Guiding Questions for Collecting Institutions

Content provided for use in AVAnnotate projects will inherently be ‘annotated’, and those materials may be ‘contextualized’ in new ways by AVAnnotate users. As a result, institutions should consider:

• Copyright and legal constraints with the materials for potential sharing beyond the project itself and within the project.
• Ethical considerations of how the project author may frame and present the material.
• Digital security - is the material protected from unauthorized copying and reuse.

The institution should determine whether to provide broad access to materials, limited access, or access by permission only.

• What is the return on investment for providing segment-level metadata through media annotation? Does creating annotations add value to the collection in terms of increased accessibility and community engagement or advancing teaching and research?
• Would the annotation of collection materials put subjects at risk or cause harm? Was informed consent provided? Does the project and annotations align with any trusts or agreements with the owner of the material?
• How are lines of contact created between communities and public collections? How are community/public contributions to annotation projects considered if the community member is in the primary source? How are resources about community engaged projects, informed consent, qualitative research ethics, etc. made available? What kind of support can the institution provide for users who wish to use AVAnnotate? Will the institution provide modeling, make decision-making transparent, explicate mindful/responsible uses of the tool?
• How will the library/institution engage with the project? Will the project feed back into the library/institution DAMS? Will it serve to represent the institution or will it function as a “one off” project and the sole responsibility of the creator?