In a posting describing the relationship of the creative commons license to interoperability of resources on the Internet, Lessig describes how a 14 year old girl might prepare a school report on the Hurriance Katrinia disaster in New Orleans:

“Imagine she finds an archive with sound recordings of victims of the flood. Then she finds collections of news programs, reporting on the flood. Finally she finds some polling data asking about the response the American government should make to the flood, and about views about the responses the government has already made.

Then using these different voices, films, and descriptions, your daughter creates a short film of her own. She integrates the voices from the sound archive as narration, and then takes short clips from the news programs to show differing views.”

While this ficitonal child displays extraordinary skill with the Internet and technology, any of us who have been around teens lately know that it’s not necessary so far-fetched. So, imagine 15 years from now when this child is an assistant professor somewhere and publishing her research in the same style, as multimedia documents. What type of scholarly publications will need to exist to present such “essays”? What type of assistance will such faculty need from a university? Certainly there will need to be some level of technical assistance, though future faculty are more likely to be tech savvy than today’s faculty. Supportive policies regarding non-traditional (i.e., non-print) scholarship will need to be in place. But, perhaps, as much as anything, support for content will be one of the most critical aspects of digital scholarship. Future scholars will need to easily search and utilize the intellectual content that is maintained within digital libraries.

Libraries make digital scholarship possible but only if the content can be re-purposed by the scholar. Take the word “digital” out of the previous sentence and the sentence describes a significant function of the research library. Traditional libraries have made scholarship through fair use that utilizes a standard method of citations and footnotes. Through the Creative Commons, Lessig is trying to build a method of attribution for digital content that is not encumbered by restrictive digital rights. While all the parameters and methodologies for specifying attribution of content via fair use are not yet in place, developers of digital libraries should be thinking about how to implement such technical features into their systems.

While most content in digital libraries is in the public domain, many archives and libraries have placed unnecessary restrictions that limit the use of those materials. Some of these practices are based on traditional archival policies of requiring permissions for reproduction and the payment of usage fees. In a speech to the Society of American Archivists Peter Hirtle addresses the economic potential of archival collections while urging archivists to balance funding needs with the core value of making materials available to researchers. Most of the institutions that have carried over the practice of permission requirements and usage fees for digital content likely have done so without questioning the implications for digital scholarship.

Hirtle identifies that a level of quasi-copyright has emerged among archives which place restrictions based on their physical ownership of material. Brooklyn Law School professor Jason Mazzone refers to this practice as copyfraud. Even without copyright some libraries have implemented licensing agreements based on state contract law via their Web sites that restrict the use of content in digital libraries. While the legality of these agreements is questionable and may vary from state to state, it’s an unnecessary impediment towards the full realization of digital scholarship. The implications of traditional archival policies towards usage of content should be re-examined unless digital libraries are to remain view-only repositories.

In an Educause article David Seaman described today’s digital libraries as only providing users with a “passive engagement” with content:

Libraries create high-quality digital masters for long-term preservation and reuse but then typically expose only one view of a file to the user, in one particular search-and-display software package. This serves one type of need but underserves others, reducing options for the reshaping and combining of content by teachers, librarians, and other users.

The potential to reshape content is a distinctive feature of digital scholarship, though it is currently the most underdeveloped aspect of digital libraries. Seaman refers to content with this recombinant characteristic as malleable.

Malleable content is, in actuality, one of the hallmarks of the traditional library in that libraries allow scholars to build upon the simple concepts of prior research and original source materials. In this sense, through the use of footnotes and citations, all text works can be considered malleable. If scholarship is a scholar’s ability to analyze, contextualize, and enrich the findings of other researchers, then digital libraries must support the scholar’s ability to creatively express these connections through digital media.