[MUSIC PLAYING]
Humanity is a self-destructive organism, but that's the way it goes. I like the Sisyphus metaphor. You're pushing the rock up the hill. Sometimes you slide back down, but you have to keep pushing. And hopefully it'll be two steps forward and then only one back and then two steps forward and then only one back so that you are making progress, despite our own capacity for counterproductive behavior.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
You are listening to WREK Atlanta. And this is Lost in the Stacks-- the Research Library Rock'n'Roll Radio Show. I'm Charlie Bennett in the studio with Marlee Givens, Fred Rascoe, and Cody the Cyclists. Also, I have to know right now, Fred, this is all your show. Who was that in the cold open?
That was Mike Mills of REM.
And there's a reason why that quote and it being Mike Mills?
It'll come up.
OK. Each week on Lost in the Stacks, we pick a theme and then use it to create a weird mix of music and library talk and cultural touchpoints from the '80s. Whichever you're here for, we hope you take it.
I'm definitely here for the weirdness.
Yes.
All right. Our show today is called "The Human in the Loop." With advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning scraping every bit of data online, it seems technology progresses much faster than our archive access policies.
For collections of material from marginalized communities, it's especially important to make sure access policies center the people in the collection.
Let me try and say that again. We need an ethical framework that centers the people in the collections first, irrespective of the landslide of AI technologies that just seem to keep on coming. I mean, yeah, I know we're supposed to imagine Sisyphus happy, but I can't do it when it's AI.
[LAUGHTER]
And speaking of Sisyphus, archivists and librarians are leading the way, including our guest. We're going to speak to Arnetta Girardeau, a copyright librarian who has written an ethical framework for cultural heritage for use at her institution.
And our songs today are about access policies, guarding against exploitation, and putting people first. And, bonus, all the songs are from mixtapes that Arnetta had back in her youth. She tells me that those tapes featured a lot of R.E.M., by the way.
Ha.
And I think Arnetta and I had similar record collections in high school, probably, it sounds like. Our first track is a song about putting people at the center of the discussion despite misgivings. This is "Second Guessing" by R.E.M., featuring Mike Mills on bass and backing vocals, right here on Lost in the Stacks.
[R.E.M., "SECOND GUESSING"]
(SINGING) Why are you trying to second guess me?
You just heard "Second Guessing" by R.E.M. This is Lost in the Stacks, and today's show is called "The Human in the Loop." Let's start by meeting our guest.
My name is Arnetta Girardeau. I am a copyright and licensing librarian at an academic library. And I think I have to give the caveat that, number one, I do not represent my employer, but also that anything I say is for educational purposes, not legal advice, although I do have a JD and an MLS.
Right. So you have all the qualifications. You're just not officially representing anyone.
Right, right. And that actually is part of it because, when you are representing a client such as if the institution is your employer, then you have ethical obligations towards your client. But when you're not, then you can talk about ethics in a broad way.
OK. So what is your day-to-day, then, at UNCC? ARNETTA GIRARDEAU: So my day-to-day as a copyright and licensing librarian is to help the members of the community navigate copyright. That copyright is found in the federal law, the United States Code. And the rights of the owner are all the rights that we need to do our teaching, our research, our publishing, and stewarding collections on the inside.
So because technology has outpaced the copyright law, which was last updated in 1976, before the digital age, research, in particular, and stewarding collections such as digitization require a more nuanced understanding and working through how the analog copyright law can be applied in a digital age. So I get lots of really great questions from researchers, help folks on the inside figure out how to make our legacy collections available or what to do when we're bringing collections in.
And because all of these copyright-protected works are, by definition, things like photographs, AV recordings, and oral histories, which our understanding has changed of who has the right to make decisions about things, that means that we have to make more nuanced decisions and include something like ethics before we get to a fairly straightforward, legal issue of, do we have the right to do this thing?
And that's what led me to come up with the six-point ethical framework based on some issues that I've seen just in the eight years that I've been doing academic librarianship. Right. And that's what we really wanted to primarily talk about today. You've got this ethical framework for sustainable cultural heritage. Can you talk about what led you-- what that is, those six points that you mentioned, and what led you to create that?
Sure. So in a very general sense, as I said, the experience of helping the library work through issues of how to get materials-- collections with photographs, for example, or video, to get them available to the public. These are the issues that I saw the most often.
People-- I call it the people in the picture, that you have to center the people who might be in an analog photograph or video that was taken hundreds years ago and think about whether they could consent to it, whether they expected control over the thing that we have and their perception of who would profit and their communities' and their descendants'.
Right, because this is the kind of thing that a lot of libraries and archives-- or archives, I guess-- especially have-- things like oral histories and--
Exactly.
--photographs. And sometimes these were recordings, often of marginalized folks with some very difficult stories, that they were taken decades ago. And so you're applying-- you mentioned how technology outpaces copyright law. And so I guess that's what this ethical framework is sort of a guardrail for.
Exactly. That's exactly it. One of the first things that I worked on was a project where we had obtained everything legally and had the rights or at least figured out what we could do when we weren't sure. And my institution was very good about putting notes up so that, when someone accesses it online, they could see.
And what it was was a man that, during the 20th century, had gone from town to town, little small towns in the South, and took silent movies, and then he would show them at the local theater, from all over. So just this morning, I happened to be looking at Facebook, and Facebook offered me a video of African-American children running around. And I recognized this guy's technique. I was like, somebody has taken this from the library where I used to work, which has put this online.
And it says the name of the city because everybody wants to-- back in the day, they wanted to see themselves. And now, you Google-- this one was Troy, North Carolina. And I was like, yeah. Within five seconds, I was able to see that video that was being presented. And so got two things going on. Number one, you've got the institution that has done-- there's hundreds of decisions that are made on the back end before we even put something up.
And it's sustainable because we put it up in such a way that it's not going-- links won't break, et cetera, et cetera. But, also, to your point, the videos that went up were the videos of African-American kids. But if you look at the entire collection from that one town, it's everybody. So there's the white folks and the African-American kids. And if you don't know-- if you don't have the collection, you just see that one little piece.
So I think that's a great example that just popped up of, we can see how the people are left out. Nobody's asking them or their grandchildren, can I make money on Facebook off of those clicks?
When you saw that clip presented to you on Facebook, did a little alarm bell go off of potential harm, the kinds of potential harm that could be done?
Big time. I think that's a really great example of where the descendants and the communities come in because this was nice. This was cute pictures of little kids. But there were two separate reels, one with the white folks, and one with the Black folks. So telling the story of the South properly means telling the story of Jim Crow segregation, for example. To me, it's a harm to not tell the story right.
One big thing that I can say is, as someone from the African-American community, is that the way a lot of people dealt with it, our elders, was to not talk about it. And I'll give one more example. There was a sit-in in Jacksonville, Florida, where I'm from, in 1960. And it's called Ax Handle Saturday because there were thugs who attacked the kids who were sitting in with ax handles. I found out about that 40 years later. Nobody-- literally nobody-- talked about it. Now it's part of history.
Now there's video that you can find online. There may be some photos. But the harm, I think, comes from when these things go out of people's control or when things might be put up without the guardrails that we were talking about.
We'll be back with more from Arnetta Girardeau about keeping ethical guardrails around digital collections after a music set.
And you can file this set under CD 973.D53.
[LET'S ACTIVE, "EVERY WORD MEANS NO"]
(SINGING) Watching for a sound to lead me to
[NICK LOWE, "CRUEL TO BE KIND"]
You've got to be cruel to be kind Cruel to be kind in the right measure Cruel to be kind It's a very, very, very good sign That was "Cruel to be Kind" by Nick Lowe. And before that, "Every Word Means No" by Let's Active, songs about personal access policies.
[THEME MUSIC]
This is Lost in the Stacks, and we are speaking with Arnetta Girardeau, copyright librarian at UNC Charlotte, about her ethical framework for cultural heritage documents.
In the last segment, Arnetta mentioned how technology was racing ahead of copyright law. To begin this segment, we asked her to talk about how her ethical framework for cultural heritage can keep up with advances in technology for unethical copying, while also promoting access for library and archives collections. Note that there was a slight technical issue with Arnetta's mic, so you may hear some clicking.
Sure. Well, so let me just reiterate real quickly the six points. So it's looking at the people, looking at whether they could consent, looking at whether they expected to have control-- would they expect this thing to end up doing what it's doing now-- engaging all the stakeholders at the table, thinking about the profit, and thinking about the privacy. And sometimes I think privacy might come up the most in this respect.
So Safiya Noble wrote Algorithms of Oppression, and she quotes Tara Robertson. Tara Robertson is a-- the best way to say it is a thought leader in the LGBTQ community. There were publications that were underground publications from the '90s, the '90s, 2000s that were before people, again, anticipated wide distribution and the kind of wide distribution that we can now make because of digitization.
And she points out that these things were made for the community and that the community needs to be involved in the decision-making about them. There's one publication from that community that it seems like a no-brainer when you look at it from an ethical lens because people posed for pictures that could harm their future reputation, harm their privacy now that they are doctors, lawyers, judges, whatever.
And, again, just the expectation of, did you expect this thing that happened in a closed situation-- and when it's only meant for limited distribution, which is a copyright issue also. But, as librarians, what would we do when that collection comes into our possession? Some things, we're going to turn down. Some things, we are going to preserve. And we digitize for preservation, for example, but we're not going to put it online.
There are some things that we might create a very detailed record for so that someone could come in and look at it for research purposes. I think it goes another step when it then leaves our possession.
Control was a big-- like I said, it's big enough that I made it a part of this framework because if I say something to you in an interview, if I take a picture for you, whether I want to or not, but I don't think it's going to go any further than right here, right now, maybe you might not have a legal obligation to stop there, but think about your ethical obligation to me and my community and my expectations.
I'm one of those people that has a lot of questions because I see where AI doesn't help me. Every time I go to the bathroom, I have to wave the light part of my hand in order to get the water to run because it's not trained on skin my color. So I see it. I can tell that the models were not trained on information and data that includes me. So there are some people who will say, we want to get all of the information.
We want to get all of those oral histories of Black folks and Indigenous folks and photographs and audios and videos. At the same time, since we don't know how these algorithms work and what they're doing, we want to do it in such a way where we might have to make decisions up front of things to exclude, include. We all know that we do a lot of curation on materials.
So how do we prepare our archives for, I guess, a perhaps mythological or idealized, ethical AI? I mean, I think AI is a tool that's going to be widely used, just like web browsers and Google. Things like that just came to be despite some pushback. How do we handle accommodating that? Is it even possible for an ethical AI to assimilate that kind of knowledge to incorporate in its models?
Well, I think that's a really important question to ask. I think the important thing is to start asking the question and start bringing the stakeholders at the table, which might mean widening who you think the stakeholders are. I think it's important to have both tech people, legal people who are from the communities that are involved. In my ethical framework, I focus it on Black and Indigenous communities.
But there are other communities that clearly would be making decisions about the materials that relate to them. In a very general sense, I can tell that these questions are being asked. People are thinking about these questions. So I think preparing our archives for ethical AI is just like any other part of acquisition, preservation, and making things available. We just add that extra layer of decision-making. It's iterative.
We don't say at the beginning, oh, OK, this stuff fits, that stuff doesn't fit, and then we're done. We have to maintain our collections all the time, so we should be revisiting these questions all the time. And as I said, that does mean broadening who is at the table.
Are there examples that you can talk about where this framework has been implemented? I guess I'm looking for success stories in one of your collections.
Yeah, I can talk about two kinds of success stories. I'm going to start with one that is very general that is consistent with the framework and partially [AUDIO OUT] which is that it's actually at the funder level.
The Jessie Ball duPont Fund in my hometown of Jacksonville decided to reassess itself because the person who it's named after, when she was alive, did a lot of philanthropy, made contributions to libraries, higher education institutions, secondary institutions throughout the South on the condition that they remain segregated. So that, I think, could contribute to some real issues in how our collections are put together.
But because they are, in the back end, focusing on placemaking and other ways to rebuild communities, this funder is bringing in these values of thinking about the people in the picture. So the Ax Handle Saturday that I mentioned-- it went from being completely unknown to what used to be our main library, our main public library, has a mural with the student leader of that time period. So, literally, it's part of the community.
Then, in terms of a project that I worked on-- I mentioned earlier-- was the oral histories of older Black people that were taken in the '90s. And we digitized it just a few years ago. And from the beginning, the curators and the rest of the team were sensitive to the issues, which is why they involved me in the first place in coming up with the framework and the categories of what we would digitize, whether we would make things completely available.
Some things are maybe just made available in-house, locally. So there's lots of examples, like I said, especially with things like oral histories which were taken at the tail end of the analog era, which is a very highly copyrighted time. And once we start thinking about the interviewee as potentially having rights, then we were able to widen how we thought of the ownership and what you should do and who gets to make decisions.
You're listening to Lost in the Stacks, and we'll be back with more from Arnetta Girardeau on her ethical framework for cultural heritage on the left side of the hour.
[THEME MUSIC]
[ROCK MUSIC]
OK, I've got it. All right. I'm Snowden Becker. I'm an archivist who's worked with everything from film and home movies to bricks and pieces of bedsprings. And you're listening to Lost in the Stacks on WREK Atlanta. (SINGING) [INAUDIBLE] if you probably can [INAUDIBLE] for love of it
Ah, Weatherbox. Our show today is called "The Human in the Loop," and we're talking about the-- I'm going to slow down, Marlee, because it is a tongue twister--
It is, yeah.
--ethical framework for cultural heritage, created by Arnetta Girardeau. Technology often outpaces our policies of digital access. Is that not an understatement, Fred?
Correct.
Even when legal questions about digital access to archives are resolved, ethical questions of access can remain, which is why centering people in our policies is so important. As Arnetta writes in her framework, "By centering the people in the picture, this framework for sustainable cultural heritage allows decision-makers to incorporate an ethical dimension." To borrow a phrase from Machine Learning, it is crucial to add a human in the loop.
And it may seem like a Sisyphean task, but putting people first is a strategy that will help us roll that ethical rock up the technological hill. And unlike the Sisyphus myth, we can get the rock to the top, and it can stay there--
Optimism.
--until the next version of ChatGPT comes out.
Oh, you ruined it. CHARLIE BENNETT: File this set under-- I think I made it better. File this set under P87.3.B94M68.
[THE JAM, "THAT'S ENTERTAINMENT"]
[SHADE, "WHEN AM I GOING TO MAKE A LIVING?"] [INAUDIBLE] Hungry, but we won't give in Hungry, but we're going to win You just heard "When Am I Going to Make a Living?" by Shade, and before that, "That's Entertainment" by The Jam. Song--
What a statement out of that set, Fred.
Songs about what happens when you don't put people first. That's the statement.
[THEME MUSIC]
Welcome back to Lost in the Stacks. Our guest is Arnetta Girardeau, librarian at UNC Charlotte. And we're talking about how academic archives keep the people included in their collections at the center of institutional access policies. We started this part of the interview with Marlee asking how copyright comes into play.
I was wondering, I guess because it's just occurring to me, is comparing these rights to copyright-- does that make it easier to frame with the stakeholders you're talking to? ARNETTA GIRARDEAU: So are you saying, is it easier to discuss-- Yeah, is it-- I'm just kind of wondering-- I'd never really considered that, for example, someone who's giving an oral history can claim copyright over what they said. Is it actually copyright, or is it a different kind of right?
ARNETTA GIRARDEAU: So, yeah, I think it's important to think about how those go through. As one of my colleagues said, in reacting to me talking through the framework, very often the copyright issue is black and white. We can tell who owns it, who doesn't own it. Those kind of issues tend to come up when you just can't find the owner, like it's something that we don't know. But copyright includes-- the first question is whether it's copyrightable, and who owns it?
When something is fixed in a tangible form such as a photograph or even in your computer, then, as long as it's an original, creative work, it's the person who did that original creation who becomes the copyright author. I have the fresh eyes of someone who came into academic libraries fairly recently.
I know that the mores of the Society for American Archivists, and the archivists and oral historians started to change things and that their change may or may not have been strictly on a copyright basis. But when we talk about copyright, and we widen our understandings, the question becomes, what about these things is the creative, original piece, and who is creating? We are in a very collaborative time period. And now people think almost immediately of cocreation, collaboration.
And when things are cocreated, when you have collaborators, then both collaborators have a right. So when we look at this oral history, for example, as a collaborative, cocreated work, then that's where we can-- that's when there's a good legal argument. I think that it makes us also go to the question of, what is protectable, and what is considered to be original?
One of the first cases about photography where Oscar Wilde posed for a portrait, and the question was about, who is the original creator of this brand-new technology? Does the person who's posing have any ownership? Does the tech person have ownership? Is it just the photographer? And, consistently, we see baked into copyright the idea of the genius who is creating things that excludes the other people who are involved that don't get rights.
And I don't think it is a-- I, personally, don't think we should forget the fact that, if you look at some of the most recent copyright cases, the really big ones that went all the way to the Supreme Court, like the Andy Warhol case-- the Andy Warhol Prince photograph went all the way to the Supreme Court. It's the photo of a Black entertainer. But it wasn't his estate that was suing.
It was the person who took the photograph and the Andy Warhol, who made something from that photograph over and over again. We see that, somewhere, the thing that is important-- like a recent Kat Von D tattoo of Miles Davis. Well, it's important and worth suing over because it's Miles Davis. But it's not his family that's suing for this. It's other people who stand to profit because they have the copyrights.
So I think that is what leads me-- I'm sure Miles Davis's family and Prince's heirs can fend for themselves. But in our collections, we tend to have things from nameless, faceless people, like those kids in North Carolina-- I think it was Troy-- that [AUDIO OUT] necessarily know that they're there.
So I guess to sum up, like in your framework, collaboration is the way to keep the people centered. And that's the point-- to keep the people centered, regardless of-- ARNETTA GIRARDEAU: Exactly, exactly. Keeping the people centered. Thank you. Arnetta, thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you. This has been such a pleasure. I really appreciate the opportunity to talk to you about this.
This is Lost in the Stacks, and you've been listening to our interview with guest Arnetta Girardeau, copyright and licensing librarian at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
File this set under HC79.I55S6813-- so long, Fred. Such a long call number.
[CELIA CRUZ AND JOHNNY PACHECO, "LO TUYO ES MENTAL"]
[YAZ, "ONLY YOU"]
You just heard "Only You" by Yaz, and before that, "Lo Tuyo Es Mental" by Celia Cruz and Johnny Pacheco. Those were songs about care for the people that matter and rejecting the exploiters.
[THEME MUSIC]
Our show today was called "The Human in the loop." And normally, we would have a little discussion here to cap off the show. But Fred--
Yes?
--you started this whole show with a clip from an interview with Mike Mills of R.E.M., which we now have to say because--
Right, yeah. Yeah.
--because. That was at the top of the show, and I am, I guess, still confused.
Well, that was inspired by our guest, Arnetta. CHARLIE BENNETT: That part I got. She is a Mike Mills superfan.
Oh, OK.
And I've got a little clip here from our interview, a little bit of extra audio--
Always let the guest explain.
Right.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Arnetta, we've got to talk about Mike Mills.
Yes. Yes, we do.
When I asked you if you wanted to be on our show, you said, "Oh, you're in Georgia? Well, obviously, I have to talk about Mike Mills." And you didn't even say, "I have to talk about R.E.M." You said, "I want to talk about Mike Mills." So can you tell me why you want to talk about Mike Mills?
Sure well, R.E.M. definitely was one of the first concerts I went to, and I think that their songwriting and the ownership, the copyright ownership over their work was one of the things that made them the band that they were. And I just think that Mike Mills is someone who, from what I see, has expressed a lot of very strong opinions on issues and would have something to say about whether their work is trained on AI or the ethics of using it maybe in a different way. So that's-- yeah.
So if we ever are fortunate enough to have Mike Mills on our show, we're definitely going to call you in as a guest panelist. ARNETTA GIRARDEAU: Absolutely, absolutely.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
I got nothing to add. Roll the credits, Fred.
[DRUM ROLL]
Lost in the Stacks is a collaboration between WREK Atlanta and the Georgia Tech Library, written and produced by Alex McGee and Hello, Teddy, Charlie Bennett, Fred Rascoe, and Marlee Givens.
Legal counsel and Mike Mills calling card provided by the Burrus Intellectual Property Law Group in Atlanta, Georgia.
Ah, now we can get in touch with him. Special thanks to Arnetta for being on the show, to all collection curators putting people first, and Thanks, as always, to each and every one of you for listening.
Our web page is library.gatech.e du/lostinthestacks, where you'll find our most recent episode, a link to our podcast feed, and a web form if you want to get in touch with us. MARLEE GIVENS: Next week, we will hear three stories of library leadership from the uproar class of 2023.
Did you think we were done with Mike Mills?
No.
Well, we are not done with Mike Mills.
I knew it.
Fans of R.E.M. know that that band always shared songwriting credits equally, no matter who actually wrote the song. But during the recording sessions for their album Automatic for the People, they titled one unused demo in such a way that left no doubt who the actual author was. Released 25 years later in an anniversary compilation, this is Mike Mills's tune, "Mike's Pop Song" by R.E.M., right here on Lost in the Stacks. Have a great weekend, everybody.
[R.E.M., "MIKE'S POP SONG"]
(SINGING) You call me on the phone You say you're not alone