Interview Date: March 4, 2010
Denver, Colorado

Howard Besser

Summary:

The first lesson Besser learned was that the most important things one should not take on alone and that things are best done in groups. Second is that you need a short range plan to fit into a long range vision. Having a vision of the future while you’re doing a project lends itself to allowing the project to be a part of a networked world of information. Besser sees the world at a level where digital preservation is still a challenge. A lot of people have made a great amount of progress in the last 8 years. The Library of Congress has spent tens of millions of dollars funding really good prototype projects in different domains. Besser was once on a committee that issued a report saying “we’re in peril; we are going to lose our digital heritage.” So there has been a lot of progress, but there is a lot ahead that is still a real problem.

Digital preservation, intellectual property, and copyright are huge challenges. The biggest challenge in the field of copyright is orphaned works. The fact that so much content is in repositories is both an achievement and an issue. Copies of images are not allowed to be put up on the web unless the right’s holder is first asked, and the right’s holder is not always known. The copyright issue cannot be solved by throwing more technology or money into it. This is something that is solved in a bigger context…by Congress or public opinion.

The field of cultural heritage has historically looked at the cream of the crop, the high quality material, and things that make their way into museums or libraries. That material is not very representative of real human activity; rather, it represents the power of high art and the highly respected sectors. The material is not representative of the average person. One of the things that many people have been advocating since the early 1990’s is looking at ephemeral material…the kind of material that is produced by ordinary, everyday people and is result of their daily activities. There is a huge number of people who put a focus on this kind of material, the “do-it-yourself” kind of material like what is on YouTube. This has become the material of today: what people are topically thinking about, dealing with, and what is on their minds. It is like having a microphone in on the water cooler at work, allowing anyone to listen in on discussions and see in to anyone’s mind .