Interview with David Kirsch, principal investigator of the Birth of the Dot Com Era Project, Page 1
David Kirsch is a professor at the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland. Kirsch is the project leader of "Birth of the Dot Com Era," one of eight formal partnerships announced in September 2004 by the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP). Additional information about the Dot Com project is available at www.dotcomarchive.org and www.businessplanarchive.org.
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What goals have you set for your project above and beyond those of NDIIPP itself? What do you hope to gain from your participation?
Additional Goals:
- The collections that we are assembling for NDIIPP are the core of our project, but we are also preserving other nondigital aspects of Dot Com Era; we have some physical ephemera as well as various paper documents.
- We are interested in raising awareness among corporations of the need to preserve for history; digital document retention strategies pose a potential risk to the future of business archives.
- We want to help people who lived and worked through the Dot Com Era come to terms with the experience; there are many personal stories still to be told; one of our collecting sites — www.dotcomarchive.org — is dedicated solely to capturing these personal stories.
- We are interested in understanding the reasons why the Brobeck law firm failed; on the one hand, it was a singular event in the history of American legal practice, but it may also be a harbinger of other, similar events to follow.
Hope to Gain:
- A measure of closure for those who are still troubled by these events; the biblical scapegoat was the animal upon which the people heaped their sins and which was subsequently cast out into the wilderness; we hope these collections will allow people to bring closure to these events through contributing their memories and digital materials to our digital repository.
- The reputation of the Library of Congress assures content owners that their materials will persist and that their rights will be respected.
- The ability to point out that digital preservation is a critical issue meriting attention from Congress and from the scholarly professions that normally consume archival outputs (i.e., history, but also other related fields, economic sociology, etc); and to build awareness of the need for increasing education around the problem of digital preservation.
- The development of technical preservation architecture and procedures that are outside our focus area.
What milestones have you achieved so far?
Since September 2004, our project has held a conference of well-respected legal ethics experts specifically to discuss the problem of attorney-client confidentiality in the dot-com records; secured the generous pro bono services of a top technology and intellectual property lawyer; appeared in San Francisco bankruptcy court to raise the profile of our project and the need for active digital collecting; secured limited access to the dot-com records in question for the purposes of appraising and characterizing them; and gained a commitment of cooperation from the bankruptcy trustee with control over the eventual disposition of the records.
What did you take away from the kickoff meeting for the preservation partners that was held at the Library of Congress on Jan. 12-13, 2004?
We came away from the kickoff meeting with a clearer sense of how our project related to the others, how the primary questions we were tackling on a daily basis would eventually become secondary questions that the other projects would need to deal with as well, and how the primary questions they tackled would eventually confront us as well. For instance, although we are initially concerned almost entirely with rights management issues such as confidentiality and copyright, we will eventually need to turn our attention to preservation metadata and issues of content selection. It’s also clear that we’re facing some of the thorniest rights issues ahead of some of the other projects. Hopefully, our experience will be useful to the rest of the network.
What would you particularly like to see discussed at this summer’s meeting?
We are very interested to get an update about the Library’s efforts to address the issue of copyrights of orphan works. We expect that many of our documents may eventually be covered by this policy.
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