The readings this week didn't require a written response on the blog, so I'll take a break from the digital history issues and take this time to talk briefly about some history making in the world of rock and roll.
Last Thursday night, May 12, Roger Waters was joined on stage by former Pink Floyd band mate David Gilmour. This is only the third time the two shared the stage in over thirty years. Summer 2010 saw the two unite for a small charity show.
After the intermission, during the widely loved song Comfortably Numb, Gilmour appeared above the wall to sing his pieces and play both mesmerizing and iconic guitar solos. This was the only song that Gilmour joined Waters and his band in the show, with the exception of the last song, Outside The Wall, in which all musicians who performed joined in front of the wall to accept the cheers of the crowd. All musicians who performed with one exception.
In attendance was the other remaining member of Pink Floyd, drummer, Nick Mason. Part way through the performance Mason was escorted backstage and later appeared during Outside The Wall with the the rest of the musicians.
This is the first reunion of the three members since their performance at Live 8 in 2005, which was the bands first reunion in well over twenty years. Since the death of keyboardist Richard Wright in 2008, any effort to reunite can only hope to be a one-off reunion at best.
Speaking of one-off reunions, just take a moment to search that topic regarding Pink Floyd. This latest gathering on the stage of The Wall in London can only serve to excite the Floyd fan and give hope that there may just be another show in the future.
Remember when they were young?
L-R: Wright, Gilmour, Mason, Waters
The issues of digital preservation and the Digital Dark Age are topics that we find addressed repeatedly in our readings this week. The Wikipedia entry for digital preservation provides a thorough description of the topic, highlighting many of the aspects of digital preservation as well as many of the practices used by people actively engaged in digital preservation. One specific area the article brings up is that the process of digital preservation is an ongoing process that changes and adjusts with the technological advancements. One of the problems with this, the article states, is that “Digital technology is developing quickly and retrieval and playback technologies can become obsolete in a matter of years.”
This issue is also addressed in the Science Daily article (from 2008). The rapid advances in software are leaving many files inaccessible, thus forever losing their content. Jerome McDonough adds to this idea that “If we can’t keep today’s information alive for future generations, we will lose a lot of our culture.” I find it rather interesting that the article is from 2008. If McDonough is raising these points then, how much more is it relevant now? Well, continuing on, the key to avoiding a digital dark age, according to McDonough, is to first decide which data is valuable, then make sure that data is available by migrating it to a format that is currently in use.
In terms of data that is valuable and worth migrating, the Polar Bear Expedition Digital Collections offers a great number of papers and photograph collections from the American intervention in Northern Russia at the end of WWI. Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan is responsible for archiving all of these documents. They did this because a large number of soldiers involved in the intervention were native to Michigan state. You are encouraged to take a look at the large number of documents contained in the digital collections.
Photograph from the Aldred S. Buckler photograph collection from the Polar Bear Expedition Digital Collections
Finally, The New York Times features a section on the job market in the field of digital archiving. Since digital preservation started picking up momentum and attention, the need for dedicated individuals to oversee these operations has increased proportionately. Victoria McCargar, preservation consultant and lecturer at U.C.L.A. and San Jose State University says “People with I.T. backgrounds tend to be wrong for the job. They tend to focus on storage solutions: ‘We’ll just throw another 10 terabytes on that server.’” That may be good news for many of us History majors, since we tend not to be the most tech savvy. For doing the active work of operating the storage facility, the pay expected can range from $70,000 to $100,000, while being a consultant can pay up to $150 per hour.
According to the U.S. Copyright Act of 1790, the term of copyright protection is set to fourteen years, so choose your release date wisely. The strong arm of the law is really flexing when we get into the plagiarizing penalties in Section two. For printing another author’s material without their consent results in your having to destroy all the printed material and a stiff “Fifty cents for every sheet which shall be found.” Section four tells the reader that a copy of every published work is to be delivered to the Secretary of State, and preserved. And Section six reminds the reader of the penalties assigned to publishing another author’s material without consent, if you do, you “Shall be liable to suffer and pay to the said author or proprietor all damages occasioned by such injury.”
Boy, 50 cents per sheet... Why'd he try to rip off Tolstoy's War and Peace?!
Along the same subject of copyrighting, Cohen and Rosenzweig discuss how digital historians can have a difficult time dealing with copyright laws of the various media they incorporate in their online productions. “Multimedia historians will probably spend a great deal more time fretting about legal issues than their text-based counterparts.” They’ll be consumed with finding copyright information about each item they use, whether it be text, image, audio, or video. If you do wish to copyright your works, it’s best to do it quickly, because “You can’t, in fact, sue anyone in federal court for violating your copyright unless you first register. You can, however, simply wait and register only if it becomes necessary. But if you wait, you can’t recover as much in a suit.” Yet Cohen and Rosenzweig suggest not bothering with registering your digital history site until the Copyright Office has simplified the registration process.
In the Historic Jazz Recordings reading, the copyright issue comes in when dealing with old recordings, as the reading specifies recordings from the “1930s until the end of World War II,” in which copyrights are often nowhere to be found on the remaining package. The common dilemma revolves around whether or not to use copyrighted work and hope that a copyright owner appears. “If the organization loses that gamble, the costs can be high.” That is exactly why museums and libraries and others do not use such orphan material. So what are music fans supposed to do? It’s not as though we’re working with words written on paper, this is music that was composed to be enjoyed by everyone. I can only imagine how happy any of these artists would be to know that we’re still constantly spinning their records a near century after their creation. In the case of orphan jazz or blues records, I would say that the copyright issue is simply a massive hinderance.
