This article is adapted and expanded from a presentation given as a lightning talk at DHSI 2023 in the Project Management stream by Ariel Kroon on behalf of the rights management team at SpokenWeb UAlberta.1 While Kroon is no longer involved with SpokenWeb UAlberta, the rights management team was at the time made up of the three authors of this paper; a digital curation librarian and two literary scholars who were all contributors to the SpokenWeb Project at the University of Alberta, an institutional partner in an exciting multidisciplinary research consortium now in the sixth year of a seven-year SSHRC Partnership Grant. While the overall goal of SpokenWeb is to build a national network of literary audio archives managed through a metadata portal called Swallow,2 each participating institution is responsible for digitizing, documenting, and curating its own local collections, including the rights management process, and this paper outlines our approach to the rights management process at SpokenWeb UAlberta. Our rights management approach combines methods used in the field of library and archival studies to process digitized collections, but also draws on domain knowledge in literary studies and ethical curation. While the focus of this paper is on the project management of a complex system designed to mitigate legal and reputational risk, ultimately the principles driving that management are matters of ethical curation—that is, ensuring the well-being of the content creators who share copyright with the recordists of the collection, who are primarily students and faculty at the University of Alberta. Our contention is that the practicalities of any project management task ultimately devolve to deeply held—even if sometimes unstated or under-theorized—ethical and intellectual commitments; project management in the digital humanities not only facilitates the work of research and learning but is itself an intellectual endeavour.
The audio assets under the custodianship of UAlberta are reel-to-reel and cassette recordings dating from 1957–1988. Currently, the collection consists of several hundred historically unique recordings approximately one hour in length each, about half of which have been digitized, documented, and deposited in the UAlberta Library’s Aviary repository. There are further prospective items for processing held in the Department of English and Film Studies, University of Alberta Archives, and the CKUA Radio Archives. These assets were created by recordists acting on behalf of UAlberta and consist of literary readings, lectures, panel discussions, interviews, and classroom dialogues with the permission of the participants (primarily authors of fiction and poetry) at the time. A subset of thirty of the recordings were recorded and produced by UAlberta faculty and staff for broadcast by CKUA Radio during its former affiliation with the University of Alberta and are held in the University of Alberta Archives. An additional 97 reel-to-reel recordings, also held in those same archives, are planned for digitization in the near future.
These audio objects are not only important artifacts of cultural heritage deserving of preservation, they are also of potential value to literary scholars, teachers, students, artists, and interested members of the public. The UAlberta collection, in particular, documents several decades of Western Canadian literary activity and the intersection of those creative authors with a national and international network of writers and scholars. In the aggregate, the SpokenWeb network of sound recordings (currently numbering around seven thousand across the participating institutional and community partners) makes a significant and innovative contribution to research and teaching in literary and cultural studies. At the same time, the cross-disciplinary, multi-institutional practice of creating this networked archive of literary sound recordings is also making valuable contributions to the academic repertoire of best practices in managing complex, large-scale workflows such as collections development and documentation, open-source web technology design and cross-platform interoperability, innovative forms of public outreach and research dissemination such as podcasting, and, yes, rights management in the somewhat uncharted territory of literary audio recordings.
That is, the overall aim of the SpokenWeb project is to make these recordings available to researchers, students, academics, and interested members of the public; however, in order to do so it has been necessary for the UAlberta team to put in place a rights management process suitable for the Canadian copyright context in order to “unarchive” (Camlot and McLeod 9) the reel-to-reel or tape recordings and make them digitally available in an accessible database. As literary sound scholars Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod note, digitization creates possibilities for new forms of public engagement and meaning making, transforming and remaking the archival artifacts.3 Importantly, SpokenWeb UAlberta’s process takes into consideration, at each step, the rights of the representatives, seeking to respect and include them, if possible, in this process in an ethical and positive way. We strive in our work to rise to Bethany Nowviskie’s challenge of creating a more capacious humanities, seeking to “work effectively, simultaneously, and in deep empathy and interconnection with other fields and disciplines, across multiple, varied scales,” (par. 3) in making literary audio accessible not just to literature scholars but to any interested parties. Likewise, we draw on Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor’s call for a turn from an archival ethics characterized by a legalistic approach centered on individual rights to an affective one based on mutual obligation, care, and radical empathy (Caswell and Cifor 42).
Soliciting and securing copyright or moral rights permissions for a large collection of literary audio recordings is a complex undertaking and can seem overwhelming at times. The UAlberta archive of literary audio contains collections that include multiple recordings for any individual content creator, and many of those recordings in turn include content from multiple creators who collaborated on a performance together. Some content creators are easily contacted, but for others, the rights management team works with literary agents or estate authorities. The interpersonal element is also a challenge, as some permissions are easily secured from representatives,4 while others drag on and require creative problem solving. Thus, designing a process to allow our research team to secure and track permissions in an efficient and well-documented manner required careful planning and appropriate software support. In managing a project of ethical curation of audio objects, there is a fundamental need for: 1) careful communications, 2) detailed process tracking, 3) resource access management, and 4) standardized documentation and templates. This paper will outline each of these elements in turn in order to describe SpokenWeb UAlberta’s process of ethical audio curation.
Recent scholarship focused on the curation of literary audio recordings emphasizes the ethical obligations that accompany the tasks of digitizing and making accessible the audio recordings of creative authors. For example, T.L. Cowan’s 2020 article “Don’t you know that digitization is not enough?” emphasizes the vulnerability of many members of creative communities (they focus on trans-feminist and queer performers) and the need to protect the wellness of individuals through acts of “care-full” curation that requires “considering the responsibilities of researchers in the transmedial migration” of cultural performances (47). Similarly, scholars such as Nowviskie have called for a serious consideration and application of feminist care ethics in the digital humanities, refocusing attention on the people behind the data. This work in rights management mirrors Nowviskie’s definition of an ethic of care, reorienting in two ways the understanding of the practitioner: “The first is toward an appreciation of context, interdependence, and vulnerability—of fragile, little things and their interrelation. The second is an orientation not toward objective evaluation and judgment (as in the philosophical mainstream of ethics)—not, that is, toward criticism—but toward personal, worldly action and response” (par. 25). Therefore, the ethical angle of SpokenWeb UAlberta’s rights management framework is informed by a feminist understanding of care of—and for—particular, personal, and relational details as contained by and related to these recordings of literary audio under our stewardship.
Ethical curation also addresses concerns of moral rights as they are understood in the Canadian Copyright Act (R.S.C., Chapter C-42, Section 14), specifically as moral rights pertain to the creator’s right of paternity, integrity, and association. Creative artists are provided the opportunity to consider appropriate, consensual attribution; the value of the unedited preservation of the recorded event as a whole; and the inclusion of their performance in the SpokenWeb collection at varying levels of access.
In the field of information ethics, copyright can be considered an ethical principle enabling transparency because it “regulates the flow of information” (Turilli and Floridi 107). In order to ensure that copyright is used in an ethical manner, it is important to understand whether transparency is impairing or enabling the ethical use of information. To do so, disclosing details on “how such information was produced” (Turilli and Floridi 111) enables ethical principles in practice. A guiding principle of our approach to rights management that considers transparency as a component of information ethics is ensuring that highly detailed metadata, including provenance and rights statements that signify the careful communications and relationship-building taken throughout our rights management process are visible on collection objects, embedding our careful approach to ethical curation with the recording itself. The members of the SpokenWeb research consortium are cultural caretakers, scholars, and artists who are themselves members of communities of practice that value ethical relations first and foremost. Many of us have worked alongside, been mentored by, befriended, or supported the very individuals whose performances are preserved in these recordings. As such, we not only have an obligation to protect and nurture those relationships, it is also in the best interest of the SpokenWeb Project to maintain positive relationships with the creative artists without whom this networked archive would not exist. Indeed, literary audio recordings include a variety of audio-textual genres: public readings and discussions; impromptu performances; interviews; lectures; classroom teachings; and more informal and unscripted forms of exchange. As a result, not every instance of a recorded event has been carefully prepared. Participants are thereby potentially exposed to unwelcome scrutiny and criticism by audiences they did not envision at the moment of performance. SpokenWeb researchers are alert to such moments of possible exposure and prepared to treat these instances with judicious care and respect for the individuals involved.
With all of this in mind—and given the fact that in many cases the content creators to whom we reach out often have no recollection of the events in question or knowledge of the extant recordings—we have drafted a template letter for the initial approach (see Appendix A). The letter can be modified to suit specific purposes, but is primarily designed to fulfill several functions: alert the content creator to the existence of the recordings, educate them about the SpokenWeb Project and the terms that might govern the circulation of the recordings, provide them with temporary access to the recordings, and invite them into a conversation about our plans in order to address any questions or concerns they might have. To date, this strategy has been very successful. Almost all of the content creators, or their surviving family members or representatives, are excited to learn about these materials; almost all of them move quite quickly to granting permission to include the digital files in our Aviary collection for the purpose of streaming by students, scholars, and interested members of the public.
In advance of setting in motion the rights management process, then, O’Driscoll and Luyk drafted a recommendation with a proof-of-concept rights management process for the University of Alberta Copyright Office. They included intellectual property considerations such as a fair dealing5 analysis and examined the ethics of this work in the broader context of Canadian law and archival praxis. As part of that process, SpokenWeb UAlberta adapted a rights statement from Simon Fraser University’s Unarchiving the Margins collection (Kloepfer) and updated based on feedback from the University of Alberta’s Copyright Office. Copyright status is indicated by the use of the Rights Statements’ “In Copyright” statement (Rightsstatement.org). The rights statement was modified in August 2023 to reflect changes in the UAlberta SpokenWeb team makeup and to include links to the UofA-specific SpokenWeb website, which had gone live very recently. We deliberately did not consider Creative Commons licenses given the fact that we are for the most part working with living authors who wish to retain copyright to their works, and wanted to ensure their rights to their works were as clearly communicated as possible. Importantly, the rights statement, which effectively figures as a “take-down notice,” is itself an extension of the principle of careful communication and follows through on that in signaling to both end users and potential representatives the terms under which the recordings have been made available, and providing a pathway to redress should this give rise to any concerns.
Figure 1: Screen capture of the rights statement accompanying a file for streaming on Aviary
As mentioned previously, the SpokenWeb Project is committed to the ethical conduct of curatorial responsibilities, and so this entails that, regardless of the legalities of rights management, we work with the creators and their estates to ensure the well-being of everyone involved. This approach aligns with the International Association of Sound & Audiovisual Archives’ (IASA) “Ethical Principles for Sound and Audiovisual Archives,” which states that “‘Rights over performances are not coterminous with the current legislation. Even when a certain use of a creator’s or performer’s work is legal, it may not be ethical’” (“Ethical” par. 51). Our team makes every effort to reach out to, communicate, and work with the original content creators or their representatives (as the case may be) to ensure the well-being of everyone involved before going forward with publicization of recordings.
After O’Driscoll and Luyk’s proposal received approval from the UAlberta Copyright Office but before any outreach was made, the rights management team set itself to designing and implementing functional contact, tracking, and backup tools in order to track the process of finding and contacting the original content creators or their representatives. The template contact email (see Appendix A) was drafted by the team, with the specific purpose in mind to modify it according to each unique contact; O’Driscoll set up a dedicated SpokenWeb email address tied to the secure University of Alberta Gmail cloud server and a connected Drive folder to archive correspondence; and Luyk was instrumental in researching and setting up a project management board on Trello to replace an earlier Google Sheets tracking document, as Trello’s superior functionality and Kanban framework6 was necessary for what turned out to require many complex and often lengthy contact processes.
Figure 2: Sample text of SpokenWeb U of A’s template contact email. See Appendix A for full text.
On the Trello board, the rights management team quickly found that it was important to create separate cards for creators and for recordings, as it was necessary to secure rights from each stakeholder before making items publicly accessible in Aviary. Rights considerations for SpokenWeb materials are complex. For example, content creators might appear in multiple files, or a single file might contain readings by several different creators. Trello’s Kanban-based card and list system is able to account for these complexities. Further, disparate team members of SpokenWeb UAlberta are able to log in and immediately understand the status of certain files or rights holders, and to understand and contribute their thoughts to the rights management workflow in the moment. For example, the metadata for each file is handled by a research assistant who is not part of the rights management team, but since she is able to access the Trello board, she is able to be quickly informed of when a file and its associated metadata is ready for deposit to Aviary,7 and at what level of accessibility (private, public, restricted, or sometimes with a note from the stakeholder that they request to be associated with the file).
Figure 3: A screenshot of the Trello board used for rights management process tracking.
Transparency of the process is important for recordkeeping, since many of the representatives that were previously contacted by the rights management team in regard to digitized files from the first batch of recordings uploaded by SpokenWeb UAlberta will need to be re-contacted in order to secure permissions for the the second batch of files being processed. The template email contains a section regarding future permissions for files that may be discovered by SpokenWeb at a later date, although many rights holders do not respond with permission for potential files. The SpokenWeb UAlberta process is at first one of discovery, as unlabelled boxes and tapes are recovered from various archival or other sources (including but not limited to the corners of university offices, or the basements or sheds of previously-contacted rights holders), many not listened to since their original recordings, and so team members have no way of knowing if a previously-contacted representative will need to be reached out to at a future time in regards to another file. Accounting for that probability, the team keeps track of representatives’ responses to this section, noting whether further contact is requested or not (or simply not addressed). SpokenWeb UAlberta acknowledges that consent is an ongoing process, and the team tries to be prepared for eventualities in which representatives reach out with further requests. This has yet to happen, but the team is prepared in case of this.
The most important modification of the template email to reflect each unique audio file is a link (or multiple links) out to the audio of the recording in question, which has been trimmed and spliced when necessary (we otherwise don’t modify the actual recordings in any manner), timestamped (or indexed), and hosted either on the secure UofA Google Drive or on the university’s Aviary platform. These links give exclusive access to the addressee for a 30-day period, after which they expire and no longer grant access to the password-protected site; representatives have a month to respond to us, and we are very willing to re-generate access for as long as needed for representatives to reach a decision.
Patience is key here, and the process of informed consent for the publicization of these audio materials sometimes requires that we provide additional support or explanations as the rights holder considers the materials made available. Indeed, given that we are dealing regularly with elderly individuals or the surviving family members of a content creator, compassion is paramount. Of course, sometimes the correspondence simply falls silent, or we are just unable, after repeated and creative efforts, to locate and contact the content creator or their representatives. In that event, having done our due diligence, we will make the recording available to listeners, and rely on the takedown notice to provide recourse to any interested parties. In the longer term, that means the University of Alberta Library must be prepared to be responsive to any takedown requests, and the expectation is that the Library will continue as custodian of the materials in keeping with its own best practices.
The University of Alberta Library uses Aviary, a software-as-a-service platform, as its media repository for various collections documenting the wide-ranging intellectual outputs of the University of Alberta. SpokenWeb UAlberta uses Aviary for this purpose as well, and also as a project management tool to support access management to recordings in the rights management process. Aviary is the intended long-term access platform for these recordings to be streamed by researchers, students, teachers, and interested members of the public. All of the work that the rights management team is doing with permissions rests as the foundation and provides the structure for this end-result user experience: the ability to listen to literary audio from the past, including rarely or never-before-heard recordings of authors and poets such as Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Dorothy Livesay, P.K. Page, bpNichol, Steve McCaffery, and many, many others. Aviary has a granular access management framework which allows for media resources and their component parts (e.g. media files, metadata, indexes, transcripts, supplemental files) to be made accessible in one of three different ways:
Private: media resources are only accessible to authorized users, e.g. as determined by IP range, authentication group (UAlberta campus computing ID), or individual user account;
Restricted: media resources are accessible to users upon request. Users may navigate to a media resource and view its metadata, and request access to the recording and its constituent parts by submitting a form which is routed to specified approvers. The content in the request form and acceptance/denial message is fully configurable by us, so could include, for example, a click-through acceptance of a terms of use statement. Access to restricted items can also be time-limited, so that access would expire after a specified period of time; and
Public: media resources are available for public streaming. Anyone may freely access them, without requiring a user account.
Figure 4: Screen capture of the Aviary website with sound files available for streaming.
The rights management team may also specify whether or not items may be downloadable, regardless of access status, or whether those items may be available as streaming only. This framework provides the UAlberta SpokenWeb team with flexibility in how we provide access to each recording in the collection as we seek approval from rights holders, and so affords us the ability to accommodate multiple use cases dependent on rights management status.
In keeping with SpokenWeb UAlberta’s commitment to ethical curation, and given that our digitization, documentation, and rights management initiatives are still in process at the time of writing this, about 75% of our current 147 recordings on Aviary are publicly available. As new recordings are uploaded, and as we work to engage the rights holders on the balance of the collection, we will be in a good position to manage the workflow with confidence. Aviary works well for rights management, as members of the rights management team are able to generate exclusive file access for a set amount of time to allow the link holder to stream the audio, in order to listen to their recordings prior to determining if they should be made available. The original creators were recorded at a time far before the internet as we know it existed, and we assume that their expectations for file use and reach were understandably shaped by that particular historical context.
Kroon managed the SpokenWeb UAlberta official email, reaching out to representatives, using Trello to track the rights process and permissions granted, and backing all communication up to Google Drive. Reaching out to and maintaining relationships with representatives was necessarily impacted by whether Kroon contacted an individual content creator, their surviving family, an estate representative, literary agent, or publisher. When necessary, O’Driscoll could take over communications or initiate them using the official email as well, being on familiar terms with some representatives, for example, or able to answer more complex questions in his capacity as one of the lead academics on the project. Each case is different, sometimes in unpredictable ways, and so the rights management team and SpokenWeb research assistants use the Trello system and email to communicate and document unique permissions issues and deal with them on a case-by-case basis.
Figure 5: An example of the filing system used by SpokenWeb U of A rights management team.
As an illustration of the variance between cases, we have the instance of the response to our query from a literary agent representing the estate of a deceased writer (A) in contrast with a reply to a similar query from a widow who holds the rights to the literary estate of a deceased poet (B). When contacted, B was extremely enthusiastic about including her late husband’s work and keeping it accessible to the public, writing to us that “Anything that keeps [his] writing voice alive is always something I support without hesitation…. Thank-you again for your interest and initiative. I look forward to being in contact with you.” On the other hand, A was very firm in denying permission, claiming to be unable to open the private links we had sent to her in order to listen to and view the files in question and so she was unsure what was contained on the files. We responded with re-generated Aviary access and a detailed description of each file, including the metadata that we had at that time (transcripts were not available for either file, and one was missing an index/timestamping). A did not reply to our email and has not responded at this point in time.
The team at SpokenWeb UAlberta understands from first-hand experience that the rights process can be a complex matter even in Canada, especially when the writer has gained some fame within the broader community (or communities) of regional, national, or even international authors. There are several recordings that feature visiting writers or poets from other countries, and SpokenWeb UAlberta strives to reach out to the international bodies holding the rights to these works in order to better understand what is involved in a transnational rights-seeking process. Notable in this regard is the case of Vincent Buckley, a writer from Australia who had visited the University of Alberta and given a reading there, whose papers are currently held by the National Library of Australia (NLA). On contacting the NLA, Kroon was told that “the Library holds contact information for the family of Vincent Buckley, but due to privacy regulations is not able to give those details to the public” (unpublished email from the NLA, 2023). The email went on, however, to say that if SpokenWeb would provide contact details, the library would contact the family on our behalf and encourage them to contact us so we could speak directly.
This was and is part of a pattern that the team regularly encounters in initial communications. Up until very recently, if the rights holder was alive, the archive or library would simply pass us their contact details. Most archives that hold the fonds of the original content creator are very willing to contact any representatives on behalf of the project. However, the team has received emails from several libraries and archives in Canada citing privacy legislation as the reason for not being able to give out contact information for the rights holders we are seeking. They are required to contact the content creator or their estate first and, if they do not hear back with permission, then the library or archive cannot give us this information. This is understandable but frustrating, as at times this leads to an inability to contact the representatives in order to include them in the SpokenWeb project. We wish to respect the privacy of individuals at the same time as we are ethically driven to reach out to representatives, and negotiating this tension is a part of managing the SpokenWeb UAlberta rights process.
The purpose of digitizing and making available the SpokenWeb UAlberta recordings is to facilitate research, private study, and education. Because recordings in the collection are stored on obsolete media formats at risk of degradation and loss, and which are otherwise inaccessible for research and educational purposes, the only reasonable way to provide access is through digital means. Recordings in the SpokenWeb UAlberta collection represent unique, one-of-a-kind performances of literary works not available elsewhere—commercially or otherwise. Although many of the underlying works may be fixed in other media (e.g. books, commercial recordings of performances), they are not effective substitutes for these recordings of original material that were made sometimes years before the written work appeared, often augmented or edited in some way. Research and engagement with this literary culture requires access to complete performances/works. Published textual versions of works contained in SpokenWeb recordings, for example, are not considered equivalent substitutes. As one of the understood goals of copyright is to facilitate wider public dissemination of works, this project serves to benefit authors by showcasing their work. All authors are clearly acknowledged in metadata records attached to recordings, and the project actively seeks their involvement and engagement.
With all of the above in mind, it is crucial that the SpokenWeb UAlberta team manage the information and details of each recording with care, making sure to reach out with tact and sensitivity to representatives; we feel that ethical curation can only ever begin with informed consent as its baseline requirement. Having a robust management system for this complex process of rights management ensures that the team does not get caught up in the mechanical details of various technologies and documentation systems and are thus able to devote their full attention to the ethical considerations intrinsically bound up in the work. SpokenWeb UAlberta is therefore a demonstration of how project management in the humanities requires a system that is tailored to the specific needs of the project and allows for scholars to attend to relationships instead of struggling with their tools. Project management is a crucial part of the conceptual and intellectual infrastructure of this digital humanities project, therefore, as it allows for the research and learning work of everyone involved to advance unrestricted. Collaboration across the project has been made much easier by clear documentation, transparency of process, standardized templates, and more, as team members come on and off the project for various reasons. In this way, knowledge of the specifics of SpokenWeb UAlberta’s methods is accessible and continuous.
Camlot, Jason. Phonopoetics: The Making of Early Literary Recordings. Stanford University Press, 2019.
Camlot, Jason, and Katherine Mcleod. “Introduction: Unarchiving the Literary Event.” In CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event, edited by Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019. pp. 3–32. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvscxtkg.5.
———. “New Sonic Approaches in Literary Studies.” ESC: English Studies in Canada 46.2–4, 2020 (2023).
Caswell, Michelle and Marika Cifor. “From Human Rights to Feminist Ethics: Radical Empathy in the Archives.” Archivaria, vol. 81, 2016, p. 23–43. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/article/687705.
Cowan, T.L. “Don’t you know that digitization is not enough?” Moving Archives, edited by Linda M. Morra. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2020. pp. 43–56. https://doi.org/10.51644/9781771124041-005.
“Ethical Principles for Sound and Audiovisual Archives.” International Association of Sound & Audiovisual Archives (IASA), 2010, https://www.iasa-web.org/book/export/html/844. Accessed 20 Dec. 2023.
Kloepfer, David. “Unarchiving the Margins Collection: Special Collections and Rare Books.” Simon Fraser University Library: Special Collections, 6 Sep. 2023, https://www.lib.sfu.ca/about/branches-depts/special-collections/exhibits-projects/unarchiving-margins-collection#women-and-words. Accessed 19 Dec. 2023.
Leighton, Angela. Hearing Things: The Work of Sound in Literature. Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 2018.
Nowviskie, Bethany. “on capacity and care.” Bethany Nowviskie, 4 Oct. 2015, http://nowviskie.org/2015/on-capacity-and-care.
Snaith, Anna. Sound and Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2020.
Turilli, Matteo, and Luciano Floridi. “The ethics of information transparency.” Ethics and Information Technology, vol. 11, 2009, pp. 105–112. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-009-9187-9. Accessed 18 Dec. 2023.
Rightsstatement.org. “In Copyright.” Rights Statements. http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/.
UAlberta Copyright Office. “Fair Dealing.” University of Alberta. https://www.ualberta.ca/faculty-and-staff/copyright/intro-to-copyright-law/fair-dealing/index.html. Accessed 23 May 2024.
Viola, Helouíse Hellen de Godoi, and Marli Dias de Souza Pinto. “Digital Humanities and Visual Project Management: Use of Tools in Libraries.” Advanced Notes in Information Science, vol. 3, 2023, pp. 47–65, https://doi.org/10.47909/anis.978-9916-9906-1-2.47. Accessed 19 Dec. 2023.
Dear [Name],
I’m writing as a member of the University of Alberta SpokenWeb Project with some exciting news. We are the stewards of a collection of audio recordings made during the 1960’s–1980’s, [a number] of which feature you and your work. We are eager to make these recordings available to researchers, students, and members of the public through the University of Alberta Libraries Aviary Repository, and we’d like to explore that possibility with you. I've attached more information about SpokenWeb below.
Out of respect for the creative labour of the authors involved, we’re reaching out to the individuals who have made these recordings possible to inform them of our plans and solicit their feedback. We would like to make these recordings available to you for review, and invite you to inform us if you have any concerns about making them more publicly available.
Recordings in Aviary will include a rights statement that stipulates that they are for research and educational purposes only; all rights are reserved and future uses (e.g. commercial) require permission from the rights holders. The recordings will be available publicly for free through streaming only. In the event that a researcher or teacher wishes to download the file, any request would be evaluated on a case-by-case basis and would be restricted in use.
Our collection includes the following recordings that feature you and your creative work:
Title and Link.
Title and Link
Title and Link.
You can access these recordings by clicking on the link above and streaming the file on your computer, tablet, or phone. Each file has been made exclusively available to you for a thirty day period.
At the conclusion of that thirty day period, our hope is to make the recordings available as we’ve described, unless we receive from you a request to restrict access to a file, or any portion of a file. In the event that we do not receive a response from you, we will follow up and attempt other means of contact. If we are unable to, or do not receive a response, we will make the recordings available accompanied by a public take-down notice that will allow anyone to inform us of copyright or other concerns.
As we continue our work with this collection, we may discover further recordings that feature you and your work. If you wish, we can contact you again regarding any additional recordings. Please note that other institutional partners in the SpokenWeb network may also be in possession of recordings involving you, and may also be in touch. If you would like us to extend your consent to other recordings across the SpokenWeb Project, please inform us and we can do so at this time. Our hope is that you’ll find the prospect of making these recordings available as exciting as we do.
We are eager to hear back from you, whether to express your enthusiasm or to offer any concerns. We are very happy to address any questions you might have. Please contact us at the email address above, or feel free to reach out directly to Michael O’Driscoll, University of Alberta Professor and SpokenWeb Governing Board Member, at [email protected].
Thank you, and best regards,
[name and position]