documents and Documentation, the focus was on how memory institutions document performance. Following on from that Exploring Performance as a Document looked at how we can document non-traditional aspects of performance. The third and final act, Beyond the Boundaries, considered what should be documented from newer forms of performance.
Performance Documents or Performance Documentation?
Following a warm welcome and introduction from Lyn and Joseph, the first session featured an excellent talk by Toni Sant, titled The Future of Documenting Performance: Plenty of Performance Documents but Not Enough Performance Documentation. Sant has a background is in Performance Studies, (holding an MA and PhD from New York University) has also lectured on performance and digital technology, in Malta, New York, most recently he has worked in the United Kingdom as Reader in Digital Curation at the University of Hull.
In his talk Sant spoke about Documentation from a Library and Information Science perspective and referred to the work of Suzanne Briet, whose manifesto on Documentation Qu’est-ce que la documentation?, was highly influential to a number of LIS thinkers, particularly Michael Buckland, whilst earning her the nickname Madame Documentation. In talking about Performance Documentation Sant used Briet’s definition of a document as ‘evidence in support of fact’ 3 and:
“any physical or symbolic sign, preserved or recorded, intended to represent, to reconstruct, or to demonstrate a physical or conceptual phenomenon”
As Bucklandstates, in his article What is a “document?”the implication of Briet’s work is that Documentation should not concerned with texts, but access to evidence.3 Sant champions Briet’s work on documentation over those of performance studies scholars such as Peggy Phelan, who claimed in her writings that performance cannot be documented:
“Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations: once it does so it becomes something other than performance”4
Sant went on to argue that documentation of performance is often an afterthought and that there is a tendency to mistake documents for documentation. Documentation he said is the process of storing and organizing documents (physical and digital) in a systematic way to ensure long-term access.
Sant’s talk was a call to action, saying “forget Peggy Phelan” and arguing there was a need to focus less on documents and more on Documentation.
Connaissez-vous Suzanne Briet?
Renée-Marie-Hélène-Suzanne Briet was born in Ardennes, 1 February 1894, but grew up in Paris. She was part of a generation of women who would come of age in the wake of the First World War. After spending time as a teacher, Briet began her career in Librarianship, at the Bibliothèque National in 1924, and would not only bear witness to but also influence the development of the Library profession in France as a result of its convergence with the field of Documentation. In his article Suzanne Briet: An Appreciation Ronald E. Day claims that Briet’s vision of documentation and documentation agencies:
“…constituted a revision of librarianship and a radical redefinition of what we consider to be documents.” 5
Recognising the importance of the work of the staff in the national library, Briet wrote that it was the duty of librarians “to conserve, to catalog, to make [materials] accessible on the one hand; to orient and instruct on the other.“6
Her time at the BNF coincided with a great see of technological change, the year of her appointment (1924) saw the electrification of the 17th century Richelieu building, she described the effect of this writing:
“I attended the birth of electricity at the BN. . . . During winter season, and under cloudy skies, all work was impossible in the reading rooms and offices after three in the afternoon. . . . It was an unforgettable spectacle to see the green lamps burst into flower on the tables”7
Administrator Pierre-René Roland-Marcel’s efforts to modernize the services and structure of the BNF led to the creation of the Office of Documentation. In 1928 after remarking that the already ‘overburdened’ staff were struggling to answer written requests for information from the office, as it disrupted their normal activity flow, Briet was assigned responsibility for coordinating all such requests, assigning them to qualified Librarians or forwarding them onto the Office of Documentation, as necessary.8
In 1927 Briet was assigned the task of compiling a directory of special collections held across major French Libraries. At this time she was influenced by the Institute of Intellectual Co-operation (IIC) of the League of Nations, which made a number of recommendations regarding the establishment of national information centres in national libraries. According to Naack these recommendations included:
(1) each national library establish a “national information center” where researchers could find out in which library or special collection the printed materials or documentation they needed would be located; (2) that the national information center be adequately funded and provided with card catalogues, printed bibliographies, biographical sources, union catalogues and directories of special collections throughout the country; (3) that these national centers be in close contact with one another in order to answer questions about resources within their home country and to centralize researchers’ requests for information that would need to be answered abroad.9
Over the next two years Roland-Marcel and Briet laid the foundations for such a centre at the BNF, and developed plans for a Centre d’Orientation that would respond to requests for information from French and international researchers. From 1934 to 1954 Briet was in charge of the Salles des Catalogues et des Bibliographies, more commonly known today as Salle X.
Briet alongside chemist Jean Gérard was responsible for co-founding the Union Française des Organismes de Documentation (UFOD) in 1931, the french equivalent of ASLIB or the American Documentation Institution. Soon after she was tasked with surveying documentation centers across the country the results of which were published in a 1935 directory (Répertoire des centres de documentation en France), which identified n 1937 she attended the World Congress of Universal Documentation, in Paris, alongside other notable figures such as Paul Otlet, Henri De La Fontaine and H.G. Wells, the latter of whom gave a lecture in which he argued that his concept of the ‘world-brain‘(a form of world encylopaedia) was a precursor for the concepts under discussion at the conference.10
In 1950 Briet became the founding director of studies for the l’Institut National des Techniques de la Documentation, one of the oldest Library schools in france when the training programme of the UFOD was formally adopted by the prestigious Conservatoire Nationale des Arts et Metiers. Briet herself was closely involved with the curriculum including as teacher. The programme was spread over two years and included:
“…included a general introduction to selection, acquisitions, cataloging, classification, indexing, diffusion, exploitation, and reproduction of documents. The second year focused on research and on documentation in the specialized fields, including the social sciences and economics as well as science and technology.”11
Following on from her interest in ‘professional education’, Briet was awarded a Fulbright grant to visit the United States from 1951 – 52, and whilst there she continued her survey of professional education. According to Maack, she also sought to understand the meaning of ‘reference work’, with of focus on technique rather than technology and on users and reference services, rather than information retrieval.12
In 1954 at the age of 60, she took early retirement to pursue a 2nd career, as a historian, studying Rimbaud, Rimbaud’s mother and Jean, Comte de Montdejeux. When her memoirs, were published, in 1976, she arranged them in alphabetical order, dispending with a chronological order in favour of presenting her recollections under key words, described by Maack as ‘idiosyncratic’.13
Briet died in Boulogne at the age of 95. When looking reflecting back upon her life and career she expressed the following as summary:
“At the age of twenty, I had as my motto: ‘To weep perhaps, but never to hate.’ At forty it was: ‘To serve.’ At eighty it could be: ‘To return to the Spirit’ “(l’Esprit) (1976, p.30).
Pour Briet Qu’est-ce que la documentation?
Briet’s treatise on documentation was published in 1951 by EDIT, the publishing arm of the UFOD, was not some lengthy treatise, but rather a slim volume stretching to around 37 pages long. It largely went unnoticed outside of France until the publication of Michael Buckland’s What is a Document? in 1997.
It begins with the definition of a document, not in terms of material object’s such as the book that Paul Otlet, favoured, but by declaring, “Un document est une preuve à l’appui d’un fait” “A document is evidence in support of a fact.” She then provides a more detailed definition claiming that a document is:
“any concrete or symbolic indexical sign[indice], preserved or recorded towards the ends of representing, of reconstituting, or of proving a physical or intellectual phenomenon.”14
Briet’s definition, dispenses with the notion of tieing documents to a physical format and instead focuses on a wider definition of documents, giving an example as follows:
“Is a star a document? Is a pebble rolled by a torrent a document? Is a living animal a document? No. But the photographs and the catalogues of stars, the stones in a museum of mineralogy , and the animals that are cataloged and shown in a zoo, are documents.”15
Briet’s explanation of documents is that objects can be documents when placed into a system such as a taxonomy, catalogue, or indice. Most famously she claims that even an Antelope could be a document, in the circumstance of it being a newly discovered species placed inside a botanical garden:
“Let us admire the documentary fertility of a simple originary fact: for example, an antelope of a new kind has been encountered in Africa by an explorer who has succeeded in capturing an individual that is then brought back to Europe for our Botanical Garden [Jardin de Plantes]. A press release makes the event known by newspaper, by radio, and by newsreels. The discovery becomes the topic of an announcement at the Academy of Sciences. A professor of the Museum discusses it in his courses.The living animal is placed in a cage and cataloged (zoological garden). Once it is dead, it will be stuffed and preserved (in the Musuem). It is loaned to an Exposition. It is played on a soundtrack at the cinema. Its voice recorded on a disk. The first monograph serves to establish part of a treatise with plates, then a special encyclopedia(zoological), then general encyclopedia. The works are cataloged in a Library, after having been announced at publication…The documents that relate to this event are the object of scientific classifying (fauna) and of an ideologic [idéologique] classifying (classification). Their ultimate conservation and utilization are determined by some general techniques and by methods that apply to all documents-methods that are studied in national association and international Congresses.”16
Lastly she argues “The cataloged antelope is an initial and the other documents are secondary or derived.” By this reasoning objects such as paintings, sculpture, photographs and films are documents, and even a person being studied perhaps for scientific, medical or anthropological reasons could be described as a document. Michael Buckland, in his article about Briet’s definition argues that although she doesn’t make her rules explicit the following can be inferred about defining documents:
Briet’s rules for determining when an object has become a document are not made clear. We infer, however, from her discussion that:
1. There is materiality: Physical objects and physical signs only;
2. There is intentionality: It is intended that the object be treated as evidence;
3. The objects have to be processed: They have to be made into documents; and, we think,
4. There is a phenomenological position: The object is perceived to be a document.
This situation is reminiscent of discussions of how an image is made art by framing it as art. Did Briet mean that just as “art” is made art by “framing” (i.e. treating) it as art, so an object becomes a “document” when it is treated as a document, i.e. as a physical or symbolic sign, preserved or recorded, intended to represent, to reconstruct, or to demonstrate a physical or conceptual phenomenon?17
Wild Antelopes
Returning to performance and performance documentation, we must ask what can Briet’s rules and Buckland’s interpretation of them tell us about how we document performance? Taking the rules as defined above the performance itself is not a document, any more than a wild antelope running around the plains of Africa, but writings, photographs, sound recordings and so forth of the performance can be considered documents. And these documents can, it could be said, in the spirit of Briet’s original assertion, be considered as the “evidence in support of fact” that the performance exists or took place in that they are “intended to represent, to reconstruct, or to demonstrate a physical or conceptual phenomenon”.
LIS can be a very broad discipline that covers everything from theories of information, social media, scholarly communication to the effects of the internet on human thought. It also supports and intersects with many academic disciplines, with elements of science, sociology and humanities. As digital technology has evolved the discipline of LIS has adapted to confront and consider issues that have arisen around the management, conservation, preservation of documents in the digital realm. It has also utilised the potential of digital technology and tools to not only preserve physical documents, but also make them available to new audiences.
One academic discipline which has also begun to harness the potential of digital tools and technology is the humanities. Much like LIS they too work with documents, such as books and manuscripts, and make use of digitisation, digital libraries and data mining. Indeed, as Welsh1 notes there has even been a debate as to whether LIS, as an academic discipline falls within the humanities, noting the placement of some iSchools within humanities department in some Universities, whereas in others, such as #citylis it is grouped with computer science. To further complicate matters, humanities itself has a subset known as Digital Humanities which as I noted before is concerned with utilizing Digital tools to enhance their understanding and knowledge of humanistic texts. The history of the Digital Humanities, dates back to the early 1990s, when humanities scholars realized that the internet could provide them with new methods for exploring and discussing scholarly texts. And in 1994 the Text Encoding Initiative(TEI) was launched as standard for the representation of texts in digital form.
Gabriel Harvey by Thomas Nashe via Wikemedia Commons
Gabriel Harvey and The Archaeology of Reading
Born in Saffron Walden circa 1550 Gabriel Harvey, was an English writer and friend of Elizabethan poet Edmund Spencer. He was a scholar and well educated studying Christ College Cambridge, before becoming a fellow at Pembroke Hall (later College), in 1570. After failing to be elected a master of Trinity Hall Cambridge, he would go onto complete his doctorate of civil law at Oxford. During the last decade of the 1500s he engaged in a pamphlet-war with Thomas-Nashe and retired in 1598, having again failed to obtain a mastership at Trinity Hall.2
As well as publishing commentaries he was a prolific annotator of books, his annotations have become the subject of study as much as his letters, providing a window of insight into the way in which reading was carried out in the early modern period for scholars such as Anthony Grafton and the late Professor Lisa Jardine. The density and extent of annotations made by Harvey, have proved a considerable challenge for anyone studying his texts. Not only did they include marginal notes, but also underlining of words, and use of symbols each with a specific meaning, requiring deciphering and understanding not only at page level, but also within the wider body of the text as a whole and perhaps also Harvey’s collection of books.
On Thursday October 13, UCL’s Centre for Lives and Letters (CELL) hosted a launch event for phase one of the Archaeology of Reading in Early Modern Europe. Having an interest in early modern history, Digital Humanities and libraries, I signed up to what was billed as a workshop on the history of reading and the Digital Humanities, to see what I could learn. The answer quite a lot!
A Digital Bookwheel
The Archaeology of Reading(AOR), is a digital humanities initiative from CELL, Johns Hopkins University, and Princeton University, funded by the Mellon Foundation. The project is intended to build upon:
…several decades of humanistic research that has focused upon the printing revolution of the sixteenth century, and the widespread practice by active readers of leaving often dense, interpretive manuscript annotations in the margins, and between the lines, of the books they read. This diverse evidence of annotation provides a considerable range of unique and largely untapped research materials, which reveal that readers—much as users of the internet today—adapted quickly to the technology of print: interacting intimately, dynamically, socially, and even virtually with texts.3
In many ways this could be an LIS project, current LIS research often considers and examines the way in which technology is changing the way we think and consume information. This project looks at annotation by readers such as Harvey as evidence of how they adapted to print, that is how print affected their reading habits. My first assignment for #citylis took a similar approach, in considering how the changes is in the form of documents, from Manuscript to Printed Book affected LIS and to a degree human thinking. LIS researchers have also drawn parallels between the information explosion of printing and that of the internet (See Bawden & Robinson 2000), and it was this that drew me to the event.
A page from Harvey’s T. Livius, Romanae historiae principis (1555) showing his annotation
The evening took the format of presentations followed by a Q&A from a panel that included AOR-chaeologists. Earl Havens, Johns Hopkins University Principal Investigator for AOR, kicked off the vent with a talk about the genesis of the project, a meeting between himself and Anthony Grafton, where they were discussing how Harvey read his copy of Livy’s History of Rome. Information overflow was a theme of the discussions of the project and of Harvey’s own writings and readings, as co-principal investigator Matthew Symonds (UCL/CELL) talked about their approach of treating Harvey’s annotations, as a dataset, he gave a useful definition of big data, as being ‘too much information’ for one person to handle.
Symonds talked about the role of curation saying that the word is not commonly recognised in the contact of Digital Humanities projects, but that it is a bad sign if projects don’t talk about curation, arguing that it affects decisions and involved the prgmatics of corpus selection, getting not just the books, but also the right editions and taking care of them.
Dr Jaap Geraerts, Postdoctoral fellow at CELL, gave an overview of the technical aspects of the project, discussing the different layers served up by the interface of the AOR website. This includes a storage layer, archive layer and a tools access layer which an IIF API for serving up images, through the Mirador viewer. The use of IIIF ensures that the project integrates standards which will allow for future interoperability and allow for future migration to interoperable viewers with greater capacity. The top two layers comprise the AOR website and the aforementioned viewer.
Technical structure of the AOR – Source: archaeologyofreading.org
He went on to discuss how the different teams kept in touch via fortnightly Skype meetings, during the two year development period, saying also that there was close integration between the developers and the humanities staff.
Geraerts gave an interesting presentation on the development of the XML framework used for the project, highlighting how they built a custom specification to accommodate the variety of different types of annotations created by Harvey. He explained that they chose an XML Schema over simple transcription of the annotations, as an unstructured data approach would not have been sufficient to allow them to answer the questions they wanted to ask. For AOR it was decided that they would create their own schema, rather than use an existing one, such as the one developed for TEI which seen as too ‘top-heavy’ for their purposes. The Schema developed was constructed around classification of different annotation types, but is also flexible enough that it could be easily updated to allow the inclusion of additional books. It also takes advantage of XMLs rich data functionality to allow the tagging of mentioned authors and cross searching the entire corpus.
In all 13 books were chosen for the project with the 13th being purchased and immediately digitised by Johns Hopkins, specifically for the project. All annotations were translated from Latin to English, and across the entire corpus the captured nearly 230,000 words to create the data-set. The platform allows a range of query based searches and includes an advanced search function which allows you to combine searches across multiple annotation types.
Example of advanced search in the Archaeology of Reading
Silence and emotion in the Margins
Arnoud Visser (University of Utrecht) gave a presentation gave an interesting presentation on the presence of silence and emotion in Harvey’s annotations, looking at what was unwritten, absence or alluded to in Harvey’s marginalia. He cited various examples of where Harvey had written either cryptic or admonishing marginalia, either addressing himself or the writer.
In one example he wrote in his copy of Livy:
“Multa uix audeo scribere, qua[e] obitèr cogito legens..” “Much of what I think in passing while I am reading, I hardly dare to write down…”
P.481 of Gabriel Harvey’s Livy featuring the annotation: “Much of what I think in passing while I am reading, I hardly dare to write down…” (bottom of page)
Elsewhere, he implores himself to spend more time simply reading rather than annotating, writing:
“Minus scriptionis: plus, plusq[ue] lectionis mihi conducit, expedit actori. Eccè Liuius ipse instar omnium notarum schola[e], aut obseruationum mundi.”
” It would be proper for me and expedient for a man of action to do less writing, and much more reading. Look, Livy himself is equivalent to all comments of the academy, or observations in the world.”
Harvey’s Livy with the annotation reminding himself to: “do less writing, and much more reading”
Visser compares Harvey’s interactions with his texts to Luther’s reading of Erasmus, arguing that much like Luther Harvey was not a ‘kind reader‘, citing pages in Luther’s own books where ink splodges on the pages where left where he had slammed the book shut in anger. As he writes in Erasmus, Luther and the Margins of Biblical Understanding:
“The marginalia vividly show which arguments triggered Luther’s ire. Ink marks on pages opposite to those with heated notes reveal how Luther on some occasions closed the book without even waiting for the ink to dry.“4
A slide from Arnoud Visser’s Presentation on emotion in Harvey’s MarginaliaLuther’s copy of the New Testament in which he describes himself as ‘not a kind reader’ via Annotated Books Online
By contrast Harvey at least appears more respectful and even admiring of his authors, as seen by Anthony Grafton and the aforementioned late Lisa Jardine in their now seminal article on how Harvey read Livy when they note that:
Near the beginning of the Livy he has a long note on Livy’s style and its importance: Livy’s style, especially in the speeches. No Latin or Greek speeches deserve more careful reading or meticulous selection than Livy’s; Perion assembled them into a sort of technical order. Hence, when I have time to read, or to imitate, or even to emulate speeches, I prefer no others to these, or others of Livy’s, which are both sharp in sense and polished in expression.
After the presentations had finished there was a drinks reception, including commemoration of Lisa Jardine, and the announcement of a further grant from Mellon Foundation for Phase 2 of the project. This will be more ambitious and aims to make 21 books belonging to the lost library of Dr John Dee from British libraries, UCL and the Royal College of Physicians. There was also a speech by Bill Sherman, Head of Research at the V&A, and John Dee scholar, who spoke about how Dee’s marginalia are far more visual than Harvey.He is currently working on a study of visual marginalia called The Reader’s Eye, asking if ‘reading’ is the right word to describe the activities of Dee and Harvey. The visual nature of Dee’s reading will pose challenges for the next phase requiring significant reworking of the xml schema.
During the reception I had a chance to briefly talk to some of the panellists and guests, such as Geraerts and the Librarian from the Royal College of Physicians, the latter of which was kind enough to tell me more about John Dee and his Library.
Early Modern Information Retrieval
It was a very interesting event, despite the fact that I had never heard of Gabriel Harvey prior to the evening, and new equally as much about the study of marginalia. And it made me think about whether marginalia can be seen as documents in their own right. Clearly they are mostly (con)text dependent, I believe they may sometimes be classified as a paratexts, but can we consider these to be documents in their own right distinct from the original text?
Furthermore, Harvey’s marginalia form a kind of early modern hypertext with numerous cross references between parts of individual texts and across multiple texts, as Grafton and Jardine note:
“In addition to the richness and density of annotation throughout them, there is persist- ent echoing of sentiments from one book to another; cross-referencing of one of these authors in the margins of another; recognizable continuity of handwriting, to the extent that we can sometimes hazard a guess as to which book succeeded which other in the circulating process of reading and annotation; narrative notes about contemporary or near contemporary affairs continued from the margins of one volume to another..”(p.51)
This multithreaded approach to reading makes it harder to view the marginalia of individual texts in isolation, but rather as constituent parts of a larger whole. In LIS terms Harvey’s approach to his texts could be considered a form of early modern hypertext or linked data, where the reader moves back and forth between documents. His marginal notes make it apparent that he worked on several books at a time. This was by no means an insignificant undertaking, practically and logistically it required having space to not only access but also write in up to 15 books at a time with handwriting which was described, by rival Thomas Nashe no less, as being more elaborate than “many a copyholder or magistral scribe that holds all his living by setting schoolboys copies”5
Harvey’s practices of reading could only have been possible through use of an invention of Agostino Ramelli, the book wheel. The book wheel was one of several designs published by Ramelli, a military engineer, in his bookLe diverse et artificiose machine del Capitano Agostino Ramelli (The various and ingenious machines of Captain Agostino Ramelli). The machine utilized a system of cogs and gears, known as epicyclic gearing, normally found in astronomical clocks, to ensure that all the books remain at a constant angle so that the reader could keep their place.
Bookwheel, from Agostino Ramelli’s Le diverse et artifiose machine, 1588 – Wikimedia Commons
As Ramelli wrote about his design
“This wheel is made in the manner shown, that is, it is constructed so that when the books are laid on its lecturns they never fall or move from the place where they are laid even as the wheel is turned and revolved all the way around. Indeed, they will always remain in the same position and will be displayed to the reader in the same way as they were laid on their small lecturns, without any need to tie or hold them with anything”7
For me the discovery of the existence of such a machine is almost as intriguing as the books of Harvey and explains the choice of logo for the AOR website and blog. It also further informs us about early modern approaches to reading and information retrieval, as Grafton and Jardine put it:
“The book-wheel and the centrifugal mode of reading it made possible amounted to an effective form of information retrieval – and that in a society where books were seen as offering powerful knowledge, and the reader who could focus the largest number of books on a problem or an opportunity would therefore appear to have the advantage”.8
Just as we(in LIS) study the history of books, documents and Libraries, so too we should consider also the history of reading, and reading practices to gain greater insights into how knowledge is acquired from books and other how the understanding of and knowledge. As Haven’s remarked following the announcement of the project in 2014:
“There are so many parallels between our project, and the digital world of information that we live in today….these notes reveal a largely unvarnished history of personal reading within the early modern historical moment. They also embody an active tradition of physically mapping and personalizing knowledge upon the printed page. The added practice of referencing and cross-referencing other works in these marginal annotations also allows us, like those early readers, to engage with the presence of ‘virtual libraries’ within the space of a single book.”.9
References
Welsh, A (2012) “Historical bibliography in the digital world” in Warwick et al (2012) 2012, Digital humanities in practice Facet : London.
Senchyne, J. (2016) “Between Knowledge and Metaknowledge: Shifting Disciplinary Borders in Digital Humanities and Library and Information Studies” in Debates in the Digital Humanities Minneapolis : University Minnesota Press.
Visser, A (2016) Erasmus, Luther, and the Margins of Biblical Misunderstanding in For the sake of learning : essays in honor of Anthony Grafton Leiden ; Boston : Brill.
Nashe, T Selected Writings, ed. S. Wells in rafton, A & Jardine, L (1990) “Studied for Action”: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy Past & Present, No. 129 (Nov., 1990), pp. 30-78
It’s hard to believe that it’s been five months since I last wrote a blog post! When I last posted I was still in the thick of writing my dissertation, and my previous post spun out of that. But thankfully it’s all over and done with now, the deadline was early January and while there were days when I thought it would never be finished, I got it all done.
And was it worth all the stress and anxiety? Hell yes!
I’m pleased to say that despite the times where I struggled with those thoughts of self-doubt and “I don’t know what the hell i’m doing”, particularly around the data analysis side, it paid off in the end as in March I got my overall grade for the Masters and as those that follow me on Twitter will have seen I am now a Master of Library Science with Distinction!
And if you want to read said Dissertation I’ve made it available online via the Citylis group on Humanities Commons, an Open Access Repository run by the Office for Scholarly Communication at Modern Language Association, meaning its freely available to [More about Humanities Commons]This means it’s freely available to anyone who wishes to read it.
Here is the link to said Dissertation which I titled:
Where are all the orphans? How effective is current legislation in enabling cultural heritage institutions to make orphan works available online?
Be sure to check it out if your interested, and be sure to look at the other dissertations and papers on there by other #citylis alumni and staff, its full of interesting stuff. Here is the group link.
So after roughly 2 and half years my #Citylis journey is at at an end. It’s been a long journey, when I started #citylis I was just coming out of a really nasty episode of depression, which really knocked me for six. But ultimately while it was a horrid experience it paved the way journey to #citylis and beyond, and while one door may be closing others will no doubt be opening. And the thing is #citylis is such a great place that you never really leave, just ask Ludi, Debbie, Shohana and Oz. A bit like Hotel California as Lyn likes to say.
Now that’s not to say i’m embarking on a PhD, not yet anyway, but you never know. However, I’ll still do my best to come and support #citylis at events and so forth. (As I did when I recently attended the launch of the 2nd Edition of David Hayne’s book on Metadata, which saw David giving talk covering metadata, information management and privacy.)
I also returned to City recently for an evening called Databeers London, which while not a #citylis event, could easily have been. The event featured 6 data-speakers giving short talks using the PechaKucha method (20 slides with one slide every 20 seconds). It was a great event with a great turn out of around 300 people and some really great talks and free beer (hence the name Databeers):
The speakers were:
Harrison Pim (British Museum): Bookworm: Social Networks From Novels
Ellie King (Governmental Digital Services): Using convolutional neural networks to classify content on GOV.UK
Pablo Aragon (Pompeu Fabra University): Data science in the era of fake news
Merve Alanyali (Warwick University): I know what you ate last summer: What can we infer from Instagram pictures?
Bruce Pannaman (busuu – a social network for learning languages): Connecting our users across language barriers – the journey from user to friend.
Finally, my interest in Copyright led me to sign up for the CILIP Copyright Conference which took place yesterday, in one of the most luxurious conference centers I’ve ever been in (everyone got their own bowl of sweets and the desks glow in the dark!) It was a really great day with lots of interesting speakers, and a few familiar faces from my time researching the dissertation, so look out for a brief write up on here soon.
This past week saw the return of the Documenting Performance Symposium at City, University of London, with DocPerform 2: New Technologies. You can read my thoughts about last years conference in my post On Documenting Performance and Suzanne Briet. To mark this years event I have created a Twitter Archive of the symposium constructed using the #docperform hashtag and the TAGS twitter archiving tool by @mhawksey.
The Tool creates an archive of all tweets using a chosen keyword or #hastag in Googlesheets, which you can then explore interactively using the TAGSExplorer. This produces and interactive network graph style visualisation allowing you to explore twitter activity around your chosen hastag or term.
TAGSexplorer view of the #docperform hashtag
You can also explore the #docperform hastag using the TAGSExplorer
You can also explore the full archive via the TAGSArchive
Storify
In addition to this you can also the Storify created by @lynrobinson of the event which I have linked to here.
DocPerform2: New Technologies Storify by Lyn Robinson
Documenting Performance (DocPerform) is a project organised and run by Department of Library & Information Science, (CityLIS), at City, University of London. The 2017 symposium was held from 6th to 6th November 2017 and aimed to bring together a multidisciplinary group of people, with a shared interested in understanding and developing the ways in which performance, as part of our cultural heritage, can be created, recorded, preserved, re-experienced and reused. The symposium is intended to collate a representative body of work in this area, to foster new partnerships and collaborations, and to support the dissemination and implementation of ideas generated.
In celebration of the start of this years #citylis, I thought it might be fun to write a very brief who’s who guide to some of the main figures in Library and Information Science. It is by no means definitive, so feel free to add your own thoughts in the comments below if you feel someone is missing.
Ashurbanipal, King of Assyria (668-around 630 BC)
The Royal lion hunt reliefs from the Assyrian palace at Nineveh , 645-635 BC, British Museum. by Johnbod CC-BY-SA-4.0
The last great King of the Neo-Assyrian empire in Nineveh near Mosul in Iraq. Ashurbanipal was responsible for assembling The Royal Library of Ashurbanipal, thought to be the oldest surviving Royal Library in the world. The library consisted of 30,000 cuneiform tablets and writing boards on a range of subjects including historical inscriptions, letters, administrative and legal texts, alongside found thousands of divinatory, magical, medical, literary and lexical texts.
The fragmented remains were discovered in the 1850s and are now kept in the British Museum. In 2002 the Ashurbanipal Library Project was setup between the museum and University of Mosul, in Iraq, with aim of cataloguing and digitizing the library to make it available to new and future generations.
Founder of Oxford’s famous Bodleian Library. After a career as an Oxford academic, Member of Parliament and diplomat for Queen Elizabeth the First, Bodley set about restoring the Library known as Duke Humfrey’s, which had fallen into disrepair. The restored library reopened in 1602 containing some 2000 volumes, and included works in Hebrew, Turkish, Arabic, Persian and Chinese. Today the Bodleian is one of Europe’s oldest libraries and also functions as one of the UK’s six legal deposit library alongside the British Library, the National Library of Scotland, the National Library of Wales, the University Library, Cambridge, and. the Library of Trinity College, Dublin.
Suzanne Briet (1 February 1894 – 13 February 1989)
Suzanne Briet
Known as Madame Documentation, Renée-Marie-Hélène-Suzanne Briet was born in Ardennes, but grew up in Paris. She began her career in librarianship at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in 1924 and would go on to shape both the field of librarianship and Documentation. At the BNF Briet was responsible for establishing the Office of Documentation, Alongside Chemist Jean Gérard she was responsible for co-founding the Union Française des Organismes de Documentation (UFOD) in 1931, the french equivalent of ASLIB or the American Documentation Institution. Brie Went on to influence the development of library education in her role as Director of the l’Institut National des Techniques de la Documentation one of France’s oldest library schools.
In 1951 Briet published her treatise on Documentation: Qu’est-ce que la documentation?, a text of great significance that considers documents not as material objects but “evidence in support of a fact“. Her expanded definition of documentation, marked a departure from previous definitions asking the question:
“Is a star a document? Is a pebble rolled by a torrent a document? Is a living animal a document? No. But the photographs and the catalogues of stars, the stones in a museum of mineralogy , and the animals that are cataloged and shown in a zoo, are documents.”
In 1997, Michael Buckland’s What is a Document? revived interest in Briet’s concept of Documentation and led to a renewed interest in the study of Documentation, providing a foundation for modern debates about the nature of documents.
Born at Bury St. Edmunds, Richard de Bury was a Benedictine monk, he studied at Oxford and became tutor to the Prince of wales, the future Edward III. Bury was a skilled diplomat and administrator, serving as keeper of the privy seal, chancellor and treasurer of the exchequer. One of the first English book collectors, he founded a library at Durham, searching far and wide for books and manuscripts. Prior to his death on 1345 De Bury wrote his Philobiblon, a collection of essays concerning the acquisition, preservation, and organization of books, in which he describes ‘his means and method’ of collecting books.
Melville Louis Kossuth (Melvil) Dewey, called “the father of modern librarianship” invented the Dewey Decimal Classification(DDC) system and helped establish the American Library Association, the ALA. At the age of 21 whilst working on the reclassification library of Amherst College, Dewey devised a system of decimal numbers on top of a knowledge structure originally outlined by Francis Bacon. The system outlined in A Classification and Subject Index for Cataloguing and Arranging the Books and Pamphlets of a Library, became the Dewey Decimal Classification System, which he Copyrighted in 1876.
Having helped establish the ALA that same year, he served as secretary from 1876 to 1890 and then president for the 1890/1891 and 1892/1893 terms. Alongside R.R. Bowker and Frederick Leypoldt he became co-founder and editor of the Library Journal. In the year, following his appointment as librarian of Columbia College in 1883, Dewey founded the first ever library school, the School of Library Economy, which opened in 1887,with a cohort of 20 students, mostly women, at Dewey’s insistence.
Following his move to New York State Library, in Albany, the school was reestablished under his direction as the New York State Library School. As director of the New York State Library (1889 to 1906), secretary of the University of the State of New York (until 1900) he reorganized the New York state library, into one of the most efficient in the United States. He was also responsible for establishing a system of traveling libraries and picture collections. Dewey, died of a stroke on 26th December 1931 at the age of 80.
Luciano Floridi is currently Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Information at the University of Oxford, and Director of the Digital Ethics Lab of the Oxford Internet Institute. Flordi’s main areas of research are Information and Computer Ethics (Digital Ethics), the Philosophy of Information, and the Philosophy of Technology. His current work includes the lifelong project, Principia Philosophiae Informationis, the Information tetralogy.
Florid’s work in the area of Information Philosophy and Digital Ethics is extensive having published more than 150 papers on these subjects.
In his Floridi’s central premise of his Information Philosophy is that :
Semantic Information is well formed, meaningful and truthful data. Knowledge is relevant semantic information properly accounted for: humans are the only known semantic engines and conscious inforgs (informational organisms) in the universe who can develop a growing knowledge of reality and the totality of information.(note the crucial absence of semantic)
Floridi also argues that we are moving into the 4th revolution, following the Copernican, Darwinian and Freudian revolutions. In the Fourth Revolution information becomes our environment, the ‘infosphere‘. Floridi argues that following the Fourth revolutions we are becoming interconnected inforgs amongst other inforgs, our online personalities and personas begin to bleed into our ‘real lives’ leading to a phenomenon known as onlife. Floridi’s work confronts the philosophical, ethical and moral issues of this new reality in which we find ourselves, what Flordi deems the ‘information ontology’ including the ethics of, Information, Onlife and particularly Artificial Intelligence.
Conrad Gesner was a Swiss physician and naturalist born in Zurich 1516. As a child he demonstrated an aptitude for both Greek and Latin and at school studied classical languages and theology in Strasbourg. In 1533 he was given a scholarship to study medicine in Bourges University, France.
. In 1537 he produced his first Greek–Latin dictionary and in 1545 he published his Bibliotheca universalis, a bibliography of 1800 author listed alphabetically, and accompanied by annotations and listings of each author works. The work the first of its kind took him four years to complete and earned him the name “the father of bibliography.”
Between 1551–1558 Gesner produced his greatest Zoological work, the Historiae Animalium, a four volume bibliography of writings on natural history, combined with encyclopaedic descriptions of every known animal. A fifth volume covering snakes and scorpions was published after his death in 1587. The book was illustrated with some 1,200 hand drawn woodcuts. Gesner’s unique method of arranging his notes involved cutting them into slips and arranging them as desired. Gesner’s other works included studies of plants and his final book De Omni Rerum Fossilium (A Book on Fossil Objects, Chiefly Stones and Gems, their Shapes and Appearances), in which he stressed the importance of the form of an object to its classification. He died of plague in 1565, having published 72 books, and written 18 more unpublished manuscripts.
Johannes Gutenberg (born 14th century, Mainz —died probably February 3, 1468)
Anonymous portrait of Johannes Gutenberg dated 1440, Gutenberg Museum
Johann Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg, son of an upper class merchant, was born in Mainz, Germany and devised the printing press that precipitated the “Printing Revolution in Europe”. Specifically It was Guttenberg’s method of printing with movable type, that would usher in the development of printed books in the west, influencing the reformation, renaissance and libraries. Although little is known of his life, around 1428/1430 he is thought to have moved to Strassburg (modern Strasbourg, France), following a dispute between Guilds. With Strasbourg at war Gutenberg is thought to have returned to Mainz around 1448.
Between 1450 and 1453 he entered into business with Johann Fust, who helped him to purchase the tools and materials he needed. However, by 1452, Guttenburg was heavily in debt to Fust and unable to repay the loan. A new agreement was entered into by the two men which made Fust a partner in Guttenberg’s business, however by 1455, Guttenberg was once again unable to pay.
Fust sued, successfully winning ownership of Guttenberg’s business, including his press and his masterpiece, “Forty-Two-Line” Bible , which Guttenberg had first managed to print at some point during the course of the trial. With Fust’s son in-law joining him in his newly business acquired business they went on to produce the first ever book to bear the name of it’s printers’, the Psalter (Book of Psalms). The Mainz Psalter was printed with 2 colour capitals, using a method of woodblocks and multiple inking no doubt pioneered by Guttenberg and put into practice by Fust and Schoeffer.
In 1462 Fust and Schoeffer’s business was destroyed in the sack of Mainz. Guttenberg remained in the city, and continued his printing, although, since he didn’t put his name to his outputs little is known about what he printed. He died in February, 1468, and was buried in the church of the Franciscan convent in Eltville, Germany.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1 July 1646 – 14 November 1716)
By Kopie nach Andreas Scheits (um 1655–1735), deutscher Maleruploader was Hajotthu at de.wikipedia (Museum Herrenhausen Palace) [Public domain], via Wikimedia CommonsBorn in in Leipzig, Saxony, during the 30 Years War, Leibniz was a philosopher and polymath. Thanks to his farther’s extensive library of Greek and Latin texts, he was able to read by the age of four and by the age of eight had taught himself latin. By 1662 he had already completed a Bachelors Degree in Philosophy at the University of Liepzig. He served as Librarian to the Duke of Guelph, at the Leineschloss Palace and in 1691 he was appointed as Librarian of the Herzog August Library at Wolfenbuettel, containing some 100,000 volumes, and which Leibniz helped design.
Liebniz’s first discussion on the ordering of libraries appeared in his Leibniz discussed the order of books in a library in Nouveaux Essais sur l’Entendement humain, a rebuttal of John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, writtenbetween 1703 and 1705, but not published until 1765.
Swedish botanist and the father of Taxonomy, Carl Linnaeus was born 1707 the eldest of five children, in Råshult, Sweden. At an early age, he was taught the names of every plant, by his father Nils, a keen gardener who took his son into the garden whenever he could. By 1728, having spent a year at University of Lund studying medicine, Linnaues transferred to Upsalla University. Whilst there he wrote a thesis, Praeludia Sponsaliorum Plantarum, on the classification of plants based on their sexual parts. The thesis caught the attention of Professor Olof Rudbeck and led him to ask Linnaeus to become a lecturer in botany.
Between 1732 and 1735 Linnaues travelled throughout Sweden including to Lapland, where he hoped to learn all he could about the country’s flora, fauna and natural resources. During his travels he used his binomial system of nomenclature to describe his findings and discovered great quantities of the twin flower Campanula serpyllifolia,later known as Linnea borealis. His Flora Lapponica described 534 species using his Linnaean classification and taxonomy. In 1735 he published his Systema Naturae in which he first established the three kingdoms that are still used today, Animal Vegetable and Mineral or Regnum Animale, Regnum Vegetabile and Regnum Lapideum. Alongside the Species plantarum the book is still used today by scientists and the basis for naming animals and plants respectively.
Gabriel Naudé. Line engraving by C. Mellan, 1765, after himself – CC BY 4.0 Wellcome Images
Born in Paris 1600, Naudé was well educated and was an avid reader of authors classic and modern. Having attended several colleges, and receiving the title master of arts he enrolled in the University of Paris to study medicine. Despite his medical training Naudé would never practice medicine and instead was offered the position of Librarian to President Henri de Mesme. Whilst working for de Mesmes, whose library contained some 8,000 printed books, Naudé would write his famous Advis pour dresser une bibliothèque, considered the first modern treatise on Librarianship. Addressed to his patron de Mesme Naudé’s Advis consisted of 9 chapters dealing with the selection, acquisition and arrangement of books under the subject headings that included “Theologie, Physick, Iurisprudence, Mathematicks, and Humanity”. Naudé’ used his Advis to advocate his vision for a universal library that was open to the public. Following, his time in the Bibliotheque Memmiana Naudé returned to his medical studies before he was asked to join Cardinal Bagni the Vatican ambassador in Paris when returned to Italy in 1629. Naudé returned to Paris in 1642, and the following year he entered into the service of France’s first minister Cardinal Mazarin, once again in the role of Librarian. In service to Mazarin, Naudé sought to establish France’s first public library and would spend the next ten years devoted to the creation and development of his Universal Library in the shape of the Bibliotheque Mazarine, in Paris.
Paul Otlet – Marc Wathieu -Flickr Commons [CC BY-NC 2.0]Belgian bibliographer, lawyer and entrepreneur Paul Marie Ghislain Otlet, was another figure said to be the ‘father of information science’, and ‘father of the internet’. Born in Brussels, Belgium, in 1868, he trained as a lawyer, completing his law degree at the Free University of Brussels in 1890. That same year whilst working as an intern at the offices of Edmond Picard, he met fellow lawyer Henri La Fontaine, who shared Otlet’s interest in bibliography.
Otlet and La Fontaine soon became good friends and in 1892 they formed the International Institute of Social Bibliography and began a bibliographic survey of sociological literature that would last the next three years. In 1895 they established the Institut International de Bibliographie and turned their focus to the cataloging of published information across all subjects. Together they created their Universal Bibliography, a card catalog comprising over 400,000 entries recorded on index cards, each assigned a class number, initially based on the Dewey Decimal Classification and later his own UDC.
La classification Décimale Universelle – Indices composés détaillant l’analyse classificatrice.Indexation des publications et rédaction des fiches bibliographiques” “By Mundaneum
Otlet and La Fontaine initially decided to use a translated version of the Dewey Decimal Classification, with the agreement of Melvil Dewey, in the process they developed and adapted it to their needs, creating a classification scheme they named Universal Decimal Classification. Like Dewey UDC divided all knowledge into 10 main categories, that could further be subdivided into any number of subcategories. Where the two diverged was in the separation of numbers, while Dewey used the decimal point from which it took its name, the UDC used a range of notations, such as the plus and equals signs, the colon and parentheses to allow a much expanded range of relationships between concepts.
They published the first complete edition of the UDC in 1905 in form of theManuel du Répertoire Bibliographique Universel (Handbook of the Universal Bibliographic Repertory) a 2000+ page containing elaborate and extensive subject arrays illustrated by extended classification tables, auxiliary tables and a guide to the scheme’s use in creating catalogs and indexes. The arrival of the First World War forced Otlet and La Fontaine into exile, with the former travelling to the Netherlands, Switzerland, and finally to France. Meanwhile La Fontaine journeyed to London and then the United States. Both were committed to peace as reflected in their writings with Otlet penning his Traité de paix générale (Treatise on General Peace, 1914) and Les problèmes internationaux de la guerre (International Problems of War, 916) whilst La Fontaine published his The Great Solution: Magnissima Charta (1916) in the United States where he was involved in the Pacifist Movement.
In 1910 having been to the universal exposition in Belgium, Otlet conceived the idea for the Palais Mondial or World Palace, which would act as an international centre for knowledge and peace. At its centre would be the Mundaneum, a universal network of all the world’s knowledge and containing his universal bibliography. In what has been described as an ‘analog internet’, Otlet envisioned network of “electric telescopes”, dubbed ‘resau’, connected to the Mundaneum, through which users could request documents from the great libraries, that would be would be projected into a telegraph room. Following the end of the War, the Begian Government, proving receptive to the idea, provided Otlet and La Fontaine, space in the left wing of the Palais du Cinquantenaire, a government building in Brussels, opening 1921. The following year it was shut briefly, due to lack of support from the government, but was reopened again after lobbying from Otlet and La Fontaine. In 1924 Otlet renamed the Palais Mondial to Mundaneum and the Universal Bibliographic Repertory, continued to expand and take in all forms of document including letters, reports, newspaper articles, and images.
By 1934, the Belgian government had again lost interest in funding the Munadaneum and its offices where closed, despite the protest of Otlet. Whilst the collection remained in situ, but inaccessible, Otlet returned to his writing producing in 1934 Traité de documentation, still considered a key text in the sphere of Documentation. The following year he published Monde:Essai d’universalisme (1935), which described his vision for a worldwide information network, that foreshadowed the internet. In 1940, Germany invaded Belgium and the Palais du Cinquantenaire was taken over to house a collection of artwork of the Third Reich, destroying much of the Mundaneum in the process. Otlet salvaged the remains and moved them to Parc Léopold, the dilapidated building in which the collection remain until it’s rediscovery by a young research name Boyd Rayward, in 1968.
Otlet died in December 1944, however the Mundaneum continues today as a private museum and archives center, with a mission to conserve, preserve and showcase within its space of temporary exhibitions, archives and collections bequeathed by its founders : nearly 6 km current documents and 12 million index cards of Universal Bibliographic Repertory!
In many of his ideas Otlet was ahead of his time, the semantic relationships that UDC allows have been compared by many to the RDF-Triples data model that underlies the semantic web. His thoughts on a network of information centres and the transmission of documents predicted the Internet several decades before Tim Berners-Lee would first propose his vision of hypertext.
Widely regarded as the ‘Father of the Information Age‘ Claude Elwood Shannon was born in Petoskey, Michigan. After obtaining bachelor’s degrees in Mathematics and Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan, Shannon began his graduate studies in electrical engineering at MIT in 1936. His familiarity with Boolean Algebra allowed him to design electrical switching circuits based on Boolean Logic. His master’s thesis, A Mathematical Theory of Communication, was described by Howard Gardner as “possibly the most important master’s theses ever written”, whilst other have called it “the Magna Carta of the information age.”
It was Shannon he who first established that data could be measured in “bits” (a term derived from the contraction of binary and digit) in his 1948 paper “A Mathematical Theory of Communication.” In 1941, Shannon, having obtained A PhD in Mathematics was recruited by Bell Labs, where he worked on cryptography. He continued to work on Information Theory during this time, realizing that the encoding of messages in cryptography could be applied on a theoretical level to communication in general. The general premise of his theory was that: “a message’s information is proportional to its improbability–or its capacity to surprise an observer.”
Whilst at Bell Labs, he would work closely with Alan Turing, who had been seconded to Washington in 1943, to aid the allies efforts in decryption. In 1949, his previously classified paper “A Mathematical Theory of Cryptography” was published in the Bell Labs Research Journal. Shannon’s landmark theory stated that all communications could be though of as the same regardless of the medium. Noise poses a risk to all messages regardless of the channel and so Shannon declared that the key to ensuring accurate delivery of any message was the information contained in the message, rather than the meaning of the message itself.
Shannon stated that all communication systems can be broken down into the same essential components, information source, source, transmitter, channel, noise source receiver and destination. From there he was able to determine that the encoding of message by the transmitter was the key to ensuring the accuracy of the message and the avoidance of noise.
Shannon’s Schematic diagram of a general communication system – Wikimedia commons
Building on the premise of information as a measure of “surprise, or the amount of uncertainty we can overcome” he used the example of a coin toss to illustrate his point. Asserting that a fair coin toss, with equal chance of landing on either side, head or tails contains one bit of information. Shannon argued that the messages we send are like weighted coin tosses, they aren’t merely a random assemblage of characters but follow implicit rules that make them more predictable. Using this knowledge exemplified by the rule that certain characters are usually followed by others for example the letter “Q” is most commonly followed by a “U” or an “E”, he was able to show that the value of English (he called it H value) characters could be less than 1 bit. He expressed this in the following equation:
H=∑−p(x)logp(x)
In 1956 he joined MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics and served as faculty until 1978. Outside of work Shannon dabbled in robotics and computing, he invented a juggling robot, a flame-throwing trumpet, an electronic maze-solving mouse called Theseus, and a roman numeral arithmetic machine called THROBAC I Thrifty Roman Numeral Backward-Looking Computer. One of his most interesting devices was the “Ultimate Machine” a featureless box, with a single switch on the front, when the switch was flipped the lid of the box would open and a mechanical hand reached out, flipped off the switch, then retracted back inside the box.
In 1973,the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers bestowed him the first ever Shannon Award. In later life Shannon was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and spent his last years in a nursing home. He died in 2001. His legacy lives on in his Information theory and work which formed the basis of modern computing, the internet and everything that followed.
Welcome to part 3 of my#citylis dissertation blog, discussing the impact of EU and UK legislation on the use of Orphan Works by UK Cultural Heritage Institutions. Part 1 is here, part 2 here.
To recap, orphan works are works for which the rights holder (author, producer) is unknown or cannot be located. These pose a major barrier to cultural heritage institutions wishing to make their collections available online, since making them available online without permission from the rights holder would constitute copyright infringement. This is because Copyright law states that the act of reproduction (for example scanning) and making available (such as through a website) are the exclusive rights of the author/creator. If cultural heritage institutions were to make such works available without permission they would be infringing Copyright leading to potential financial and reputation damage, from a claim by a reappearing rights holder.
To resolve this issue legislators around the world have adopted different solutions ranging from national licensing schemes, exceptions to copyright, to proposals for limiting the amount of damages paid in infringement cases.
Canada
Act 77 of the Canadian Copyright Act allows anyone seeking to use in Copyright works where they are unable to locate the rightsholder to apply for a license to the Canadian Copyright Board. The Board will evaluate if the efforts made to locate the rightsholder are sufficient and may then grant a license. Licenses are non-exclusive but permit certain uses including reproduction, publication, performance, and distribution.
Licensees are required to pay royalties to the Collective societies, to be held as compensation for a reappearing rightsowner. Collective societies were required to hold the royalties for upto 5 years after the expiry of the license after which they were entitled to ‘dispose of the royalties as it sees fit for the general benefit of its members’. However, this practice was abandoned and the collective societies were able:
to use the unlocatable owners’ royalties as they saw fit from the outset, as long as the collective undertook to compensate the owner if necessary. (De Beer & Bouchard 2009)
The Canadian legislation appears to have had a limited effect as to date less than 300 licenses have been issued since (Copyright Board of Canada). The Report of the Register of Copyrights (2015) notes that several studies have drawn attention to low usage and flaw in the Canadian system.
Germany
German legislation on orphan and out-of-commerce works was passed on 1/10/2013 and entered into force on 1/1/2014. The amendments to the Copyright Act represented Germany’s implementation of the EU Orphan Works directive, permitting the digitisation and making available to the public, under certain conditions, of qualifying works from the collections of publicly accessible libraries, educational institutions, museums and archives. (VGWort.de)
The legislation establishes a presumption that a collecting society administering the rights in such works is also entitled to do so for the works of non-members provided that the usage is non-commercial, the works in question are recorded in the Register of Out-of-Commerce Works maintained by the German Patent and Trademark Office and the rightsholder has not objected within six weeks of registration.
Hungary
The Hungarian Copyright Act (HCA) tackles orphan works in three distinct sections. The HCA was amended in 2003 by Act CII to include a free use provision that permits libraries, archives and other educational institutions, to provide limited onsite access to works in their collection, including orphan works, via dedicated terminals for educational and scholarly research purposes.
Specific legislation dealing with orphan works, came into effect 1 February 2009. The orphan works specific provisions of the HCA allow the Hungarian Intellectual Property Office (HIPO) to grant licenses for both commercial or non-commercial uses of orphan works. Applicants must complete a documented diligent search and pay compensation for their use.
Japan
Article 67 of the Japanese Copyright Law allows users who have been unable to locate or identify the rightsholder of a work after due diligence to apply for a compulsory license. Applicants must deposit compensation for reappearing rightsholders, the sum of which must correspond to the normal royalty rate and is determined in conjunction with the Culture Council by the Agency of Cultural Affairs. Compulsory licensing is only available for works that have been:
made public or those for which it is clear that they have been offered to or made available to the public for a considerable period of time. (United States Copyright Office 2015)
Under Japanese legislation it is possible to obtain a compulsory licence for works of a foreign author as long as the work will continue to be exploited within Japan. The terms conditions for diligent search for foreign works are the same as those that apply to domestic works. (Favale et al. 2013)
Korea
Per Article 50 of the Korean Copyright Act users may apply to the Minister of Culture, Sports and Tourism for a compulsory license to allow use of certain types of orphan works. Applicants must demonstrate that they have taken “considerable efforts” to identify the rightsholder or rightsholder’s place of residence and compensation must be paid at market rates, as determined by the Korea Copyright Commission.
Switzerland
The Swiss Copyright Act contains provisions on orphan works which are limited to sound and audio-visual recordings. Art. 22b URG/CopA authorises users to seek authorisation for the exploitation of works from the licensed collective management organisations if the rightsholder cannot be contacted, is unknown or cannot be located. (Suisa Blog)
The Netherlands
The Netherlands implemented the Orphan Works Directive into their national Copyright Act (‘Auteurswet’) in 2014 with the law entitled: Wet van 8 oktober 2014 tot wijziging van de Auteurswet en de Wet op de naburige rechten in verband met de implementatie van de Richtlijn nr. 2012/28/EU inzake bepaalde toegestane gebruikswijzen van verweesde werken (Act of 8 October 2014 amending the Copyright Act and the Related Rights Act
with the implementation of Directive 2012/28 / EU on certain permitted uses of
orphan works) this amended the Dutch Copyright Act and Neighbouring Rights Act (Favale et al 2016). Prior to this the Dutch had no specific orphan works legislation, instead relying on contractual agreements between heritage institutions and rightsholder organisations. (KEA 2011)
A 2011 study by the IViR (Institute for Information Law of Amsterdam University) proposed what it considered two viable solutions to improve rights clearance, 1) a compulsory collective licensing model or 2) an extended collective licensing model. The report concluded that in order to satisfy the need of rights holders to exercise their rights, certain restrictions would be required such as limiting licenses to cultural heritage institutions with a public mission. To ensure film producers don’t suffer unfair competition, from CHIs in the exploitation of their digital rights they suggest the option of granting a license on audio-visual heritage material older than ten years.
UK
In the UK Orphan Works Legislation was originally introduced in the 2010 Digital Economy Bill Clause 42 (Subsequently Clause 43) however the provision was eventually dropped during the wash-up phase of the 2010 parliament. The legislation would have allowed the Secretary of State to create a licensing scheme for orphan works. (Khong 2010). In 2014 the UK implemented the EU Orphan Works Directive into UK, through the Copyright and Rights in Performances (Certain Permitted Uses of Orphan Works) Regulations . At the same time the IPO Orphan Works licensing scheme was introduced through The Copyright and Rights in Performances (Licensing of Orphan Works) Regulations. In a 2012 Impact Assessment Report on Orphan Works published by the Department of Business Innovation and Skills, the IPO estimated that 2500 museums, 3393 public libraries, 3000 community archives, 979 academic libraries and approximately 3500 trust archives stood to benefit from the introduction of an orphan works scheme. (IPO 2012)
USA and the question of Fair Use
In the United States Orphan Works legislation was first introduced in 2008’s Shaun Bentley Orphan Works Act, but the bill never made it into law before congress adjourned. The bill:
would have limited remedies where the infringer had performed and documented a good faith reasonably diligent search before using the work; the infringing use of the work provided attribution to the copyright owner, if known; and the infringing user included an appropriate symbol or notice in association with any public distribution, display, or use of the work. (United States Copyright Office 2015)
The report by the Register of Copyrights proposed an ECL (Extended Collective Licensing) system as the “best answer to solving the mass licensing that is inherent to mass digitization.” The report cites the voluntary agreement between parties in the Google books settlement as evidence that with government support such a system could be made to work:
we believe that with government support and oversight to ensure that any legislation is developed transparently and in a way to benefit a wide array of stakeholders equally, ECL can be successful here. (United States Copyright Office 2015)
The report examines the application of fair-use as an alternative to legislation, noting that representatives of libraries and other groups had argued that legislation on mass digitization was unnecessary since the courts were capable of using fair use doctrine to evaluate projects on a case-by-case basis. However, the report argues that reliance on fair use:
can only go so far in enabling the development of mass digitization [and therefore] should Congress wish to encourage or facilitate mass digitization projects providing substantial access to the expressive contents of copyrighted works, it would need to look beyond fair use to a licensing model, either voluntary or statutory. (United States Copyright Office 2015)
In their study of orphan works legislation Favale et al (2013) analysed the proposed orphan works legislation and claimed that the US approach focused on limiting liability for users of orphan works “in order to maximise the public access to these works and to foster the diffusion of public digital libraries.” They argue that this reflects the market-driven approach to copyright in America and stated that for this reason:
collective management of rights (either “extended” or not) do not find a viable place among the proposed solutions to the orphan works problem in the US.
However, as we have seen above the most recent approach of the US Copyright Office seeks to reconsider a collective rights management approach. In its comment on the proposals for an ECL system the Internet Archive criticised the US Copyright for basing its approach to heavily on Google Books arguing that such a project was a unique occurrence and would most likely not be repeated. They argued that an ECL system as proposed would be unsuited to the current decentralised approach to digitisation in the United States and instead propose strengthening of existing notice and takedown systems already in use such by many digitisation projects including their own.
What is ECL?
ECL (Extended Collective License) is a form of collective rights management agreement negotiated between a user and a third-party collective management organisation, widely used in Nordic countries of Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Norway. Under a collective license an agreement is negotiated made between a user and a representative organisation for the use of works in a particular category. This agreement is given extended effect by including the works in the same category of non-members known as “outsiders”. The CMO is responsible for locating rightsholders and distributing remuneration.
The legislation made it possible for books published in France prior to 1st January 2001 to be digitized if they were no longer commercially available from the publisher and is not available in printed or digital form. This was achieved by granting the collecting society SOFIA the right to authorize the digital reproduction or representation of such books six months after their entry into the ReLire database of out-of-commerce works, maintained by the Bibliothèque National de France. As Franck Macrez notes, orphan works would be included since they would meet the definition of “unavailable book”. Under the Act the collecting society would be required to take appropriate measures to locate and distribute royalties received. It was also to take steps to preserve the interests of rights holders not party to the publishing contract.
The act raised concerns for turning copyright on it’s head, allowing authors to opt out but would have improved the accessibility of unavailable works in cultural heritage institutions particularly as the collective society would have the right to grant publicly accessible libraries remuneration free permission for non-commercial usage of an unavailable work if no rightsholder is traced within 10 years of the date of the first authorisation to exploit. Reappearing rights holders would be able to put an end to such exploitation at any time, if they believe that the digital cause harm to their reputation or honour.
In 2013 the Decree implementing the law was challenged by the writers Sara Doke and Marc Soulier (also known as French Science Fiction writer Yal Ayerdhal) who sough to have it annulled by the Conseil D’etat, on the grounds that the amendments in the Decree represented a limitation to their exclusive right of reproduction provided by Article 2(a) of Directive 2001/29 (the InfoSoc Directive) which was not included in the list of exceptions to this right listed in article 5 of Directive 2001/9. The case was referred to the Conseil Constitutionnel, asking it to rule on the law’s constitutionality. The Council found that the law did not prevent the exploitation of works in other forms than digital and that the plaintiffs’ rights to private property granted under article 17 of the French Declaration of Human Rights and Civic Rights(1789) had not been breached.
Following this the Council of State then sought a ruling from CJEU on the question of whether the decree was incompatible with articles 2 and 5 of the Infosoc Directive. The preliminary ruling of Advocate General Wathelet found that French law was not compatible with the InfoSoc Directive.
The AG found that the French legislation was incompatible on the following grounds:
The Decree does not allow the author to provide their prior express consent for the reproduction and communication to the public of their works, described by the AG as “cornerstone of the author’s exercise of his exclusive right” (Case C‑301/15 n61). Tacit or implied consent deprives the author their essential intellectual property rights.
This is not altered by the fact that the works are distributed non-commercially or that the author has the option to oppose, withdraw the exercise of his rights by the CMO and receive remuneration.
On the question of the influence of the 2011 Memorandum of Understanding on the digitisation and making available of out-of-commerce work (signed by three European library associations, rightsholder organisations, journalists, publishers, authors and artists) the AG argued that the agreement could the scope of exclusive rights set out in Articles 2 (a) and 3(1) of the InfoSoc Directive since the MoU is not a legally binding instrument but a means for ensuring the legal certainty of voluntary agreements negotiated between users, rightholders and collective rights management organisations.
While the decision of the CJEU and the AG did not specifically address the issue of Orphan Works it has implications for the digitisation and making available of orphan works as Andree (2016) argues:
Does that mean that orphan works can never be placed in such a database, since it is impossible to secure the consent of their unknown right holder, or, to the contrary, should Soulier be interpreted as meaning that only orphan books can be placed into the database, since it is not possible to secure the prior consent of their authors, and they are thus out of the scope of the Soulier decision?
Much of the Soulier Doke case hinged on the issue of the authors prior to consent to the use of their work. As Valérie-Laure Benabou (2017) writes in a blog post(French) that the judges stated that:
…the author be “effectively informed of the future use of his work by a third party and the means at his disposal with a view to prohibiting it if he so wishes”. The absence of such effective information deprives the author of any possibility of “taking a stand” on future use, which makes consent purely hypothetical
Sganga (2017) argues that the decision could have potentially far-reaching consequences, Citing the decision’s focus on the requirement of the author to provide express consent for any exercise of exclusive rights would mean:
outlawing the very basic principle on which ECLs operate, that is the possibility to extend the collective licence between CMOs and users to all the works belonging to a definite category, regardless of whether or not the author is a member of the organization.
She notes that CJEU recognised the societal value of exploiting out-of-print books but does not indicate to Member States a solution that would be compliant with EU law. She proceeds to argue that the decision creates more ambiguity and uncertainty around the functioning of Collective Licensing Agreements:
In censoring a commercially oriented law to protect authors without engaging in a more detailed analysis, the CJEU has created further uncertainties, and opened the gate for a potential flow of complaints against national collective management schemes.
However, Benabou (2017) suggests that there is no obstacle in principle to a ‘collective management mechanism’, whereby non-response from an author is considered consent, despite the fact that it appears to be in conflict with the right to prior authorisation. She writes that:
in order not to undermine the very principle of prior authorisation, it is necessary for the author to be individually informed about the terms of the intended use, so that his silence can be regarded as a genuine implicit endorsement of that use. Thus, there is no obstacle in principle to a compulsory collective management mechanism of an exclusive right “by default”, provided that each author has been able to understand the implications of his inaction after being individually notified, which makes the consent purely hypothetical.
Territoriality and the challenge of cross-border dissemination
Once of the main challenges for CHI in disseminating their digital collections is the principle of territoriality, a principle of public international law that limits the extent of protections and exercise of rights to the borders of a sovereign state. Despite efforts made by the EU to harmonise aspects of Copyright through Directive 2001/29/EC (also known as the InfoSoc Directive) Copyright in European Countries is still based upon the principle of territoriality.
Accordingly, there are two legal rules that can be applied in to determine the applicable law for the cross-border dissemination of works in an online environment, the principle of lex loci protectionis & the principle of country of reception. The first, derived from Article 5 of the Berne Convention, stipulates that the law of the state where the work is made available is applied. The principle of the country of reception applies the legislation of the state or country where the work is accessed. In practice, this means that in order to avoid infringement CHIs wishing to disseminate their works, must obtain a license from rights holders for each territory. (Axhamn & Guba 2011; Anderstotter 2017)
The Orphan Works License scheme, is limited by the principle of territoriality in that the license granted is only valid for use in the UK, as the IPO’s guidance states:
An orphan works licence will cover the lawful use of the work in the UK only. It is the responsibility of the organisation or person using the orphan work to ensure that they comply with the law of any other jurisdictions where they may wish to use the work.
The Orphan Works Directive overcomes this by ensuring mutual recognition of a works orphan status in all member states.
Evaluating ECL
The main drawback of an exception such as the one implemented by the EU Orphan Works Directive is the need to clear works on an individual level, through means of a diligent search. This proves to be time and resource intensive for organisations, however once diligence has been completed users are provided with a greater degree of certainty that the work is orphaned or else are able to determine than an ECL (Extended Collective Licensing) solution that forgoes diligence in favour of a payment to a Collective Management Organisation, which takes on responsibility for tracing rightsholders and redistributing fees. As Guibault (2015) writes the cumbersome and limited nature of the Orphan Works Directive has led to many member states to consider ECL:
Compared to standard collective rights management, the “extension” of agreements to non-members of a CMO significantly facilitates the licensing process to the benefit of rights owners and users alike: even if not all rights owners are identified, license agreements can still be concluded and remuneration paid, allowing the use to take place under specific conditions.
The main drawback to ECL as an approach is that many of the works licensed under these schemes are restricted geographically to their country of origin, meaning only the citizens residing within their national territories can access them. For example access to the Norwegian Digital Library (bokhylla.no) is restricted to users based in Norway. (although it states that users “without Norwegian IP addresses can apply for access for specific purposes, primarily research, education and professional translation” for an initial period of six months.See here for details)
Rignalda (2011) lists this amongst other issues which he argues need to be resolved before ECL can be an effective solution to mass rights clearance. On this point he argues that if all countries implemented or adopted ECL, then it would be possible to set up organisations to manage multi-territorial licensing with responsibility for arranging and administering extended collective licences in all Member States. (so-called ‘one-stop shops‘)Axhamn & Guibault (2011) recommend the promotion of multi-territory licensing modelled on the IFPI I Simulcasting Agreement
Compatibility of ECL with International Law
Third, that ECL should conform to international and European copyright law. On this point, he notes that in principle this should not be an issue given that it is recognised within Directive 2001/29/EC. In response to issue of whether the requirements for opting out would constitute a conflict with the prohibition of formalities within the Berne Convention, but argues that it may be possible to make a distinction between the notion of formalities related to the automatic grant of Copyright, as opposed to a formality around the enjoyment of the exclusive nature of copyrights. This he argues would depend on the form taken by an opt out mechanism, citing the difference between a simple notification via email and the need to provide more detailed information.
Axhamn and Gubault (2011a) examine ECL in the context of the Berne Conventions’s three-step test, which requires that all limitations and exceptions introduced by member states should be confined to “certain special cases” (i) that “do not conflict with a normal exploitation of a work” (ii) and “do not unreasonably prejudice the legitimate interests of the author”(iii).(Knights 2001) Since the extended effect of a an ECL Agreement acts a limitation on the exclusive rights of an author there is a risk of it coming into conflict with the three-step test. Their opinion, however, is that the characteristics of the ECL statutory provisions, namely freely negotiated agreements between parties to the agreement, the principles of equal treatment and right to (separate) remuneration and the option for rightsholders to opt out from the agreement, decrease the likelihood of ECL agreements conflicting with the three-step test.
Since most ‘outsiders’, usually foreign authors, are guaranteed remuneration at the same rate as members of the CMO and also in most cases have the choice to opt-out of any collective management agreement in which their works are included, ECL is considered to comply with the principle of equal treatment. (Axham and Guibault, 2011a)
Compatibility with EC/EU Law
Article 5 of Directive 2001/29/EC article contains an ‘exhaustive enumerations of exceptions and limitations to the reproductive right and the right of communication to the public’ (Council Directive 2001/29/EC Recital 32). With the exception of one, the limitations listed in article 5, are optional, allowing member states to choose which ones to implement in their national legislature. All limitations implemented must comply with the text of the Directive and are applied in accordance with the 3-step test.
However, Clause 18 of Directive 2001/29/EC states that:
This Directive is without prejudice to the arrangements in the Member States concerning the management of rights such as extended collective licences.
This implies that ECL agreements are not regarded as exceptions or limitations in the meaning of the Directive and are thus not enumerated under article 5 (Rosén 2011)
Drawbacks of ECL
As several authors. including Rignalda(2011) and Axhamn & Guibault (2011a), note one of the main drawbacks of ECL as a solution, is the cost of licensing. Rignalda cites the cost per book negotiated for Norwegian digitisation projects as averaging €13. Clearly at this rate not scalable/ feasible for entire collections, they explain the reasoning for this as being due to market forces saying:
The essence of this issue is that extended collective management is not a policy instrument. It is not intended to be used by governments to control copyright and achieve certain policy goals. It is merely a facility to support the market, to lower transaction costs, and to resolve market failure.
Rignalda(2011) also references the high cost of administering a system of extended collective licensing as an issue, noting that this applies in particular to the costs incurred by CMOs for locating rightsholders and paying them the licensing fees that they are due. Essentially the advantage of ECL over the Orphan Works Directive, is that it transfers the burden of locating rightsholders to the CMO in exchange for a fixed rate licensing fee. In some instances this may be preferable.
Anderstotter(2017) carried out comparative research into the legislative frameworks for clearing orphan works in UK and Sweden. As part of her research she conducted interviews with Victoria Stobo and Nic Poole and both were asked to give their thoughts on ECL as a means of outsourcing rights clearance. Both commented on the cost with Poole noting he had:
’yet to see a collective licensing scheme that is cheaper than it is to simply deal with the risk.’
He continues by further highlighting pricing as a major barrier to the success of collective licensing, maintaining that:
’the collective licensing always falls down on price. (…) It costs human and organisational resources even if the licence cost is very low. (…) If [a work] has become orphaned it is highly unlikely the cost of collective licensing scheme is going to be proportionate.
Per Anderstotter(2017) Stobo describes ECL as a ‘bureaucratic nightmare‘ claiming
’It’s not well-used, it’s expensive in terms of the time it takes to go through the applications process, and you can’t use it for mass-digitisation. It could perhaps be used for high-risk orphans.
Stobo also raises the fact that the UK does not have a strong tradition of collective management in most sectors, this is a point raised by Rignalda(2011) who notes that while ECL is popular in Nordic countries where the benefits of such a system are widely understood. He believes that there may not as widespread availability of CMOs sufficiently representative to issue license in countries where ECL is not so popular.
On this basis it appears that ECL is not a viable alternative to the problem of mass digitisation for cultural heritage, although it may have a limited use for certain categories of Orphan Works. There is nothing in the Orphan Works Directive to prevent the use of the two solutions side by side, since the directive states it is without prejudice to collective management agreements. However, this still leave both CMOs and CHIs facing high costs for rights clearance. Therefore a solution remains elusive.
Next Steps
During August I launched a survey of UK GLAM institutions asking them about their experiences of the UK licensing scheme and the EU exception. From this I hope to get an understanding of how institutions are using the license scheme / exception and if not what their reasons for not doing so are. I am also planning on conducting some brief interviews with some of the respondents. The survey has been created in Google Forms and distributed through Twitter, email and various Jisc Mail Lists. The questions can be read here and the actual survey can be via this link, just in case you’re reading and are able to contribute 😉
I will post an update once I’ve analysed the responses in detail , but in the meantime here’s a sneak preview.
Graphs showing the responses to questions 2 & 4 of my orphan works survey
-Fin –
References
Anderstotter, K. (2016) A Single-Minded Market for Digital Assets? [Master’s Thesis] King’s College London
Axhamn, J., and Guibault, L. (2011a) Cross-border extended collective licensing: a solution to online dissemination of Europe’s cultural heritage? Final report prepared for EuropeanaConnect. Universiteit Van Amesterdam. Available at: https://www.ivir.nl/publicaties/download/ECL_Europeana_final_report092011.pdf
Borghi, M., & Karapapa, S. (2013) Copyright and Mass Digitization: A Cross-Jurisdictional Perspective, 1st edn, Oxford University Press Available at: DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199664559.001.0001
Knights, Roger (2001) Limitations and Exceptions under the “Three-Step-Test” and in National Legislation–Differences between the Analog and Digital Environments. Regional Workshop on Copyright and Related Rights In The Information Age organized by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in cooperation with the Russian Agency for Patents and Trademarks (Rospatent) Moscow, May 22 to 24, 2001 http://www.wipo.int/edocs/mdocs/copyright/en/wipo_cr_mow_01/wipo_cr_mow_01_2.pdf
Opinion of Advocate General Melchior Wathelet in Marc Soulier and Sara Doke v Ministre de la Culture et de la Communication and Premier Minister, C-301/15, EU:C:2016:536.
Ringnalda, A. (2011) Orphan Works, Mass Rights Clearance, and Online Libraries: The Flaws of the Draft Orphan Works Directive and Extended Collective Licensing as a Solution. Medien und Recht International , Vol. 8 pp. 3-10. Available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2369974
![First page of The Mazarin Bible [Biblia latina]. Genèse-Psaumes. – [Mayence] : [Johannes Gutenberg et Johannes Fust], [c. 1455]. – In-folio. - 1er volume.](https://thomasash.files.wordpress.com/2017/03/751063002_inc1_t01_0011.jpg?w=228&h=300)
Thomas Ash 
