Clearing a Path for a Virtual Reading Room Program

Clearing a Path for a Virtual Reading Room Program Sara Fuchs & Katherine Fisher Emory University Lindsey Memory Brigham Young University My name is Sara Fuchs, and I am a visiting librarian at the Stuart A. Rose Manuscripts, Archives, & Rare Book Library at Emory University – I was hired as a two-year project manager for a Mellon planning grant on virtual reading rooms. I’m joined by Katherine Fisher, Head of Digital Archives at the Rose, and PI on this grant, and also Lyndsey Memory, the Head of Digital Initiatives at Brigham Young University. The QR code that you see on this first slide takes you to the shared notes section that was set up by the conference organizers. I’ve added a link to our conference presentation and some resources about virtual reading rooms. Feel free to add your own thoughts and notes in here as well. Do not edit How to change the design Join at slido.com #3158168 Presenting with animations, GIFs or speaker notes? Enable our Chrome extension 📣 This is Slido interaction slide, please don't delete it. ✅ Click on 'Present with Slido' and the joining instructions will appear when you get to this slide. In an effort to make this more interactive, we’ll be doing live polling using Slido. You can log in using the QR code on your phone or by going to the website - slido.com - inputting this code - 3158168. The first screen you see on your device will be the Q&A slide. You’re welcome to submit questions there at any point in the presentation – they’ll be displayed on a screen at the end, and we can answer them then. There is a separate tab for polling questions – those will pop up automatically on your device when we reach them in the presentation. What Is a Virtual Reading Room? So we’re here to talk about virtual reading rooms, and our experiences implementing them, and what we’ve learned along the way, but we wanted to start out by talking about what we mean by a virtual reading room, but also what others mean, and what others are doing in this space. Emory Working Definition “A virtual reading room (VRR) is a mechanism to provide access to digital archival materials that are protected by copyright and that we do not have permission to display on an open, public website. The goal is to reproduce the experience of a physical reading room with one basic difference: removing the geographical limitations. Emory's virtual reading room for mediated remote access to collections is intended to protect creators’ intellectual property and respect their desires while democratizing access and more seamlessly enabling use of archives split between Emory and other institutions or separated from their communities of origin.” We all work in special collections libraries and archives, so we have a physical reading room, where people make an appointment, request materials, put all their belongings in a locker, and follow all the rules required ahead of time to look at rare books and archival materials. At Emory, we wanted to know - can we create a virtual space that replicates some of these restrictions, allowing us to share copyright-restricted material with a greater audience? Can you view some of this material without traveling to Atlanta, Georgia? So this is our working definition at the moment – we want to provide mediated access to copyrighted material that we don’t have permission to display on an open, public website. We want to protect creators’ intellectual property and respect their desires but also enable use of archives that are separated from their communities of origin. And mediated is the key word here – how do we mediate this access? BYU Working Definition “To us, a virtual reading room will be a DAMS through which we facilitate access to archival & AV materials that cannot be displayed on the open web, either for privacy, embargo, or copyright reasons. Our VRR will have a geographic limitation to our campus footprint. Its use will be initiated through a request process similar to making an in-person reading room appointment.” At BYU – they're also working on providing greater access to digitized files. For them, the restriction is also geographic – the digitized files can be viewed while on campus. Lindsey will go into more detail later on in the presentation. Online Access Restrictions But really what we’re talking about is access plus restrictions. And what differentiates us is the way that we’re providing restriction. The Virtual Reading Room (VRR) at the University of Manchester Library University of London University of Edinburgh The Huntington Library National Library of Scotland University of Melbourne University of Manchester Leeds University Mediated virtual reference with a camera First, many institutions use the phrase “virtual reading room” to mean a service, that became popular during Covid, where a mounted camera is used to show collection materials. A staff member turns the pages, the researcher watches over Zoom, and they’re able to view a collection remotely. Research Library UK created a toolkit on how to implement these VRR services and wrote a very thorough report on how they’re being used. Some institutions continued offering these services once the reading rooms opened up, as it was a low-cost way to provide greater access. But it’s basically another service point – you make an appointment, request material, and then someone goes through the boxes with you. Some places have restrictions on how many appointments you can make, or how many boxes they’ll go through. Some places allow you to record the Zoom session, so they can pause and look more closely at the material on their own time. Some researchers liked it because they could get a better sense of what was in a collection before a research visit, therefore maximizing their time when they were there. They also liked consulting with someone who was knowledgeable about that collection during the viewing session. For smaller institutions without the resources to digitize material or the infrastructure to store or provide access to them, this was an easier way to make their collections more broadly available. Desktop Virtualization ●Utilizes existing campus service ●Sponsored account is created ●Requested material is manually loaded ●Access is given for 30 days At the Special Collections Center at North Carolina State University, they utilized an existing campus service – desktop virtualization – to provide temporary online access to digitized material. The material is manually loaded into the system, a sponsored user account is created, and users have 30 days to look at the material. Aeon Photoduplication Feature ●Restricted digital items are in Calisphere ●Request item through Aeon ●Item delivered through email At UC Irvine, they are using the photoduplication feature in Aeon to request digital items located in Calisphere – from Calisphere, the repository for University of California libraries - you’re directed to create or log into your Special Collections Aeon account, and the item is delivered by email. It’s again, a manual process – the request needs to be approved by a staff member before it’s sent out. Emory University: Current Access Options ●Reading room ●Reprographic services ●Digital collections site with public and Emory-only tiers ●Aviary with public, Emory-only, and request-only tiers By way of background, we have several options for people who want to view our collections: Researchers can visit in person. They can request copies (which might prompt digitization on demand or delivery of existing digital surrogates or born-digital files). Or they can use one of our existing digital access systems for some digital content, although these are confusingly fragmented for users and have varying levels of remote access. Some systems are accessible in the reading room only: Most audiovisual material is in a homegrown Fedora preservation repository with an access layer. We distributed temporary credentials for remote use during the COVID-19 pandemic but then had to stop. Most other born-digital material is in LIBSAFE Go; we aren’t using the official end-user interface, but we use a workaround for access in the reading room. For broader access, we have a Samvera-based repository that is intended mostly for public content but does have some material behind an Emory login or accessible in reading room using dedicated terminals. We use Aviary for select AV; these items are either public or mediated, requiring the user to create an account, submit a request, and receive staff approval. (This is currently our closest thing to a VRR under Emory’s preferred definition.) Emory University: Problems We’re Trying to Solve ●Barriers to in-person research visits ●Split or displaced collections ●Limited content available offsite ●Limited functionality for mediated remote access ●Legal and technology considerations drive decisions So our infrastructure isn’t bad, and we have several options for presenting material online. What’s the problem, then? Lots of people can’t visit our reading room (for reasons ranging from finances to geography to disability to schedules). We also have collections that are split between us and other institutions or that are removed from communities of origin. We wanted to reduce the impact of these barriers by making much more content available remotely, but not everything can be fully public for legal or other reasons and there’s no mechanism in our primary systems for mediated access for non-Emory users. We had the opportunity to apply for a Mellon grant focused on expanding access to our Irish poetry collections for researchers in Ireland (and elsewhere, but that was the initial inspiration). One goal was to design a service that isn’t just built around technical constraints and legal risks–which have been the driving factors for us in the past–but also accounts for user needs and experience, staffing considerations, org readiness, ethical commitments, sustainability, etc. We wireframed lots of options as lightweight prototypes; conducted focus groups with end users, staff, and other stakeholders; and got lots of great ideas about what people want from a VRR and how it could work. Emory University: Our Plans ●Someday: ○Individual accounts and authentication with non-Emory identities? ○VRR dashboard to manage entire research experience? ○Shared discovery environments and side-by-side display? ●For now: partner-site access using IP addresses ○Cons: geographically bound, limited collections, limited content types, product support, burden on technical services and digital archives staff ○Pros: more access, relatively simple to implement, extensible, rightsholder protection, reduced burden on public services staff We came out of that process with several ideas that we’d like to implement someday, but they are beyond the scope of the project and outside our current capacity. In the meantime, we settled on piloting a more modest interim solution to show how a VRR built on our current infrastructure might work and then assess usage levels. We plan to create a new access control in our Samvera repository that will allow access to select objects from kiosks or workstations in partner organizations’ reading rooms based on their IP addresses. The major downside of this approach: access is still geographically bound. It also requires lots of digitization, the system can’t support all content types, and the solution requires a new IT support model and OLA for external audiences. On the plus side: It increases access to key constituency for subset of collections and helps build new partnerships. It’s an enhancement or extension of existing infrastructure, so it requires minimal new development work. It can easily be duplicated for other collecting areas and partner sites, it’s aligned with rightsholders’ wishes and risk tolerance, and it has limited impact on public services staff at the host and access sites. IP-Based Access Rose Reading Room Atlanta, GA USA NLI Reading Room Dublin, Ireland To test this method, we’re starting with our Seamus Heaney papers. This is a great example of a split collection–we have his correspondence, the National Library of Ireland has his manuscripts, and Queen’s University Belfast, has his student notebooks. With the permission of the Heaney estate, we’ve digitized a portion of the work that we hold and are using that work, along with some related collections, to pilot this IP-based access. So how this would work is that if you are researching Heaney’s work in Ireland, you can go to the reading room at the National Library of Ireland, where you would have to follow all of the rules that they have, and view these digitized facsimiles there. Now we understand that this still isn’t widespread access. However, Emory’s a risk averse institution. And estates have valid concerns about making their work publicly available. This is one solution that we can easily pilot, with the hopes of providing greater access in the future. We want to provide the appropriate guardrails, so that all the stakeholders–Emory, the Heaney estate, NLI–are comfortable with what we’re doing. Brigham Young University: Current Access Options ●Reprographic services ●Repositories with public-only tiers ●Reading room with kiosk connected to Box storage managed by Digital Initiatives & Reference; contents reformatted upon request BYU has had many of the basic digital access pieces in place for years: from a digitization lab providing reprographic services to a DAMs primarily housing digitized content, with the occasional one-off, licensed born-digital item shoehorned in. We recently added AV digitization services, and the curator who initially developed it had nowhere to stash the files except in Box cloud storage, which I guess you can consider our first VRR. I took over management of the digital initiatives department and digital access five years ago, and I was primed (through DLF and MLS) to understand that different access solutions will probably be requested of me during my career. I inherited technical debt elsewhere in my infrastructure and so I sought to be intentional with my systems and program decisions to prepare for virtual access. All this to say, I’m not in the same place as Emory but I’m here to talk about what can be done in the interim: how to lay the foundation while there is no mandate. First stop is with your institution’s legal counsel. BYU: Clearing the Legal Path -Historically risk-averse wrt digitization and digital access - Tolerance for digital access w/o license for items ~20 years from copyright expiration, per section 108h - Recent AV digitization resulted in geographically-limited digital access being justified through TEACH Act -No approval to explore remote access with user authentication/agreement BYU’s Office of General Counsel and Copyright office are historically risk averse, but I cultivated relationships with them. I sought to understand their risk tolerance and concerns. I came to conversations very conversant in the case law and relevant statutes that apply to libraries and digital access. Because of this, I’ve made inroads advocating for access expansion. - Thanks to IA’s white paper, OGC accepted 108h as rationale for digitizing orphan items in their last 20 years of copyright and they built me a due diligence checklist to fill out per item. - The recent creation of a large cache of copyrighted AV materials lead to more overt requests to solve restricted digital access: I started asking OGC what can I do here? Yes to library streaming with 108, and I brought in the TEACH act to expand to campus footprint with provisos. I got a solid no to remote access, I have since learned what their worst nightmare scenarios with privacy are so I can work around them. I’ll talk about future copyright advocacy plans later in the presentation. In addition to laying the groundwork by obtaining legal “permission” to provide virtual access, as I predicted, those restricted access requests have started to come in from my stakeholders. This leads to my next area of groundwork-laying: strategic prioritization [click] BYU: Priority Shifts - Recent exploration of more digital collecting due to space crunch - Trickier programmatic digitization desired, which benefits from more mature restricted access options: - AV digitization - “Digitize-and-return” post-custodial collecting - “Digitize-and-withdraw” process sought for extant collections - Admin support for digital lifecycle gap analysis Over the past five years, both digitization and digital collecting have received increased strategic administrative prioritization due to a space crunch and from faculty’s expectation of digital access. This has further accelerated due to requests for trickier programmatic digitization, like [read from slide] which benefits from mature restricted access options I spent a lot of time contemplating the question: “Given that everyone is so busy BUT Admin want me to provide access solutions soon, what foundational workflow issues do I need to solve to achieve a minimum viable product that will have room to grow? What will I need from everyone else?”I headed a three-year project using the digital lifecycle to find gaps in our digital systems, staffing, and workflows. I spent a long time seeking to understand my surrounding units’ dreams, fears, roadblocks, and knowledge gaps regarding work in the digital lifecycle. I accepted at face value to notion that, while I am in charge of digital access, I HAVE to inculcate a baseline level of competence and buyin from curators, archival processors, IT, and other stakeholders. Here’s some of the areas I’ve been drawing people’s attention to: BYU: Clearing the Path In Place: ●DAMS and DP systems extant ●Plenty of content ●Incoming Digital Archivist and Digital Processing Archivist Nailing Down: ●No integration between the two systems/ArchivesSpace ●Content stashed in cloud storage, but no appraisal, structure, identifiers, or connection to Finding Aids ●No BD archival workflows, no consensus Mercifully I want to acknowledge that I have privilege regarding the staffing size for digital: because of my gap analysis we justified the creation of No consensus on myriad issues BUT they mostly speak the same language now, which is great. So [click] BYU: Workflows to Nail Down ●Pre-Access Acquisition: how to appraise using what metrics (yay Brunhilde report creating initial intellectual control!) ●Archival Arrangement: what levels would facilitate access/easy browsing, how to represent that in systems (Yay ARKs for DO’s in ArchivesSpace) ●User Journey: where will patrons submit requests; when/ how to do a PII review; how to geographically limit DAMS For the next two years, this is what I’ll be ruminating on. These will be familiar to anyone working in the born-digital access … - Archival arrangement: easy access includes things like dividing correspondence into a series from and a series to, so I can digitize all the “from” stuff I’ll have a license for. We just recently (knock on wood) figured out how to flexibly apply ARKs in ways that will correspond to digital objects in AS So that’s a little about my work clearing the path, let’s talk about the still extant barriers to implementation: Barriers to Implementation We want to identify some of the major barriers to implementing VRR solutions. We’ll ask first about yours, and then we’ll share some of our main shared barriers and what we’re doing to address them. Resource Acquisition I. Resource acquisition - 5 minutes A. Emory 1. Need buy-in and staff capacity for creating the service and for ongoing training and support. We’re just one library at Emory, and we share staff and budgets for software development and digitization. 2. We’ve encountered some pushback from colleagues who question whether a VRR service is necessary. And some of that hesitation is understandable, given the limited reach of our current plan. We’ve talked a lot about whether to continue digitizing material for a VRR with limited access or instead to focus on either digitizing things that can be fully public or even processing more collections for baseline RR access. Are we better stewards of our collections and our budgets if we try to maximize the number of people who can access stuff or the number of things that can be accessed? 3. Similarly, we’re still trying to gauge whether it’s worth directing a lot of resources toward a partial solution instead of pushing for something more ambitious. We have more info than ever before about user needs and expectations, but if we can’t fund and staff what they ideally want, is there enough 1. interest to justify a middle-ground option? B. BYU 1. I feel good stewardship of our resources includes efforts to build a future proof system and workflows that cover the basics, so we aren’t starting from 15 years behind as priorities change. So, I consider some of my biggest battles ahead will still be asking of other people’s time and attention. I mentioned the assignments I’d like curators and processors to have, but my biggest resource need is more collective prioritization for training and adapting new workflows. We assume that these are questions and considerations on your minds as well and we are curious to continue to share ideas and concerns, so let’s go to the Q&A section of Slido Do not edit How to change the design Audience Q&A Presenting with animations, GIFs or speaker notes? Enable our Chrome extension 📣 This is Slido interaction slide, please don't delete it. ✅ Click on 'Present with Slido' and the questions from your audience will appear when you get to this slide. Wrap Up Sara I. Wrap up (5 minutes) A. Share resources? Handout or slide with useful publications, preview of Emory toolkit/report, etc. B. Request ideas for next steps: VRR research agenda, community-supported tool development, statement of best practices, shared policy framework, etc. Continue the Conversation Join the listserv! Register for the kickoff meeting! 12/16 2 pm EST [email protected] katherine.e.fi[email protected] [email protected] Join us for dinner tonight! Meet in Westin lobby 5:55 PM Sara