Sensitive and Copyrighted Materials

I. Introduction

This guide is designed to help institutions that provide stewardship and access to AV collections navigate ethical and copyright considerations, particularly with respect to working with audio/visual (AV) materials using AVAnnotate.

II. Institutional Operations

A. AV Content Providers

  • Risk tolerance assessment: Assess if making AV material openly available for annotation presents risks to the AV subject, related communities, or the institution (including its staff). Determine the review process that would allow principles to be developed in relation to the particular situation of a collection.
  • Metadata granularity and ethical review: Review whether the institution has staff expertise to appropriately describe materials, if reparative description is employed where necessary, and if (for community-partner collecting activities) descriptive language is co-created. Determine if the metadata is sensitive and how and when it might be used.
  • Access levels and IIIF manifest fields: Ensure that item records have access and rights statements attached (e.g., rights, required statement). Institutions should use established rights statements and creative commons licenses. Create protocols for third-party use (e.g. AI bots) that include privacy/ethical concerns. For more information, please see Accessibility Considerations.

B. Development of Governance Documents and Consent

  • Co-creation of documentation: Where possible, invite partner community input for policies and procedures (including takedown policies), develop consent protocols that center the agency of the participant, and develop language for warnings or qualifiers in collaboration with relevant stakeholders.
  • Make ethical decisions: Whenever possible, ground decision-making in professional ethics first and consider how legal requirements might affect that approach.
  • Disambiguate institutional practice: Ensure that collecting partners understand institutional capacity and limitations, policies around access and reuse, and options for levels of control and restrictions.

C. Community and Donor Engagement

  • Collaborate with community archives: Prioritize community archives control over institutional decision-making and use of their collections, i.e. setting sharing limitations or indicating that item-level annotations must be private vs public; bringing in communities’ usage of their own materials and intellectual property; clearly defining considerations, legal contracts for content and materials from communities to be protected in perpetuity; attaining informed consent and good faith agreements; establishing ethics of care and transparency agreements; committing to ongoing communication over the duration of the relationship.
  • Train on correct citational practices, digital application and access, fair use; responsibilities in using materials, when and where to use materials in terms of public implications (e.g. citing content but not necessarily being able to use it; subtleties of the relationships between user communities, law, etc.), and how faculty and staff relationships to the institution(s) they work within are spelled out in bylaws, handbooks, etc.
  • Create transparent donor agreements: Ensure that donors understand the potential for future unforeseen use of the donated materials. Develop agreements that make rights considerations and financial implications explicit.

D. Practical Implementation

  • Provide public-facing guidance regarding media, metadata, and transcript availability, restrictions, re-use terms, etc.
  • Develop permissions-release documentation and make the associated procedures visible to the public.
  • Assess public-facing metadata: Ensure that potential sensitive content, such as victim names or sovereign data, are not visible in open metadata.
  • Implement labor visibility and recognition procedures: ensure staff labor is visible to partners, develop compensation policies for volunteer archival description efforts.

E. Technical Implementation

  • Provision infrastructure assessment: How infrastructures and tools are configured impacts AV access. Providing access to IIIF-compliant media or direct links to media CORS (Cross-Origin Resource Sharing), for example, must be properly configured to allow media to be embedded and played via IIIF. Ensure transparent CORS settings and authentication systems.
  • Authentication Support: Increasing browser restrictions require updated protocols for secure access to content. Ensure that password protected AV assets can be brought into digital tools under the same protection.

III. Supporting Users

A. Communicate Digital Ethics in Broader Context

  • Develop and communicate terms of use to explicate ethical and copyright constraints
  • Note effective responsible research practices, particularly when content references groups of people or sensitive topics.
    • Reciprocal sharing with research populations
    • Shared documentation provides context and helps others find a path to doing the work.
    • Reduce decontextualization risk whenever possible.
  • Encourage users to retain collection notes associated with sensitive materials, particularly when presenting material in a classroom setting.
  • Encourage honoring the wishes of project contributors, including library and archive staff and student workers, to be credited or not for their work.

B. Communicate Copyright and Fair Use Information

  • Develop public-facing information regarding copyright and fair use of AV materials, including the importance of citation.
  • Develop public-facing information regarding user responsibilities and limitations of use.

C. Additional Considerations for Researchers and Educators

  • Documentation
  • Encourage the development of shared best practices: Documentation should clearly explain how and why decisions were made. While no documentation can be fully comprehensive, incomplete or in-progress documentation (that is identified as such) is better than no documentation.

IV. Developers

Purpose: Ensure software supports ethical use by providing transparent and configurable tools.

A. Technical Considerations

  • Read IIIF fields and allow configurable tags
  • Provide default warnings and prompts for ethical use
  • Ensure rights metadata is carried through to public-facing projects
  • Support “feedback loops” with functionality to contribute back to institutions
  • Enable export methods that ensure platform independence and long-term access (see Sustainability section)
  • Support authentication control parameters

B. Customization and Support

  • Enable scholars to license annotations
  • Explore options for tiered access (e.g., reading room only)
  • Support workflows for consent, permissions, takedowns
  • Support inclusion of warnings and usage statements via templates or other standardized language
  • Provide tools for transparency, especially regarding rights and restrictions
  • Promote community use cases and sustainable documentation practices. Model best practices.

V. Community Practices and Scaling Up

  • Build institutional and inter-institutional communities for support
  • Offer training and working groups (e.g., DHSI-style, Software Carpentry)
  • Promote and foster ethical culture via conferences, developer channels, and informal learning spaces

VI. Suggested Resources