infoSpace - Access

Software Activation, DRM, and Implications for Digital Preservation

tkiehne — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 23:00:39 +0000

It's time again for another installment in my ongoing audio encoding project saga. For some time now I have been on the verge of the next phase of the project, which involves encoding the remaining analog sound objects in my collection, specifically cassette tapes and vinyl records. Procrastination, combined with a serious dose of being busy with other things, has delayed my progress on this phase of the project, but one technical aspect has also proved crucial.

In order to digitize the analog sound objects I require a software platform for encoding the analog input into digital objects that is also capable of cleaning-up the analog input of analog artifacts, such as tape hiss, pops, clicks, scratches, etc. There are many software packages that are available on the market for sound recording and processing and, fortunately, I already "own" one of them: Sonic Foundry's Sound Forge.

So, what's the technical problem, you ask? Well, I purchased version 5 of the software in 2001 as part of a special introductory promotion at a very reasonable price. Unfortunately, Sonic Foundry transferred ownership of the entire Sound Forge product line, as well as a few other key products, to Sony in 2003. Normally this wouldn't mean a thing, except for the fact that professional-level software like Sound Forge is protected by an online registration/activation scheme. In a nutshell, the software will install and run just fine for a 30 day trial period. During that period, you are expected to perform one of a set of procedures to register the product with the vendor which, when completed, will eliminate the 30 day countdown and give you full, unlimited access to the program. As you can guess, the transfer to Sony complicated the process in that the online registration routine built into the original program could no longer find the registration server — these functions had been transferred to Sony while the software remained unchanged.

Not being satisfied with only 30 days of the program at a time, and unwilling to shell out the bucks to upgrade, I embarked on a search to figure out the new registration procedures. I'll spare the details, except to say that it took some Googling, several failed customer service contact attempts, numerous user forum searches, and a call to a number that I finally managed to track down, which implored me to visit a chat application on their Web site in order to get to the information I needed to reactivate "my" software.

In the end, no big deal, right? But, my experience exposes some very important digital preservation issues. Sound Forge is not itself a particularly important piece of digital information in itself. It is a toolkit used to create the artifacts in which we are interested; in this case, sound artifacts. The same could be said about Photoshop, or any of an increasing number of professional media toolkits. Perhaps the furthest extent that a person in the future might need current or past versions of these software tools would be to regenerate projects that one might have created using them, or to analyze detailed technical aspects of the software. But, again, it is the products of these programs that will most likely interest future users, archivists, and the like.

But consider this: the registration and activation process used in software like Sound Forge is conceptually identical to the license management process in Digital Rights Management (DRM) schemes used to protect digital information, particularly music, movies, and other copyrighted works. Having reviewed my account above, one could imaging that instead of activating software that I purchased, that I might have been trying to access a DRM-encoded sound or video file that I had purchased in the past. The same issues with license servers, transfer of ownership/responsibility, changes in the license registration schemes and so on are just as pertinent in this new situation.

Everything managed to turn out alright for me in this case, but imagine if Sonic Foundry had simply disappeared instead of selling off it's product line? Or what if I had tried to install this software 10 or 15 years later, after the market had decided that the software no longer held enough value to justify supporting it? All discussion about ownership of digital information aside (a discussion of which would explain my liberal use of scare quotes), it seems apparent from this example that if left to the market (as governed by long copyright terms and far-reaching copyright legislation), we stand to lose not only the right to preserve digital information, but the technical ability to do so. Conveniently enough, I've treated on this situation before.

Stay tuned as I embark on the more complicated phases on my encoding project.

Bringing Records to the Users

tkiehne — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 07:06:37 +0000

I've volunteered at the local National Archives branch for over a year now. Over this time I have gained the acute impression of lament over the dwindling number of researchers and members of the public who make the trip out to the archives to do research. Indeed, it is not uncommon for me to enter a virtually empty research room during my Thursday afternoon visits.

What is seldom spoken of, but is vitally central to the issue, is the instant information gratification that the general populace receives from their increasingly ubiquitous internet connections. The reams of information available through Google, or the convenience of accessing Ancestry.com from home (instead of for free at the archives), keeps them at home and only adds insult to the injury of fewer patrons.

NARA is not alone in this lament. Günter Waibel of OCLC recently spoke of it in a Hanging Together blog post covering the IMLS WebWise Conference, where he reposts a quote by Deanna Marcum of the Library of Congress that rather eloquently sums up the issue:

“What I think our challenge is, it is not enough for us to create the perfect finding system, we know from all the user studies that individuals, who are looking for information, go directly to the open web, and our marvelous catalogues are not getting used. We have to find ways to take our content and the metadata and move that content to the open web.”

NARA relies on an online system called the Archival Research Catalog (ARC) to catalog and describe its considerable physical holdings. This system was derived from an earlier prototype called NARA's Archival Information Locator (NAIL), which primarily contained images and other non-textual surrogates. Each of these systems are of late-1990's vintage – a Web lifetime ago – and, quite frankly, the user interface shows it. One of my contacts at NARA once stated that the government seems to be about a decade behind when it comes to information management, and in this case it seems true enough.

Granted, the scope of these projects is monumental and one cannot expect them to be updated at Web speed to, say, incorporate some of the more useful “Web 2.0” principles. However, given the exodus of potential patrons to full-text search engines, there is a particularly devastating truth hidden behind the aging ARC code. To paraphrase Marcum, we need to take our content and metadata to where the users are. As it turns out, some informal research provides a striking illustration of this need.

One evening I found myself looking through the Web site of the Northwest Digital Archives, a group of education, government, and private archives across the Pacific Northwest and Alaska. I was curious about a number of things, but not the least of which was the potential for sharing finding aids for holdings at NARA's Seattle branch with the NWDA. This led me to search and browse some of the NWDA finding aids available via their search engine.

After browsing some of their EAD-encoded and HTML transformed finding aids, it occurred to me that this method of presentation very likely exposed the finding aids to Web agents acting on behalf of search engines like Google. I immediately wondered if the same was true of ARC and set out to verify.

Google exposes a number of advanced search parameters that can, among other things, limit the results to one site or domain. Using this feature, I performed a search for the number of records returned by Google for the NWDA and ARC respectively (click these links to see for yourself or reference the images below). The results are shocking: on the order of 3000 results from the NWDA, most of which are finding aids that have been full-text indexed; but only one result for ARC – its main search page!

Figure 1: A Google search result for the Northwest Digital Archives

Figure 2: A Google search for ARC records

I should not need to explain this to you, but the point is clear: the catalog information about holdings of the members of the NWDA are being seen by the masses searching Google, while not one of the multitudinous ARC records is being seen outside NARA's domain. Although seasoned researchers will know to go directly to the NARA site to search their holdings, the well-meaning masses will not. But which is easier: changing millions of people's Web searching habits, or altering an application to get the data to where those millions of people already are?

Fortunately, this example was very clearly understood by NARA staff at the Seattle branch, and apparently also with the staff in D.C. Within weeks of my demonstration I heard reports of changes being made to ARC to allow direct links to the catalog records, and a plan to phase in search engines by transferring indexes to these links directly to the major search engines. Regardless of where the impetus came from or what plans were already in motion, I am happy to know that progress is being made.

I've been working with the marketing sector as a programmer for over nine years. The companies I have worked for have specialized in Web and online marketing, and, although I have no direct role in marketing planning, I have of necessity become intimately familiar with such concepts as ROI and performance tracking, sales cycles, and lead/customer database development. Because of this exposure, the notion of how to reach people online is somewhat intuitive to me, but that knowledge is not yet widely dispersed among the archival profession. From this example, the intersection of Web marketing and archives seems to be an interesting space for me to explore.

Feeling Out Finding Aids

tkiehne — Fri, 24 Mar 2006 02:42:23 +0000

I've now spent five afternoons over the last five weeks volunteering my time at the local NARA branch. The bulk of my work has focused on developing user-friendly finding aids for patron use. For the benefit of my memory, here's a recap of some of the things I have done in creating these items.

When I first began the project, I was given a copy of a finding aid that had already been developed that was considered to be the ideal final product. From this, I created a spreadsheet that displayed an information "crosswalk" between the two major primary sources of data, ARC records and accessions records, and the desired end product. The crosswalk enabled me to understand all of the different ways that the same information is represented among the different sources and to communicate these relationships quickly and effectively, should anyone else need to create finding aids. Next, I created a Microsoft Word Template to ensure that formatting and layout would be consistent for all of the products.

Each finding aid contains more information than any one of the component sources of information from which they are created. The National Archives divides records among hundreds of "Record Groups" (RG) that are based upon government agencies, commissions, or other formal bodies. Looking through the list sequentially gives the impression of a semi-chronological subject listing about US Government operations and history. I create a finding aid for each RG that the regional branch carries. The first page lists the RG number and title. Given the government agencies often undergo reassignment, name changes, dissolution, and transfer, each RG may contain many sub-agencies, often with different regional or functional offices underneath them. Each agency or sub-agency that has records at the region has a separate descriptive page within the finding aid that describes the function and history of the agency, followed by sections for each series for that agency. Series is as it sounds -- a grouping of records as they were originally maintained by the agency in question. each series has a descriptive sheet with scope and content note, inclusive dates, geographic and subject references, extent and location, and arrangement notes. The series sheet is a cover sheet to a box or folder inventory that describes in more detail what is included in the fonds.

As I mentioned in my previous post, there are a number of information sources from which I assemble the finding aids:

ARC Database Records: I have found that these records, if they exist, comprise the most accurate and up-to-date description of each series. For each of the RGs that I have processed so far, there has been an ARC record that I have used to find most of the data for the agency and series sheets.

Printed and Online Indexes: For the agency and sub-agency history, especially originating and successor agency descriptions, I have used indexes published by NARA, as they are the most authoritative references available for such information.

Internal Databases: I have a copy of a database table that lists a great deal of internal inventory information. Anything that I have not found in the ARC record can usually be found here, especially the shelf locations and extent information.

Existing Inventories: Most of the RGs have already been inventoried and have Word documents containing these inventories. I have used these to create the box/Folder listings.

Accession Records: In some cases, however, no inventories exist. For these, I have had to use the accession records and any annotations made by the region to generate a box listing. In one case, I was brought into the stacks to verify the extent and arrangement represented by a very old accession record, and I expect that I will have to do this again many times as I progress through the project.

Through all of this, I am getting a full grasp on how information is generated and flows through the regional branch which I think will serve me well as I move toward description and records processing.