1From the time of its inception in 2008, New York university Abu Dhabi (or NYUAD) has defined itself as a key component of a global network university, linked to the main campus of New York University in New York, as well as to the Shanghai campus that was established in 2012. Along with these three degree-granting “portal” campuses, the NYU network also includes ten study away sites in locations as far-flung as Berlin, Accra, Sydney, and Buenos Aires. Central to this model is the idea that students, faculty and resources circulate between these locations, and students who matriculate at the Abu Dhabi campus are required to spend at least one semester at one of the other campuses or study-away sites, and are expected to spend further time away through summer internships or short-term courses between academic semesters. Equally central to the identity of the Abu Dhabi campus though is its location in a cultural, social and economic crossroads in the United Arab Emirates. Students from over 120 different countries study at this campus, and this intentionally diverse student body is designed not only to bring a variety of cultural backgrounds and experiences to Abu Dhabi, but also with the hope that that students who have lived there will take a deeper understanding and appreciation of the Arab world and its traditions back with them to their countries of origin.
2As a fundamental part of the NYU Abu Dhabi campus, its library also embodies these concepts in the services and collections that it offers to its users. While housing a substantial collection of books of its own, users of the NYU Abu Dhabi library can request materials from the New York campus, which often arrive in Abu Dhabi within a matter of days. They can also draw upon the extensive collection of reference and periodical databases licensed to the NYU Libraries. In addition to the free circulation of materials between its international sites, however, the library at NYUAD also houses a collection that is conscious of Abu Dhabi’s role as a crossroads between East and West, and this is especially apparent in the collecting scope of the library’s Archives and Special Collections department (or ASC). Designed to meet both the teaching and research needs of the university community, and also to develop cultural collections that will be of use and interest to the wider community of Abu Dhabi and the United Arab Emirates, the archives and special collections of the NYU Abu Dhabi Library consist of rare books, maps, ephemera, audiovisual materials, and archival collections that document the social and cultural history of Abu Dhabi, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the nations surrounding the Arabian Gulf, those that comprise the Arabian Peninsula, as well as the countries that border on the Indian Ocean, ranging from the Swahili Coast of Africa to the Malabar Coast of India. All of this recognizes that for centuries, the settlements around the Arabian Gulf, including the present day emirates of the UAE, had extensive commercial and cultural ties with this broader region, with traces of those ties is evident in everything from archaeological finds, Emirati cuisine, regional musical styles, and the Gulf Arabic dialects spoken today, among other things.
3Since its opening five years ago, the ASC of the NYUAD Library has built a collection of over 1,500 books, several hundred maps, and dozens of archival collections. Yet, the necessities of preserving and providing appropriate levels of security for rare or unique materials such as these prevents the library from allowing them to circulate among campuses the way that other library resources do. Given this, how best can we ensure that such materials not only get used in Abu Dhabi, but can be made more broadly available throughout the NYU network, and beyond? In response, the staff of the ASC and its colleagues in the Library’s Center for Digital Scholarship (CDS) have been working together to find ways to create digital surrogates of collections housed in Abu Dhabi, in order to make them more broadly accessible. Two recent and ongoing case studies illustrate these efforts to balance accessibility with preservation and copyright concerns. One involves a collection of commercially produced East African popular music collected by a faculty member as part of his research project, and another is a pilot project to digitize a sample from an archival collection of another faculty member, whose papers document modern Arab art and artists.
4The first case study arose out of materials collected as part of a faculty research project, which having wider scholarly uses beyond that project, were transferred to the NYUAD Library for preservation, cataloging, and for providing continued access. This collection consisted of over 450 sound recordings of East African popular music from the early to mid 20th century, which Professor Andrew Eisenberg collected for his own research, but also drew upon as part of the Music and Sound Cultures research group at NYUAD, in which several musicologists have sought to use computational methods to identify linkages between the vernacular musical traditions of Arabia and the Indian Ocean rim, among other objectives (http://masc.hosting.nyu.edu/). Some of the recordings Eisenberg obtained as digital copies of commercially available sound recordings during his field work in Kenya, others consisted of audiocassettes he purchased there that were later digitized by staff of the CDS. While the body of recordings collected by Eisenberg had immediate uses for that research project, he subsequently donated them to the NYUAD Library, whose staff then arranged and described them as an archival collection, creating an online archival finding aid for them (http://dlib.nyu.edu/findingaids/html/nyuad/ad_mc_035/). Because of the unclear copyright status of the majority of these recordings, and the desire to prevent any unauthorized commercial uses that would harm legitimate copyright holders of these recordings, the collection was meant to be used in-house, on dedicated computers in the library by students, faculty, and other authorized users, and its contents would not be able to be copied or downloaded without permission.
5However, Eisenberg and his colleagues immediately recognized that other scholars and students of this music who could not easily travel to Abu Dhabi, and who might benefit from scholarly and non-commercial uses of this music, should be able to access it for their research purposes as well. How could the Library provide a greater level of access without publishing copyright-protected content on the World Wide Web? A number of options were considered, but the one that was most technically viable within the context and infrastructure of the NYU Libraries was to upload the recordings to Box, a cloud management platform used by NYU because of its ability to balance security with providing global access to digital content. The recordings of the Eisenberg Collection were uploaded into Box in a file structure that mirrored that of the online archival finding aid, which had been initially created using Archivists Toolkit, an archival content management software. While it would have been optimal to be able to directly link the digitized recordings with the descriptions in the EAD finding aid published online, since the NYU Libraries do not currently have the capability of doing that, then making the contents available in this manner in Box was deemed to be the next best thing. To access the contents, NYU-affiliated users need to log into their library accounts, and are prompted to provide their NYU identification number and password, and then are able to access these recordings in the same manner in which they can access research databases that are licensed to the NYU Libraries through paid subscriptions. However, Eisenberg and his colleagues also wished to be able to provide access to the scholars they were collaborating with on their research, but who were based outside of NYU. In order to do this, a separate procedure for user authentication, employing a different set of usernames and passwords, and providing access that was mediated on a case-by-case basis by Eisenberg, was implemented. In this manner, there is a high degree of confidence that any non-NYU users who are permitted to access this collection remotely will abide by its rules of use and will be accessing the content only for scholarly research purposes. While unique to the circumstances of the Eisenberg collection, this approach has helped the staff of the ASC and CDS at the NYUAD Library think through the issues of how to balance digital access with copyright restrictions, and to develop a model that may be applicable to other digital projects in the Library as well.
6Given the approach taken with the project concerning East African music, one of the next logical questions to ask was whether there were more materials in the library’s holdings that could be digitized and shared with a wider audience in this manner, even if copyright restrictions prevented the library from posting them on the World Wide Web. For several years, the NYU Abu Dhabi Library had been the leading partner in Arabic Collections Online, a project that has digitized over 11,000 books in Arabic, primarily in the areas of history, literature, philosophy, and law, and made them freely available on the web (http://dlib.nyu.edu/aco/). The works included were drawn from the holdings of several major research libraries in the United States and the Middle East, and focused on out-of-print titles that would otherwise be very difficult to access, and whose copyright term had expired and were now in the public domain. However, as successful as that project has been, there are other issues involved with the full-scale digitization of archival and manuscript collections.
7While the copyright status of a book is relatively easy to assess, those for most archival and manuscript collections are much more complex, since the latter often include a variety of unpublished documents that may still be protected under copyright term. In particular, in collections that contain a large amount of correspondence received from third-parties, it may be impractical if not impossible to determine the copyright status of every single unpublished item in the collection (Dickson 2010; Akmon 2010). In addition, the technical aspects of the digitization of books, as in the ACO project, are quite different from the work done with archival and manuscript collections. In comparison to archives, books are relatively uniform as a format, while archives can contain a variety of document types and sizes that require different means of capturing the images. Added to this is the question of whether or not a library or archive has sufficient resources to commit to digitizing entire collections.
8Aside from the technical and staffing considerations, questions must also be raised as to whether all collections within an archival repository merit digitization and publication online, and if not, then which criteria will be used to select those that will be chosen for such a project. Up until now, relatively few archival repositories have opted to start full scale digitization projects that image entire archival collections or record groups. Many of those who do offer digitized content on the web restrict themselves to projects that only include material whose copyright is in the public domain (Dryden 2014: 65-66) or which are connected to projects of limited scope or duration, usually occasioned by research projects connected to faculty of the host university, or events, such as anniversary commemorations, that generate short term interest in specific topics documented in the archives.
9In short, as attractive as the thought of imaging archival collections at NYU Abu Dhabi could be, was it something feasible for a library of its size, and with the limits imposed on its existing staff? One way to find out was to pursue a small-scale pilot project with one such archival collection, in order to determine and define what the limits are, how much staff would be required for a larger project, and what technical issues can be identified in imaging a small number of materials.
10The collection chosen for this pilot project was that of faculty member Salwa Mikdadi, an art historian and curator who specializes in modern Arab art, and who has documented the careers and works of hundreds of artists in the Arab world and the diaspora through a non-profit organization she established 30 years ago in the United States, a project that eventually led to the first large-scale exhibition in the United States of the works of modern Arab women artists, which took place at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC in 1994. A significant portion of the Salwa Mikdadi archival collection that she has donated to New York University includes an extensive series (28 archival boxes, or 3.56 linear meters of papers) that consists of dossiers on individual artists, including – for each artist – a biographical file with documents about that artist’s life and career, a file of correspondence between Mikdadi and that artist, and a file of visual representations of the artist’s work, usually consisting of full-color slides, postcards, photographs or other images (an online archival finding aid for this collection can be found at: http://dlib.nyu.edu/findingaids/html/nyuad/ad_mc_022/). Given the variety of formats and sizes of documents within this series of her collection, it was determined that imaging the contents of one box of her collection would be a representative sample, and could help determine what level of resources would be necessary to digitize the entire series, if not her entire collection. This, in turn, would help provide information that could be useful in planning a large-scale digitization initiative that could address other archival collections at NYUAD as well. Staff of the ASC and the CDS worked together to coordinate the steps of this pilot project, with staff from the former bringing their expertise in archival arrangement and descriptive standards, and staff from the latter utilizing their technical expertise in digitization.
11By the start of this pilot project, the first series of Mikdadi’s papers – including the chosen box – had already been archivally processed. However, additional steps needed to be taken to review the contents of that box, to ensure that by the time it reached the imaging technician, it would truly be camera-ready, and no outstanding questions or issues would remain for the technician to decide. Where multi-page documents were stapled or clipped together, such fasteners were removed and the pages were rehoused in a paper sleeve that would keep the document intact, and prevent the pages from being mixed with other contents in the same folder. Where duplicate documents existed, such as photocopies of the same document, those were removed. Unusual formats were flagged or otherwise noted, so that decisions could be made in advance of digitization as to whether those items would need to be removed and imaged separately, as was the case with the color photographic slides, which required different imaging equipment. And even though the intent of the project was full-scale digitization, it became apparent that not every document or every page of a document in a file required imaging. One example was when a complete issue of a periodical was included in a file, and that same periodical contained only a small amount of material relevant to the contents of that folder, such as a single article of a few pages about an artist whose work was documented in that folder. In such a case, instructions were given to only image the cover of the periodical, its title page, and the pages containing that single article, and not the entire issue. Sometimes after the thorough review of a folder, it became apparent that archival appraisal decisions still needed to be made, in particular if non-archival or irrelevant documents were interfiled in these folders, and needed to be removed. All told, this relatively simple but labor-intensive process took one hour to complete on the sample box.
12The next step was to transfer this box to colleagues in the library’s CDS department, for the actual imaging of the contents. This involved identifying different imaging equipment to be used for different formats of documents, such as standard A4 sized documents, larger documents, photographs, or color slides. Determinations had to be made as to whether items would be imaged in sequence within each folder, or whether the technician, in this case a student assistant trained to scan the documents, could wait to image all documents of one type of format separately, such as beginning on the scanner that could handle A4 documents, and then moving to the slide scanner, and so on. Documents would be placed on the scanner, imaged, and then cropped in Adobe Photoshop. It was determined early on that images would be scanned at an adequate resolution for access purposes, and that these images would not be treated as preservation copies, but rather as access copies, in order to save on the file size. Initially 135 documents from that box were imaged as a test case, with samples from various types and formats. It was determined that this subset of documents took 8.5 hours to complete. When these figures were extrapolated to include the contents of the entire box, it was estimated that it would require close to 20 hours total to image the one sample box, which consisted of 314 documents, 30 positive-print photographs, 23 color slides, and 19 photographic negatives.
13At this point, the pilot project is incomplete, and a number of further questions need to be answered in the coming months of this project. The actual imaging of the remainder of the contents of the first box needs to be completed, in order to determine whether the estimated amount of time is accurate. Further boxes will be sampled in order to see if these results are repeated, or whether a learning curve and increased comfort with this workflow will lead to an increase in the speed with which this work can be done. Since the current staffing of both the CDS and the ASC relies on student assistants who are hired anew every semester, this staff turnover will require a certain amount of time each semester for the new imaging technicians to familiarize themselves with these procedures. Furthermore, since the pilot project is still in progress, certain issues following the imaging of documents have yet to be addressed, such as the procedures for performing a quality control check of the digital images, or issues related to the storage and publication of these images. Even without these additional considerations though, and only with preliminary findings, it looks like the project could be a time consuming one. If it truly does take around 20 hours to image one box, then the Artists Series of the Mikdadi collection would take one person, working full time (a 40-hour work week) about 14 weeks to image, after another person has spent the equivalent of three days performing the pre-digitization review, and not taking into account post-imaging quality control and work related to publishing the digitized materials to the university’s network. A remaining series of Mikdadi’s papers, recently acquired and containing records of Mikdadi’s non-profit arts organization and of the exhibitions that she has curated, would take an additional 10 weeks.
14Even with the limited scope and incomplete nature of the current pilot project, along with the experience gained from working with the East African sound recordings, several issues have become apparent to us that will inform our planning moving forward, and may also be relevant to other institutions considering a full-scale digitization project of archival materials:
- Imaging definitely has an impact on archival arrangement: during the past decade and a half, the trend, at least in Anglophone countries, has been toward minimal level processing of archival collections, as a result of the influential article by Mark Greene and Dennis Meissner in 2005 which championed the “more product, less processing” approach as a means of reducing archival processing backlogs (Green, Meissner 2005). A digitization project like this, however, reintroduces many steps that Meissner and Greene suggested could be eliminated in most cases of archival processing, such as removing fasteners or arranging the contents of individual folders. Given that technicians performing the imaging cannot be assumed to have the same knowledge of these collections as the archivists, it is incumbent upon the latter to more carefully arrange and prepare materials, as well as to identify and withdraw duplicate and non-archival materials, a step that minimal-level processing would normally skip.
- Variety of formats: the variety of formats must also be taken into consideration, and will impact a number of steps of the digitization process, including the decision about which imaging equipment to use (and to purchase), the sequence and workflow in which items are imaged, and whether or not oversize materials that had been folded (by the creator or donor) to fit in standard-sized folders will need to be rehoused as oversized items, or require further conservation treatment.
- Copyright: as illustrated above, the copyright status of unpublished materials such as letters, diaries, or other similar writings will need to be addressed. Given that most of the archival collections and records that will find their way into a repository like NYUAD’s Library will be from the UAE, and will have been created within the past half-century, the likelihood is high that most of the materials handled by this digitization project will still be under copyright term.
- Risk assessment: having noted the difficulties with copyright status, individual institutions must determine the levels of risk that they are willing to take in order to place digitized archival content on the web. With the NYUAD project, materials will be circulated on an internal network, and made accessible in the same way that licensed databases from vendors are to authentificated users within the NYU network. But if content is to be placed on the publicly-available web, institutions must determine which levels of risk of copyright infringement are acceptable and reasonable to take on, in the name of fair use and providing access for educational, non-profit purposes. Jean Dryden, Peter Hirtle, Kevin Smith and others have sketched out ways in which levels of risk can be assigned to individual collections, and policies implemented that enable low-risk materials to be made more widely available on the web, even when the copyright status is unclear (Dryden 2014; Hirtle 2012; Smith 2012).
- Cost-benefit analysis: and in conclusion, repositories and their parent institutions must determine whether the costs – in equipment, materials, and staff time – to create and manage a digitization program, will be worth it in the end for their users, both current and prospective. Will the archival collections themselves have sufficient cultural and informational value to make them more widely accessible via digitization, and can the institution demonstrate other benefits, tangible and intangible, to the archive and its parent institution, in doing this?
15In terms of the cost-benefit of digitizing a portion of the Mikdadi collection, due to the paucity of published materials readily available for research on modern Arab artists, and in particular available in languages other than Arabic, there is a compelling reason for imaging and making these materials available at least within the NYU Libraries network. Even with this level of access, researchers from other academic institutions and from world-renowned museums in New York can easily travel to NYU’s Bobst Library to view this content, even if they are unable to make the trip to Abu Dhabi.
16For the NYUAD Library, the verdict is still out on the overall success of this pilot project, and whether it can create a road map to use with other collections. However, the participants are hopeful that the digitization of archival collections will help bridge the geographic distance between potential users in the NYU system, and eventually help NYUAD showcase informationally rich collections that will benefit scholars and students, and help make distinct facets of Arab culture more widely available, and appreciated.