 Hi everyone. This is exciting. We are here from the Modern Endangered Archives program. We presented at the spring 2020 CNI and kind of right in the middle of figuring out how we were going to respond to the pandemic. And we are here to kind of give an update a little bit on where we've been since then and expand a little bit beyond that. Thinking about the ways that the world has changed in the last two years and how we're going to respond to that kind of work. So I'm Rachel Devlinger. I'm the director of the Modern Endangered Archives program at the UCLA library. I'm very lucky that some of my colleagues are here with me today. Gloria Chacon who's an associate professor of literature from UC San Diego, Tad Gropon, the associate university librarian of digital initiatives and instructional technology. Information technology. Sorry. And unfortunately our colleague Sharon Farve can't be with us today but her thoughts are here represented and I'm sure you'll get an opportunity to hear from her about this program and other work we do soon. So as I mentioned we are going to talk a little bit about the updates in the last two years. Mostly trying to highlight some of the tensions and challenges that have come up and as I kind of introduce what our work does I'll help kind of point towards where those tensions and challenges are. But we're interested in thinking about geopolitics and the nature of how we preserve cultural heritage around the world. And then we want to end with some more of an open discussion and hopefully you can think with us around some of these challenges as well. So the Modern and Danger Archives program is a grant giving program from the UCLA library and we work to preserve global cultural heritage collections that are in at risk due to really a range of reasons. So it could be at risk because it was stored in unsafe places. It could be at risk because there's magnetic tape that's deteriorating. It could be at risk because an older generation thought it was important to preserve but a younger generation is about to throw it out on the streets. So there's really a wide range of at risk. But we are interested, especially today, in really thinking about that kind of at risk-ness because we're a program built to address risk and yet there were tons of things in the last two years that we weren't quite prepared for and so how we kind of strategize and dealt with those issues. It's important to note that the projects we fund are working to preserve cultural heritage materials from the 20th and 21st centuries so really a modern program which means we have all kinds of rights related issues that pop up and we'll come back to that as well. And then the other piece I want to note is that all of the material that gets digitized and preserved through MEAP funding must get published on an open access repository. So there's a really interesting tension and kind of working with material with modern materials that are still under copyright and also having a mandate to publish them on an open access repository. So we'll kind of talk to all of those points. So far we have funded three cohorts. We're in the process of reviewing applications for our fourth cohort now and you can see here the areas where we have ongoing projects. We've funded 62 projects so far in 32 countries. We fund only outside the US, UK and EU countries so you can kind of see that reflected on the map. Okay so what does MEAP do? We fund post-custodial collecting. So the materials must stay in country where they are. We largely fund projects directly with the communities that have preserved them either at archives or at grassroots organizations. We also sometimes fund projects that are led by researchers in the US or the UK or Western Europe and the work still happens outside of those locations. We also fund survey work so that kind of in a planning phase projects that either aren't ready yet to digitize or still need to do some work investigating rights, other kinds of planning phase projects. As I mentioned all of the material gets published on an open access platform so if you were to go to neap.library.ucla.edu right now you would see we just published over 10,000 or like just went over the 10,000 marker and we in the next few weeks will be publishing content from three new projects. So as we anticipated as projects start working again after their archives have reopened we're getting a ton of content in now so there will be more projects coming up online pretty soon. We focus on at-risk collections so we're kind of intentionally working in at-risk places and yet still we weren't quite ready for some risk that came up and we're really focused on providing at scale. So if you heard our last presentation neap is built off of some of the work the UCLA library had been doing in a project called the international digital ephemera program where the UCLA libraries went around the world and worked directly with community partners to help them establish a digitization workflow. That kind of one-to-one relationship worked really well but it was really hard to scale up so neap is kind of working with a different model trying to fund 20 to 30 projects per gram cycle. Okay so we are working to act ethically to some extent that means providing guidelines and frameworks that work across our projects like funding the labor that happens on the ground, ensuring that training and other kinds of capacity building work is being funded and can perpetuate a culture of digitization and preservation after the neap program is over. But that also means that sometimes we're working in ways that aren't systemic across all projects and we're really trying to meet the needs and priorities of each project as they come up. One of the kinds of tensions we have around working on a global scale and trying to maintain this ethic of care is when and how to work in a multilingual way. So one of the requirements that comes from our funder is that neap metadata must be collected and presented in English. On the one hand I think that helps our projects all present their material in ways that cross regional boundaries so we can help collections and project teams connect human rights organizations in Latin America with human rights organizations in Malaysia and in Africa and we can help users find primary source material around certain themes across these different regional areas. The flip side is that the time and labor involved in translating means that other things aren't getting done. So maybe there's a regional or a local language that isn't being represented because the team is focused and paying a translator to work in a multilingual way. It also kind of raises questions for us about how many languages we provide our documentation in, how much we invest in translation and which languages we translate into. I'll show you in one second some of the documentation we've created and kind of how that question plays out in reality. The other kinds of questions we think about in terms of acting ethically have to do with rights. As we'll come up in a little bit we have found that copyright is less of an issue than other kinds of rights that we thought we would kind of take on our communities and the projects are, we empower them to find the right copyright owner and have them sign and many times they are willing to do that. But whose voice is really being preserved when material gets documented and preserved? Are our project teams working with the communities that they need to work with to ensure that enough information is being captured at the right time? All kinds of other kind of ethical challenges. Who gets to decide which images are okay for open access? How far should our project teams go to capture those permissions? All those kinds of questions come up in our conversations. Okay, we're also again a program designed to work at risk. But there's a whole range of what these risks and challenges mean. So we navigate the power and resource imbalances with our partners, political instability around the world, cyber technology, a lot of the things we just heard about in the last session, staffing limitations. We get complaints fairly regularly from our project teams that they hire, they train and then what do they do next? They can't keep the staff on beyond the terms of the grant. And climate change. So this is a really big question we have when projects, when we get applications from an area where there's an increase in hurricanes or fires, should we evaluate those applications with being imminently at risk? Is that urgency right now, even if those materials are in well preserved climate controlled areas? Because we know climate change has changed the patterns. So we're kind of continuing to think about all these issues. Okay, so I'm going to pick it up a little bit because I want to get to the examples that we have to share. But our COVID-19 response has really been led by our funder actually and their commitment to an ethic of care and ensuring that the people that are working on an MEP project are not putting themselves at risk in doing so. So we've been offering a lot of no cost extensions and really just keeping projects going and open as long as the project needs until they feel comfortable working again. We offer small top ups. So if a project team has found that the equipment is suddenly much more expensive, which is happening all around the world, we might be able to give them a little bit more money to meet the difference. If they need to keep the staff on a couple months longer and a small top up would make that difference. We've been able to do that as well. We work with project teams to change their plan for their workstation so that they can find local equipment instead of having to import. We send a lot of formal letters advising governments around the world that they should accept foreign funds because we're not bad and all kinds of negotiations between the UCLA contracts office and local contract offices. One of the ways that we've also responded to the pandemic and the current moment is to create additional documentation for project teams. MEP has always allowed funding to go towards training, but many of the plans that our teams had in place were to bring in a trainer from somewhere else and they were not able to do that. So we've created documentation, particularly around AV digitization and metadata creation to help our project teams meet the need for their teams. So what does that look like? So here's an infographic we created helping our project teams really hard to see, but the main goal of this is to help our project teams understand why we're asking them to do so much work on a metadata template and what happens to those categories when they get put online. So if you're from the library environment you're thinking we already know what metadata is and we know what happens to it. Most of the people we fund are either researchers helping coordinate with the library team or the archivist or volunteers or members of an organization who've been collecting materials for a very long time but they've never created professional metadata. They don't know what a subject heading is, they don't know why it matters, they don't know why they might be asked to put their data in a certain format. So we've been trying a number of ways to kind of help people understand why that work is really essential at the front end of a project. We've also created a lot of kind of interactive work flow, interactive opportunities for people to think about different categories of metadata, different project teams kind of get stumble upon different categories and so we've created some interactive materials and so this is one of the ones that we've talked a lot about how do we translate this? We want everybody to really understand what we mean by date or what we mean by place, but how many languages do we translate it into? Do we kind of think about the like five global business languages? That's not really going to help the grassroots organization in Peru that's trying to preserve their human rights organization materials. So anyhow, we kind of think a lot about how we translate, how we invest in translation and then how we sustain the materials if we're going to continue to make changes to all the materials as we see how they're used. So right now we're waiting until the material we see how it's used and then we're going to figure out the translation but if anyone has thoughts on translation I'd love to hear more. Okay so a couple of case studies and these case studies that I'm going to offer are really focused on thinking about the preservation side and the kind of competing priorities and tensions that pop up at sites of global global crises or hotspots and when I turn things over to Gloria she's going to talk a bit more about the access side but they connect. Okay so we have a project team in Lebanon in Beirut and we got an email from them the day after the explosion that happened at the port that their site had been damaged and they weren't sure how much of the material was damaged or not. It turned out that their archive was damaged but the material itself wasn't damaged but at the same time what was happening in Lebanon and maybe you're all aware of this is that the government has been rationing energy for the last five years and it's kind of grown and grown and grown. We first funded the project of Lebanon they were like no it's okay we have a good relationship we're going to keep our our air conditioning going so all of our archives will be safe um they had enough energy that they needed and slowly over the last two years they just haven't had enough energy to be able to a keep the climate control going and then be digitized and store all of the material that they were digitizing so the organization the Arab Image Foundation decided that they were going to create their own solar panel so that they could kind of work outside the government energy and they asked us if we could help contribute to that it's really outside the scope of any AP funding but we were able to use this kind of small top-up space and contribute a thousand dollars to their larger project that they found additional funding for so here at the bottom you can see their team kind of setting up the solar and they've been able to continue digitizing throughout and now they've just switched on this solar program so that they don't have to rely as much on government energy. Okay um we also have project in Haiti and a project in Sudan. The project in Haiti has had a number of kind of stumbling blocks along the way staff changes at the host institution staff changes locally um hurricane which luckily did not hit this particular spot and so the materials are okay um and we've been able to support them just by granting them a series of no-cost extensions and working with them in a much more hands-on way to help kind of refine the project refine the scope um helping them kind of pair back their initial estimates of how much they would be able to digitize um and then we have a project in Sudan we got an email from the project leader saying uh you might not be aware of this but there's a violent coup going on in Sudan and we'd like our project team on the ground to not go out and do the field work that they've been doing for the last year um can you help us pay them while they stay at home until this passes and so again we were able to use these top-up funds which were designed to really meet the need of the pandemic but have actually helped us meet all of these other kinds of needs for our project team so that the staff could stay committed to the project and be able to finish up hopefully in two months I think it was optimistic but hopefully they'll be safe in two months to go out and finish um the field work that they've been doing okay we also have a project that we funded in our first year of funding this is in 2020 at Kabul University in in Afghanistan this is one of the projects that was first to start digitization they were they'd already been doing some digitization before they got funding from us so they were able to really quickly start the work these are all images from the first few batches that they sent us throughout the pandemic their archive never closed so even though their hours were reduced they were able to keep working throughout 2020 throughout 2021 and in August 2021 they had sent us not only their third batch of materials so we had published about 29,000 objects from the Dupre collection it was an American archaeologist and his wife who had lived in in Afghanistan for many years they had taken not only some of these they'd taken images photographs of some painting but they'd also taken a lot of landscape images from the pre-Taliban 1950s and 60s and that was kind of the most important part of the collection that the the team wanted to preserve for the landscape and and the kind of way that Afghanistan looked before the initial Taliban takeover and we had received a progress report from them August 30th which was the day the Taliban hit came into to Kabul and it was clear that the team didn't was not expecting that and they sent us like their report and we're like we'll follow up tomorrow with their additional information and so we helped them as best we could so over the next few months we followed the example of the Smithsonian and took down all of the content that they had sent us so we had 2900 images up we took them all down we kept in touch with all of the project leads and tried to work with UCLA to help get them out didn't quite work out but we tried our best and in the months since we have stayed in touch with the three project leads one of whom is now in Germany one of whom is now in the United States actually two of them are in the United States the two that we've been most directly in contact with one is in Pittsburgh one is in Germany and they have given us their permission to put the collection back up online so the collection is back up online our team and our board have been working to help support them as best we could we've been sending materials for their their kids the project lead in Pittsburgh is now settled with visa and um is in graduate school at University of Pittsburgh I don't know if anyone here's from Pittsburgh um our project lead in Germany is still looking for employment so if anyone needs a linguist in Germany we have a good one um but we have also been trying to get the project back up and running because they were almost done they told us they had finished digitizing all the material they just hadn't finished creating all the metadata yet and so we were working with UCLA to transfer the project funding to the project lead in Germany who would finish that metadata and as we were getting that started cobbled university reopened and the american center at cobbled university reopened and they wanted to take on and finish the project so we just this week last week um signed the amendment to continue working on the project with the team that remains in cobble so it's really interesting kind of ethical conversations of the people that we were trying to help make sure they were safe um we're actually not able to financially support them in their continued effort and we're working with cobble because that's where our institutional relationship is and they still have the material so um within the next month I anticipate that we'll have the full collection up hopefully we'll see how it goes um and then the last kind of example I wanted to raise is kind of an ongoing conversation just this past year our third cohort we funded a project to digitize um audio recordings of indigenous voices from Siberia from the Pushkin house in St. Petersburg and the project was set to launch late last month um it was hosted at the University of Aberdeen and we had a kickoff call planned for a week after the invasion of Russia into Ukraine when um each day there was a new set of sanctions that had come up and we had the call with the team and they said well everyone here at Aberdeen is still willing to pay the project team in St. Petersburg I was like oh I don't know let's find out if UCLA is still willing to pay them UCLA was also still willing to pay to St. Petersburg but our donor asked us not to go forward with the project not to cancel it but to pause it because we couldn't just understand what the long-term perspective for the project would be we didn't know if the team um would still be able to be paid if in a month from now we'll still be able to make those payments legally within all the sanctions and other kinds of structures so for the moment the project is paused the project lead totally understands and is using some of his personal research funds to start parts of the project that he thinks are most urgent but I think it's a really interesting case where there are these competing urgencies that you know preserving and making public the voices of indigenous communities in Russia seems like a really important ethical action at a moment where Russia is trying to minimize the voices of minorities within their national sphere so I think there's some really interesting questions that pop up when we're trying to figure out the best way to manage the program I'm going to turn things over to Gloria to talk about data colonialism and then I'm happy to answer any questions later good afternoon I don't know that my presentation is actually on data colonialism but it's really just kind of thinking more broadly about intellectual property rights and indigenous rights and so following on Rachel's wonderful discussion which is a hard act to follow I just wanted to take some time to highlight one of some of the reasons why the declaration on human rights was not enough when addressing the needs of indigenous peoples and the advocacy indigenous people communities made at the international level for the UN to issue a declaration on indigenous peoples in 2007 and second I want to spend some time addressing you know what is the implication of all of this for international intellectual property instruments such as WIPO which is the World Intellectual Property Organization I will also briefly just highlight some important legal cases that speak to some of the issues involving IP and indigenous communities and first I just wanted to point out that there is an inherent tension in the emphasis of indigenous collective collectivities within human rights and IP regimes while human rights are accorded to everyone indigenous rights are only for indigenous peoples as they have been impacted by colonialism in their own lands and have suffered language cultural spiritual biotech changes since European encounter according to professor Peter Kulczewski these rights should not be defined on the basis of the philosophical precepts of liberal enlightenment indigenous rights must be viewed differently because the rights are held only by members of specific communities oftentimes before the invention of nation states themselves sometimes this rights may interfere with other human rights in relationship to questions of gender children or even the environment although I will actually not get into detail around those issues because of time constraints but I can say that due to the emphasis of indigenous communities on collectivity and the fact that they are protected under groups uh under international instruments it does have repercussions for intellectual property perhaps the main takeaway is that questions that collectivities are intention with human rights should be resolved with indigenous communities in 1952 UNESCO initiated the universal copyright convention for countries that were not providing minimum copyright protection as established by the burning convention due to the organization's constitution of mainly highly industrialized western european countries the term of protection outlined for literary works and other art and other arts excluded indigenous tangible textual productions which for the most part were tagged as simply folklore in the 1970s in the mid 1980s waipo worked with UNESCO to provide guidelines for developing nations whose cultural practices were particularly vulnerable these guidelines offer some models for developing countries to protect tangible and intangible expressions indigenous peoples in particular have challenged the use of folklore to describe cultural resources because as we know folklore is not protected under IP these oppositions led waipo to change the name to from folklore to traditional knowledge or traditional cultural expressions or indigenous intellectual property all of which have been historically been excluded from IP protection the expansion of indigenous rights at the international level implicates intellectual property regimes as many legal cases involved violations of these international instruments in 1996 waipo included performers of traditional cultural expression expressions which have been previously been considered ineligible for IP protection since then a number of meetings have been held by waipo to address the specific needs of indigenous intellectual property as Yana Yaro Kibo adduces the main pressing issue in the realm of indigenous traditional knowledge is the lack of its protection waipo recognizes this problem offering workshops for indigenous communities the website links to UNESCO guidelines for the protection of folklore and the term is being as I said contested but it's still used not just in international instruments but also within nation states that also obviously have IP protection guidelines but the guidelines make explicit assertions that better legislation is needed to ensure that indigenous cultural resources are not commercialized without consent waipo convened an international an intergovernmental community on intellectual traditional knowledge to tackle this issue they state that they are currently working on negotiating international legal protection of traditional cultural expressions waipos intergovernmental committee on intellectual property and genetic resources traditional knowledge and folklore first met in 2001 so it hasn't been that long right in the working papers the committee knows that the main issue is whether or not additional IP style guidelines should be established over old and pre-existing materials currently regarded by IP as public domain and this is a really good example because for example in Mexico last year it was particularly vex because in Mexico's guidelines they say that anyone can access folklore as long as they don't alter it so that's in in their particularly laws article 157 and that became an issue because of the cultural appropriation of many textiles as you may be familiar or not at the international level which is not something that I'll get into but just wanted to underline that it's not just at the international level but I think in order to think the parameters of copyrights we must scrutinize this from a decolonial frame intellectual property law has conveniently and conventionally divided art versus craft ancestral temporality versus modern times collectivity as opposed to individually individualism and these differences are deeply reflected in the way that intellectual property regimes and indigenous people conceive community ancestors and knowledge. Professor Boateng accentuates in the copyright thing doesn't work here that an unfolding historical shift between art and craft and authorship in the 16th century detrimentally affects indigenous cultural products in ideological and material ways. She illustrates how intellectual property law owes its natural naturalized status partly to the process by which modernity spread around the world. Jennifer Gomez-Manhiva and I have pointed out in other works such as indigenous interfaces that modernity does not and did not give birth to technology hence crafts are also modern as they require specialized skill which is the art definition of the terms etymology. The prevailing ideological aesthetic and political process that divides culture protection production in these ways protecting only those that are legible under the definition of modernity read mainly western countries needs to be interrogated for its Eurocentric values. Indeed as Savina in her analysis of textiles adds artifacts previously consider exotic and not art first go through a system of fine art or bill arts associated with the educated leisure classes fine art becomes justified as a superior manifestation of human effort as opposed to crafts. The real problem in some ways is what we see is that perceiving people engaged in weaving a basket textile or other cultural productions it's not seeing the people who produce them as authors that can be protected under IP. And this is obviously important for material reasons as well. One of the most important additions to intellectual property law is that nation states can introduce sweet generous laws to protect indigenous cultural productions. They can be passed at national levels with only a missive to waipo and they will alert all state members but this information is hardly something that indigenous communities have access to. They indigenous communities who seek protection of traditional knowledge don't necessarily use the same language to talk about the regimen of IP which is another issue. We think that it would be optimum for indigenous communities to be able to claim copyrights as authors even when dealing with things like textiles because according to them this is easier translatable even with the nation states because otherwise the paperwork that entails sweet generous laws would be too cumbersome for many of these indigenous communities. As the indigenous WAU lawyer writer and designer Estilia Ciman Capuchina stressed in a recent telephone conversation the problem is that copyrights protect those who plagiarize and not the indigenous communities that produce the cultural resources. She underlines the globalization and the economic needs by women in particular compound these problems. That said copyright does not apply easily to the protection of indigenous knowledge due to the cultural and aesthetic values driving understandings of intellectual property law as I previously mentioned many indigenous cultural resources are simply seen as folklore right and folklore is in the public domain or commons. This obviously contrasts with the way indigenous communities perceive their practices as communal because living communal involves reciprocity. An author under intellectual property is defined as an individual who produces original and new work. This presumption obviously hides things such as intertextuality of any kind. Co-author status would be perhaps an alternative venue as rights are recognized under joint authorship but it doesn't really reflect the idea of indigenous peoples holding cultural resources in communion or community owned. Authorship restricted to one or two individuals or an entity also excludes the main governing principle of community which is reciprocity. One last thing that I wanted to sort of point out is that perhaps another venue may be increasing copyrights under the term legal person right which in reality is a corporate body. In this context companies or even universities function as legal persons under copyright law. Under the status of legal person in indigenous community for example may be able to offer licensing rights to people who want to use their designs. In this aspect I think could be considered but as of now how indigenous communities can become legal persons under property laws as complex as defining what is indigenous. Another major incommensurability between intellectual property law and indigenous communities notions of author authority relates to the term of temporality of protection under copyright. Under article seven of the Bernie Convention the duration of this protection has a limit of 50 years or so after the passing of the author. The temporal limitation is due to the interests of consumers at least that's what we know but individual member countries of Waipo may apply to extend the terms. This copyright expiration applies to economic rights but not moral rights. In other words the author is still recognized as having produced this work. The term of protection counters the desires and aspirations of many indigenous cultural producers who are invested in cultural preservation and transmission. For example weavers have been appealing to nation and international law to protect their textiles permanently. For them authority or authorship derive from an accumulation of years right so the older it is the more authority it accumulates and this contrasts greatly with the way that current copy law perceives it. What can intellectual property law gain from indigenous experiences? I think for starters understanding that historically in indigenous communities painting writing and weaving were not seen as separate practices. In many respects this perception is still palpable in indigenous current contemporary works. While most people who live outside indigenous community may not discern differences between say a Mayakiche cultural production or a Mixtec one indigenous communities recognize them as their respective intellectual property. In this regard these cultural resources are unique to each indigenous community and that difference could function as a type of authorship. Their uniqueness at a local level is reproduced as they enter global markets. For example Worley and Palacios point out that based on conversation with weavers in Chiapas the tension of the loom depends on the body of the weaver serving as a kind of signature. They pointedly note that that quote weaving also records the very body of the weaver to the tension among the threats themselves as the backstrap loom requires a woman's body to function while giving weaving's tension or lack thereof speaks directly to factors such as a women's age. In this context the weaver's body functions or imprints authorship. In this section I just kind of talk a little bit about future considerations that I think are important to think about. The issue of intellectual property in indigenous communities is evolving and shifting. A promising avenue would be for communities to become persons before the law akin to an entity or corporation. This would take and entail a major task for nation states whose interests are precisely to undermine legal claims of indigenous communities. It's not in the best interests of a nation state. Actualizing and considering how indigenous and non-indigenous scholars grapple, propose and implement novel ways of thinking beyond the individual or distinctions between the commons and public domain versus community and creativity would also benefit the process of decolonization of intellectual property law. Sweet generous laws for the protection of indigenous cultural expressions have played an important role in developing these protections and the open avenues for legal battles to remedy misappropriation cases which I think I probably mentioned would like to mention some of these or at least you can see some of them. While these sweet generous laws do not typically refer to legal battles they do offer some basic protection of collective rights. A combination perhaps of copyright and industrial property which includes industrial designs and trademarks in addition to sweet generous national laws would probably serve indigenous communities best so that they can create collectively and innovate or innovate ancestral designs. Designs would more than likely benefit trademark protection but the issue according to WIPO is that this kind of applications for protection while they have increased in the last few years they are never really completed so they will start but they are never completed. Nations affected by misappropriation of designs and and textiles for example may take some important cues from how indigenous poets and weavers in Mesoamerica literalize weaving as a form of writing and the poetic text as a form of weaving as they both seek to legitimize authority in the world and establish and establish their world designs as continuity and preservation. And let me just end by I'm not going to go into details of these cases but just to point out that some of the protections that Native American tribes have have been used to combat cultural appropriation and in this case this was a suit brought about by the Navajo Nation against urban outfitters as you can see here the Navajo Nation sued them because they were using Navajo patterns and designs and claiming the term Navajo for for themselves. The Navajo Nation won I mean they settled out of court but I think it was important that they used some of the legal language that the United States has in relationship to Native American production of arts and crafts. And just to mention how in some of these cases there's a direct violation of human rights I wanted to point out the first you know case of human rights and intellectual property had to do with a US scientist who tried to patent ayahuasca which is a sacred plant in the Amazon and one that has been used for millennia and here's a US scientist trying to patent this this plant. I think the irony is that the courts had initially rejected the patent and then due to the appeals decided to overturn it but the patent has a limitation so very little was accomplished at least from what I understand. The other one is the 1990 American scientists who wanted to patent a Waimi woman cell claiming that it had antiviral properties and the this organization in conjunction with the indigenous tribe sued and so the patent obviously didn't go through but it's another one of those cases that I think clearly makes the link between human right abuses and indigenous IP protection. And this last one which is an evolving case I'm not sure what its ultimate solution will be but this is an indigenous company that is using the name Coca for their beer for their own beer and Coca-Cola has asked them to not use the name Coca even though it is the name that all the people in Amazon know for this medicinal plant and have been using it for thousands of years as well. And I kind of just wanted to end but what does this have to do with our project here of Endangered Modern Endangered Archives and what I was thinking about this is that we need to make sure that we fund projects that have consulted with indigenous communities when it pertains to their own intellectual property because oftentimes as Rachel mentioned the applicants are professors most of them anthropologists who have been in these indigenous communities and have videotaped performances or have taken photography or made film. So I think we have to be considerate of not allowing the open access imperative of our project to override indigenous traditional knowledge protections. And I think the other thing that I just kind of wanted to end with is how can we change the process of these applications and not reproduce academic hierarchies especially when involving indigenous communities. This is obviously something that I'm thinking as a board member as well. How can we not enforce the dominance of English language and contribute to data colonialism which I think it's something that we have to think about more and more as it is a reality for all of us now. Thank you very much. Hi everyone. I just wanted to say real quick there's supposed to be another speaker here who's not here today so I'm just going to our presentations kind of feather together so I'm just going to wing it for a little bit. I just wanted to say it's so nice to see you all. It's been quite a while and there's familiar faces here. It's really great. Anyway thanks. As we sort of do that sort of thing you know we reflect we come back. I wanted to just offer that it's a real good time for us to reflect on our profession. You know we are a profession really sort of dedicated to supporting massive for-profit publishing industries. That leaves us in my opinion in my frustration and I'm sure a frustration you all share little time for experimentation and innovation because all of our resources are dedicated to for-profit commercial publishing and this sort of thing as you can see it's pretty hard to do. It takes a lot of attention time practice and patience as well as equipment communication. It's just not something we roll with really well. And I think when we started this project we had a narrative in our minds that copyright and preservation and paying people in other nations were going to be the real barriers we had to overcome. But that's not really as true as we found out. We found out about state actors and freedom of speech and climate change and we're looking for content that's at risk. So there's a real crisis going on with modern content that is disappearing. Unless there's freedom of the press, what's the point? We're preserving nonsense. What's the point if everything's censored? And we found out quite real that dissenting voices are dangerous voices to a lot of governmental actors. This content is at risk the things that we're digitizing. And the pandemic has only made things worse. We started this project by looking at places in part of the world, part of the globe that were not industrialized. But as you know from the pandemic there really are no safe spaces in the world. There are no places where these issues are at play. Climate change is going to affect everybody. And if our industry wants to make a difference for these people, you need to do this sort of work. You can't license this stuff. You can create these primary sources or you can go buy them from somewhere else because people are going to digitize it. It could be you, it could be us, but it could very well be people we spend our money on. Yeah, this work is disruptive. We need disruption in libraries. Disruption leads to innovation. And nothing really about innovation is not risky. So take risks, be disruptive, do this kind of work. Those are the end of my remarks. I just wanted to ask some questions, both to you folks under the panel. You saw just the first question, I guess you saw, we're doing projects in Russia. What do you guys think? Do you think the content? Well, okay, thank you. We're paused. But the discussion we have about working in Kabul and working in Russia is really, it's an interesting tension between preserving this culture and potentially breaking the law or paying the Taliban. So anybody have a reflection on what you think is the right way to look at these tensions? Here, go ahead. Thank you. I don't have like the right way to do it answer. My name is Yasemin Shorish, but I can speak as an Afghan American librarian on my thoughts on some of these ideas that you've presented. And I love the work that you're doing. And I think it's very important. But I think that there is a problem of temporal consideration in these projects. The time scale is always so short. It's always so brief as if things can be done so quickly. And this is not how many other contexts operate. The time scale is much longer. So I'll tell you, I had a conversation with the University of Arizona back in 2019 about the idea of repatriating some of their digitized materials from Kabul. And I said, it doesn't really seem like it's stable. It's not secure. And they said, but there's a government Ashraf Ghani's there, and we want to do post-Costodial, we want to do repatriation, this balancing that you're talking about. I think there needs to be much closer connections to community. And that community is not homogenous. You have to have a lot of disparate voices from the community in these projects from the beginning to provide to you the different perspectives and intricacies of a history that goes back much farther than any of you are considering. So the decisions that are happening from Dupri to now, these are very significant. And all of these things could have been foretold earlier. And the generation that we have failed in Afghanistan that is 20, 30, 40 years old. Yeah. I mean, we try our best to solicit applications from as many communities as we can around the world. And we ask the communities to tell us what their priorities are. So this Dupri collection wasn't something we went out and said, we would like to digitize the Dupri collection. The center in a Kabul University applied to us and said, this is what our priority is right now. We've already digitized other, they're on slides so that we've already digitized other slides. We know how to do it. Our team is trained. So this is what we want to do next. And they worked with their team. They hired some new staff. They worked with their existing staff to document those collections. That was their choice. That's what they've told us they would like to do. The community that was on the side of a couple of slides ago in Bolivia, the one that Gloria was talking about, the main PI on that application was the wife of the archaeologist who went to the Amaya community and had captured largely on video but some on audio Amaya speakers. And she is working with a young Amaya man who is in graduate school right now for linguistics to digitize that collection. It's a really interesting case study for our program because we funded the project knowing they don't have permission yet to publish online. And we've given them permission to digitize first and then take that material back to the community, play the material for the community who most of whom have never heard it and never seen it. And so they can then tell us whether or not they give us permission to publish it online. So that's kind of counter to the way our funding was given to us and to the imperative that we've been given to make all digitization openly accessible. But our board had a really long conversation about where's the urgency? Well, the urgency is this linguistic community is shrinking. There's this material that exists. It's on magnetic tape that is deteriorating. And the kind of urgency is around digitizing it. And then the community can decide are there things on there that can't be shared publicly? Are there things that can? And they get to make that decision. So each project for us is really different. We try by soliciting open applications to invite communities to tell us what they think is most important. And then we invite them to develop the team that creates the documentation again, that hopefully prioritizes what they think is most important. There is a tension in our projects around the two year time limit. Although based on the first three years of our project, we have not stuck to that timeline. So most projects get extensions because of the pandemic, but because the work takes longer than they anticipate, particularly it takes longer to sign the administrative paperwork, it takes longer to get a scanner, takes longer to get all of the things in place. And so the timeline is generally we work with our project teams to scale the projects appropriately, and then they keep the equipment. Ideally, they keep the staff because they've been trained and they continue to do that work. We're not expecting them to have digitize a full collection. We kind of help most of our project teams scale the project so that they fit appropriately within two years, and they pay the staff ethically. So our board often goes back to many project teams and says, we don't think your salaries are high enough and we'd like you to redo your budget. So I hear your concerns, and I think they're valid, but we are really working in ways that we have the capacity to empower project teams to make those choices for themselves. And often we push back to say you need to engage more community members. Last year we pushed three projects that had applied as project grants, and we pushed them back to planning grants because they hadn't talked to their communities enough. So we try to balance that again, not across all projects, but with each application as they come in. Okay, not you, John Rosie. So sort of related to actually what you were saying is an ancient archive that has run into similar issues. So about four years ago, I was asked to randomly sign an agreement at like four o'clock on a Thursday to take in the digitized work of the Library of Tibetan Works, and I did it because who says no to the Dalai Lama? But that in and of itself, the amount of time it has taken to get those materials I think is the other thing you're trying to get at, right? They've digitized it, but how do we get it out of that region? Because it really does mean somebody needs to go and smuggle it out for lack of a better word. And I think some of those long time frames are really challenging for indigenous communities, depending on where they are. And you can also think through too, how long it took to get to the point where the Library of Tibetan Works was able to digitize their materials, right? To be at a point where they feel like they're ready to do that. And there are real reasons now with the Dalai Lama questioning his longevity to start to look at digitizing those things. So I think, you can look back at ancient things to definitely see what you're trying to get back to, and you're right about the longevity of some of these things. I think we're out of time. John, if you want to pop up? I'll come up and talk. Yeah. Okay. Thanks everyone for coming. I hope you enjoyed the talk, and we'll see you at the conference.