Digital Preservation of Artifacts on the Internet

This week’s blog topic is on digital preservation, how and what degree you need to document research for others to understand and/or reference your work accurately. Especially because my research proposal (examining various YouTube stakeholders’ understanding of copyright) requires collecting digitized primary sources, this week’s topic is quite important to writing the proposal. Often times copyrighted materials get dealt with automatically through algorithms, user created content (UCC) or uploaded content ‘disappear’ in terms of becoming inaccessible by ‘end users’ of YouTube (that is, the consumers/audience who do not have the video or alternative access to it such as a copy of it). This can make it difficult for (future) readers of my research who may not understand the topic and want to see firsthand what primary sources/artifacts I was examining. A way to mitigate this limitation is either to make sure to describe artifacts in enough detail in the research paper (illustrating for audiences), or download a copy of primary sources and perhaps attach it to the appendix. The last is quite impractical, as storing and preserving can be difficult and access rights would have to be defined. Above all, (un-ironically?) copyrights and permissions should be requested if I plan on inserting original parts of observed data (i.e. artifacts) into an appendix or other parts of the published paper. Ultimately anonymity of data and subjects (ethics) would be a central issue, particularly as I am considering potential/actual cases of copyright infringement. These are only a part of the sum of considerations I would have to make, concerning digital preservation (e.g. as some of my colleagues had similarly mentioned in concern to preserving and ensuring access to the research paper itself or of my own notes on the research progress, such as these blog posts?).

Lilian Le-Dang