Public Policy Initiatives That Might Improve Digital Stewardship
Clifford Lynch
Traditionally most discussions of public policy efforts to enable stewardship of the cultural record have focused on copyright law — in particular, first sale, fair use, preservation exemptions for memory institutions, copyright deposit, and duration and registration (and orphan works). I'll briefly summarize some of these discussions, and underscore how poorly they are matched to some classes of cultural materials in the current world. I'll suggest some very tentative speculations about alternative approaches and formulations that might be worth considering for examination and discussion.
Clifford Lynch is the director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) and an adjunct professor at the School of Information. Prior to joining CNI in 1997, Lynch spent eighteen years at the University of California Office of the President, the last ten as director of Library Automation. Lynch is a past president of ASIS&T and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the National Information Standards Organization.
