Helping me to make the transition from thinking about “Digital Collections” back into thinking about “Information & the Knowledge Society” is Jame Boyle’s new book The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind. Loved his Shamans, Software, and Spleens a dozen years ago: expect that this will be even better. Don’t take my word for it, though — read it yourself!
The children’s digital library group is one of the more active discussion groups in Digital Collections right now, sharing some excellent thoughts about children’s diaries, which led me to ponder the question above.
[image of Clara Hinton and her brother Eugene,
from the Old Capitol Museum at the University of Iowa]
For example, Clara Hinton’s diary, written 100 years ago when she was about twelve, is one of the showpieces of this Digital Library collection from Iowa. After the deaths of her mother and sister, she helped her father, an Iowa farmer, to raise her two brothers. She eventually attended college and then the library school at the University of Wisconsin, after which she returned to Iowa, where she was instrumental in improving the library at the University of Iowa. This diary was among the papers she donated to the Iowa State Historical Society during the later years of her life. (She lived until 1987).
So, the question is, in the kind of digital collectiverse we’re making today, whose intellectual property will the text messages and MySpace pages of today’s 12 year-olds become?
Brief discussion in the very last class session of 5033 about the “content” of the semester: certainly could have done less with theory about the rights and lefts of “copy,” and more with things like this, hm? Too late now, though. . . . I’m off to reread a little Bijker on the social construction of facts and artifacts.
