HCA Scholarly Articles

An overview of essential legal concepts and strategies, this chapter synthesizes the ideas, questions, and legal issues that arise in relation to 3D data. Case studies provide scenarios based on real-world situations that will help readers recognize legal and policy issues. Readers will have a framework for thoughtful decision making that is consistent with their particular mission.

We begin with a general overview of US Copyright Law and then focus on case law that is relevant for understanding the legal status of 3D models. Case studies focus on creation or acquisition methodologies including: institutional photogrammetryi of an object, indigenous community and non-profit organization partnership to digitally document and preserve cultural artifacts, transferring ownership of 3D data to an institutional repository, and a complex researcher-developed 3D model. These case studies are used to provide relevant illustrations of practices and situations that may prompt legal questions, but we also recommend considering more complex ethical issues early on. These case studies will help readers recognize legal and policy issues that may be relevant to their current practices in 3D creation and dissemination, and review will emphasize expectations under both open and restricted accessii scenarios, including contracts and licensing. In certain case studies, expansions are included to highlight additional domain-specific questions.

A band of archivists and IT professionals at Harvard took on a project to convert nearly two million descriptions of archival collection components from marked-up text into the ArchivesSpace archival metadata management system. Starting in the mid-1990s, Harvard was an alpha implementer of EAD, an SGML (later XML) text markup language for electronic inventories, indexes, and finding aids that archivists use to wend their way through the sometimes quirky filing systems that bureaucracies establish for their records or the utter chaos in which some individuals keep their personal archives. These pathfinder documents, designed to cope with messy reality, can themselves be difficult to classify. Portions of them are rigorously structured, while other parts are narrative. Early documents predate the establishment of the standard; many feature idiosyncratic encoding that had been through several machine conversions, while others were freshly encoded and fairly consistent. In this paper, we will cover the practical and technical challenges involved in preparing a large (900MiB) corpus of XML for ingest into an open-source archival information system (ArchivesSpace). This case study will give an overview of the project, discuss problem discovery and problem solving, and address the technical challenges, analysis, solutions, and decisions and provide information on the tools produced and lessons learned. The authors of this piece are Kate Bowers, Collections Services Archivist for Metadata, Systems, and Standards at the Harvard University Archive, and Dave Mayo, a Digital Library Software Engineer for Harvard’s Library and Technology Services. Kate was heavily involved in both metadata analysis and later problem solving, while Dave was the sole full-time developer assigned to the migration project.

This paper critically examines the concept of intellectual freedom (IF) and the central role it plays in the U.S. library and information science (LIS) profession, challenging the concept’s assumed basis in neutrality and demonstrating the active barrier it presents in its current implementation to existing and future social justice efforts. Thee paper argues that if LIS is to move from making ineffective calls for equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) to actively working for justice within and beyond the field, then it must adopt an understanding of IF that fundamentally considers the sociohistorical context of power in LIS, the United States, and the world.

Contemporary virtual reality systems enable academics to more efficiently explore and analyze complex three-dimensional (3D) content, but their utility is limited by visual short-term memory. Janus, a geometry agnostic shader script, circumvents this cognitive limitation by automatically rendering complex object meshes to fit entirely within the field-of-view of consumer head mounted displays. The resulting 360° vision experience represents an advantage over existing scientific data visualization tools, which have sought to replicate real-world viewing experiences but have inadvertently replicated associated limitations as well. By presenting data in such a way so as to effectively circumvent cognitive loads associated with body (or object) movement, academics can use the Janus shader to more readily engage in the exploratory analysis of complex 3D data sets, thereby facilitating scientific insight. This paper explores the motivations and design of the Janus shader, and describes preliminary results from user testing conducted under controlled conditions. For the 24 study participants (N=24), statistically significant time-to-completion decreases were observed for spatial analysis tasks taking place in intervention (Janus-enabled) VR scenes of low to moderate complexity.