Ethics of capturing and
providin
digital materials stored
on digital media
Among the papers of the American painter Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986) and American photographer
Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) resides a collection of 187 photographs called the 'Waste Basket
Collection.' O'Keeffe, who was Stieglitz's second wife, rescued many of these photographs from the
trash. 'When Stieglitz was in a bad humor', she wrote, 'he tore up and threw away such piles of prints
that I began to think from what went into the waste basket I would make a collection for myself.'1
This collection now forms part of the Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O'Keeffe Archive at the Beinecke Rare
Book Manuscript Library at Yale University.
About
Gabriela Redwine
Although O'Keeffe pulled photographs from the trash with
Stieglitz's knowledge, she chose to impose restrictions on their
use at the Beinecke. The finding aid warns that because Stieglitz
'did not intend these particular prints to have an audience
beyond O'Keeffe, [they] may never be exhibited or reproduced
according to a restriction set by O'Keeffe'.2 The language of this
restriction emphasizes Stieglitz's intentionality - he did not
intend anyone besides O'Keeffe to see the photographs - with
direct implications for researchers, curators, and members of the
public.
Stieglitz died in 1946, well before the digital age, but his discarded
photos and their second life as a collection curated by O'Keeffe
underscore ethical questions that are relevant in today's
landscape of digital archives. If a photographer discards a print,
should it stay in the waste basket? Thinking in terms of
born-digital archival materials, if an author deletes a Word
document or moves it to the Recycle Bin on his laptop, is it
ethical for an archival repository to restore the deleted
document and allow researchers access to it in the reading
room, or for a curator to include it in an exhibition? The answer
to questions like this may govern a repository's approach to
capturing, preserving, and providing access to born-digital
materials.
By born digital I mean material that originates in a digital
format. Common examples include Word documents, digital
photographs, digital audiovisual files, email, and websites.
At the moment, born-digital materials typically arrive at
Gabriela Redwine is digital archivist at
the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript
Library, Yale University (New Haven,
Connecticut) where she is responsible for
developing a distributed model of service
for born-digital materials. Previously she
worked at the Harry Ransom Center (Austin, Texas) as an
electronic records/metadata specialist. She co-authored
both Born Digital: Guidance for Donors, Dealers, and
Archival Repositories (2013) and Digital Forensics and
Born-Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Collections (2010).
Both publications are downloadable from the website of the
Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR).
During the Summer School of the Book 2014, organized
by the Special Collections of the University of Amsterdam,
Redwine gave an eye-opening workshop on the many
challenges of working with born-digital materials that arrive
with acquisitions in special collections. Convinced of the
urgency to improve our awareness of the ethical considerations
to be made when working with born-digital materials in
archives and collections and the need to develop a shared
policy on making these materials accessible, the Archievenblad
invited Gabriela Redwine to elaborate on the ethics of
capturing and providing access to born-digital materials.
22 2015 nummer 3
