Vanishing Culture: An Article Worth Reading

Michael Menna and Lila Bailey have published an article in The Political Librarian worth a (free!) download and read. Here are some passages to give you a taste:

We are living through a troubling paradox: Digital technologies have enabled the production and distribution of more information than ever, yet access to that information is increasingly fragmented and fragile.

If copyright, privacy, and other regulatory frameworks were designed to balance the interests of creators and users with the public’s need to access and contribute to the wealth of human knowledge, then our increasingly digital information economy has thrown that balance out of whack.

In this new media environment, publishers and other content providers have unprecedented power to control knowledge and culture with technical restrictions and exclusionary licensing terms. Governments also have an easier time censoring what people can see by scrubbing their websites and pressuring commercial platforms to do the same. . . . [F]or libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural heritage organizations (“memory institutions”), it poses an existential risk to their core public service mission of preserving culture and protecting history. When these organizations can no longer collect and provide access to digital materials, members of the public cannot place their trust in a stable record—which affects their ability to confidently participate in democratic discourse.

As often noted by RF, the licensing economy—increasingly pushed by corporations from tractor manufacturers to motion picture studios—present serious challenges to libraries, economic as well as in preservation and sharing. Give the article a look: it is a worthwhile rad for anyone interested i library digital content.