Digital Preservation Code of Ethics
A project for the Ethics for Library and Information Professionals course in the University of Arizona School of Information Resources and Library Science program
The digital frontier has come and gone. What was once a promising future has become the all-encompassing reality of today. Digital preservationists are charged with the duty of ensuring that tremendous amounts of information created in this new digital environment are not lost in the transition.
This code of ethics for digital preservationists presents four maxims that provide a framework, not prescriptions, for ethically navigating the stewardship of digital information resources. Digital preservationists inherit much from traditional archivists and librarians. This code of ethics reflects the debt owed to those traditions, and builds on the duties of those traditions with careful attention to the prospect of future technological frontiers.
As digital preservationists, we…
Strive for excellence in selection, acquisition, and access.
If there is one universal challenge facing digital preservationists, it is the sheer volume of digital information (and analog information being digitized) with which to contend. Much like traditional archivists, public, academic, or school librarians, the digital preservationist must strive for excellence in determining on which resources preservation efforts will be extended. Selection of those resources will necessarily be directed by the objectives of the parent institution or the communities the preservationist’s institution serves. The digital preservationist must, by duty, resist efforts to censor resources from a digital archive as a fundamental obligation to preserve justice in the distribution of digital preservation technologies.
Following selection processes, the digital preservationist must work with clients, donors, or other constituents bequeathing their information resources for long-term digital preservation to ensure that digital resources are acquired ethically. This duty includes the ethical mandate to ensure provenance of digital resources, maintain intellectual property rights, protect individual privacy rights in accordance with rights guaranteed by U.S. Copyright Law, Creative Commons Licensing, the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and our own duty to avoid actions which may result in financial, intellectual, physical, or creative injury to any individual or community.
A digital archive without users is akin to a locked vault. Digital preservationists recognize the ethical imperative to provide equal and unfettered access whenever possible. Such access may include an intranet for the institution’s employees, distribution via commercial vendors, or online via an archival website. Regardless of the medium, digital preservationists must work to ensure that access points to digitally preserved resources utilize globally accepted standards for digital accessibility.
In some instances, this unfettered commitment to access may run counter to the ethical demand to respect an information resource as that which should be preserved but may not be accessed by the general public. These situations, while rare, will pose few problems if the digital preservationist is careful and thoughtful during the acquisition processes.
Application:
A global example for each of these elements proves elusive, so I would like to treat the practical application of each element independently. With regards to selection, we might envision a digital preservationist working within a non-profit organization to preserve the past digital assets of the corporation while also establishing a system for the preservation of future assets. Obviously the preservationists will focus her efforts on the assets the organization finds useful to preserve as well as those assets the corporation is legally obligated to preserve for a period of time (i.e. email records). The preservationist may encounter ethical dilemmas if, in the course of his/her work, the parent institution asks the preservationist to expunge some records that it finds undesirable (or worse, incriminating). The digital preservationist is morally and legally obligated to resist such censorship.Shifting our attention a bit toward the acquisition of materials, let us imagine a digital preservationists working within an art museum. The director has recently acquired two works of art that are to be digitally preserved and made accessible via the museum’s interactive website. It is the digital preservationists duty to work with curatorial experts to ensure that the provenance of the work of art is established, verified, and relevant metadata for this resource is preserved alongside the digital surrogate. Were this resource to be found of dubious provenance, it is the digital preservationist’s responsibility to communicate this with the director and any relevant stakeholders.
Staying with the example of the digital preservationist working within a museum environment, we expect that the preservationist will work closely with web designers and/or programmers to ensure that access to the resources via the museum website meets generally accepted accessibility guidelines for web content accessibility.
Practice loyalty, not obedience, to our institutions and users.
Digital preservationists acknowledge and appreciate that our parent institutions operate within an ethical framework — just as we do — that guides the work of the institutions to ensure ethical behavior from all of its employees or representatives. Naturally, the digital preservationist will remain loyal to the ethical guidelines of the parent institution. However, humans — and the institutions we create — are fallible, and we recognize that loyalty is not synonymous with blind obedience. Digital preservationists bring unique skills and perspectives to the institutions for which we serve, and our institutions and clients stand to benefit from the assertion of our unique abilities to anticipate needs that may be invisible to the untrained eye. It is our duty, to preserve the fidelity of our promises to society at large, to practice the work of digital preservation with the best interests of humanity — not just our parent institutions — at the fore of our priorities.
Application:
A digital preservation consultant is working on a long-term contract for an investment firm to help establish a long-term preservation strategy for its digital business library. The primary focus of the contract job is the firm’s digital case study library, though the preservationist realizes in her research that the firm has no plan in place for preserving email communication per the Federal Records Act. The preservationists may assume some ethical obligation to alert the institution to its legal requirements.For another example, we might turn our attention to a hypothetical situation in which the director of an academic library proclaims that the library has no financial obligation to engage in any digital preservation projects. As an employee of that library working with scholars at the university, the digital preservationists is ethically obliged to work with the director to come to some sort of understanding about the dire need to preserve scholarly work generated at the university by its esteemed faculty and student researchers.
Promote cooperation and collaboration for the betterment of the world.
Digital preservationists may only realize the true power of their work through intentional collaboration with one another. In a field grappling with an exponentially increasing amount of information created each year, it is imperative for digital preservationists to share best practices, engage in long-term collaborative relationships between institutions, and continuously interrogate the work they do for its effectiveness and long-term sustainability.
We may view our work as digital preservationists as a holistic body, working in concert to ensure the long-term availability of historic, political, and cultural records. As such, digital preservationists, as this working collective of individuals, must work to fulfill Ross’s moral duty to “improve oneself with respect to virtue and intelligence.” Additionally, mutually beneficial relationships with our colleagues “improve the lot of others with respect to virtue, intelligence, and happiness.” This holistic approach requires the balancing of respect for an institution’s or individual’s autonomy with the power that collaboration and cooperation has to increase the speed, thoroughness, and efficacy of our work as preservationists.
Application:
Rather than an example of an ethical dilemma here, it is perhaps more useful to envision the sort of work a digital preservationist is expected to do in upholding this element of our code of ethics. Whether working in a commercial environment, academic, or other non-profit situation, the digital preservationist stands to both teach and learn a considerable amount about the work he or she does by working with other institutions to speed the progress of work for all parties involved. As such, we might expect the preservationist to: engage in lifelong learning (and teaching) through participation in best practices conferences, encourage collaboration between institutions working with similar preservation objectives, and publish the findings of any and all collaborative lessons learned.
Live in the future to preserve the past and present.
Technologies have always maintained the power to change our world in dramatic ways, and it seems now that technology wields the power to change our world overnight. To the digital preservationist, this rapidly changing environment makes it difficult to establish standards that will ensure the long-term availability of digital information resources. This moving target, so to speak, should not dissuade digital preservationists from forecasting technological changes and building bridges between current digital preservation practices and future best practices. Indeed, it is our moral duty, according to Ross, to uphold our moral obligation to pursue self-improvement. Such commitment to improving the work we do, for whom we do it, and how we go about this work increases our ability to uphold other prima facie moral obligations toward a just distribution of digital preservation resources and fidelity to the commitments we have made as digital preservationists.
Application:
It may seem that this maxim expects digital preservationists to predict the future or suffer ethical impurity and an uncertain professional future. Far less extreme, living in the future simply suggests that all major decisions about the work of digital preservation should be made with educated consideration about which direction(s) technology is taking. For example, a digital preservationists may be faced with a number of format options with which she might choose to preserve fine art photographic images. She may, through research about the options available and their projected long-term stability, concur that high resolution (450dpi) tiffs with comparable derivative Jpegs will adequately reduce the risk that these images will be lost or rendered unreadable by future machines — for the time being. There are no guarantees with regards to technology, but it is the digital preservationist’s obligation to pay close attention to shifting technological environments to limit the risks of loss of important digital information resources.
References
American Library Association. 1995. “Code of Ethics.” Retrieved on May 15, 2007 from http://www.ala.org/ala/oif/statementspols/codeofethics/codeethics.htm
Federal Records Act (1950). Retrieved May 28, 2007 from http://www.ed.gov/policy/gen/leg/fra.html
Mathiesen, Kay. 2004. “What Is Information Ethics?” Computers and Society 34.
Spinello, Richard A. 1995. “Frameworks for Ethical Analysis.” Pp. 14-44 in Ethical Aspects of Information Technology. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall.
United States Constitution. (1787) Retrieved on May 28, 2007 from http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/constitution.overview.html
Universal Declaration of Human Rights. (1948). Retrieved May 28, 2007 from http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (1999). Retrieved May 28 from http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Jason Kucsma, 2007