|
Trusted Repositories, Great Expectations Thus far, libraries, archives, and museums have shown they can create and provide access to digital materials. Users now rely on institutions to provide ongoing development of systems that support long-term access to the materials. Over time, institutions will keep the users’ trust so long as they sustain reliable access to information.26 Trust and authenticity are inextricable, and in the digital world are linked by reliability, which answers the question, Will this digital object remain the same over time?27 Trust in our public institutions is often rooted in documents, the rules that guide officers of the state empowered by those documents to lead our society, but this trust is nourished by time, and the sense that we can rely on our system to perform in a manner to which we have become accustomed. Trust is therefore also grounded in expectation – to what extent we can trust a document depends directly on previous experience with documents of that type and delivered by that source. By virtue of its youth, the digital environment is one where trust is at best a shaky proposition, but perhaps a more viable notion than authenticity. If in the digital environment one accepts there really are no originals but only copies, “the persistent question is whether a given object X has the same properties as object Y. There is no ‘original’….In such cases, there is no question of authenticity through comparison with other copies; there is only trust or lack of trust in the location and delivery processes and, perhaps, in the archival custodial chain.”28 Lacking time-proven results, how do repositories and archives in the digital domain generate a sense of trust among its users, and how do we recognize those that are trustworthy? Put succinctly, “a trusted digital repository is one whose mission is to provide reliable, long-term access to managed digital resources to its designated community, now and in the future.”29 According to the authors of RLG-OCLS’s Trusted Digital Repositories, we can distinguish three levels of trust: how cultural institutions earn trust from their communities (in the case of online music, these would be users at computers with a variety of expectations difficult for the archive to pinpoint, if only because of their facelessness); how cultural institutions trust third-party vendors (we could think of these as record companies or subscription services employed by music libraries); and how users trust the documents provided to them by a repository (i.e., the extent to which online music users trust downloaded files).30 But we are still left with a nagging question: how is trust developed by institutions who have been digital for such a short period of time, in some cases only a matter of months? “In the absence of trusted repositories or reliable, proven practices, a program for certification could provide a basis for trustworthiness.”31 Certification programs, based on organizational feasibility, best practices (if not proven), and compliance with standards such as the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) Reference Model, have been recommended and should be critically considered.32 Certification programs, while most likely necessary, may be difficult to construct, as best practices in digital environments may depend on the nature of the material digitized (from the perspective of the type of media, e.g. sound, and the content, e.g. music, spoken word, etc.) and are at least partly reliant on user expectations or needs as well as user technologies (for instance, on some user systems some sound files may not even be playable)33 . The obstacles facing certification programs, however, are not insurmountable, if subsets of standards could be applied depending on the type of archive or repository the institution claims to be. For instance, iTunes might attain certification based on similar, but not identical, standards applied to the Live Music Archive. Why the difference, and wouldn’t this difference destroy any notion of standard, thus nullifying the concept of certification? Yes and no. While achieving certification implies that certain standards have been met, the means of attaining certification, or meeting standards in specific organizational situations, is not an absolute. There are different brands of trust, just as there are differing perceptions of authenticity and uniqueness, that depend both on the source and the user, and therefore certification for trust might also be reasonably expected to have some malleability. In the case of online music delivery, building trust in users is challenging, especially because, for having such a short history, its past is a checkered one. Issues of copyright have taken down entire systems, and not just populist concerns like Napster, but listening libraries in university settings as well.34 Trusted online music repositories, that can be relied upon to deliver consistently authentic sound documents not only now but indefinitely into the future, are scarce to non-existent. Commercial sites have specific challenges to contend with, given the profit motive. If a company finds that its online music vending business no longer meets profit goals, as unlikely as that may now seem in the case of iTunes, then in all likelihood that business will close, regardless of its holdings in otherwise out-of-print copies.35 Academic or non-profit providers fare somewhat better in long-term viability, as they are typically either publicly funded or, as is the case with the Live Music Archive, they may be mirrored at other open archival sites. What else might provide a surrogate for trust
for online music archives? Until trust can be gained through time, there
may be only one answer: metadata. Providing users with information about
the content and the history of the accessible files, as clearly and completely
as possible, appears to be the best hope archives have for establishing
trust, regardless if they are non- or for-profit. Telling the user what
its holdings are, promising the user they will receive the materials as
presented, and then facilitating the user in realizing that promise (as
the Live Music Archive does in its step-by-step explanation of how to
download and play the files it provides access to), is the best, and perhaps
only, method of beginning to build a trusting relationship in a context
of delivering cultural material such as music. NOTES |