Accessibility and Integrity of Networked Information Collections Page: 61
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loosing the "essence" of this content. This relatively high level of standardization is
facilitated by the fact that methods of presentation are well established and fairly
simple-one listens to sound and views movies. The experience is not interactive. But,
when we consider the new electronic "works," it is clear that they can only be
apprehended by the human senses and the human brain interacting with a computer
system that includes software and various input and output devices. The experience of
these works is complex and interactive; a work can be viewed or experienced in many
different ways. Further, other intuitive measures of a work are lost; for example,
browsing a printed work gives the browser a sense of the amount of information that
the work contains. It is unclear how to measure the amount of information that is
contained in a multimedia database.
There is enormous variation among the capabilities of these computer mediators, and
too few (or too many) standards. Material may be converted and transferred or
displayed in many forms; these transformations can cause major changes in both the
presentation and the intellectual content and thus threaten the integrity of the work.
Worse, in many cases the content of the work is inextricably bound with the access
methods used to view (and navigate within) the work. It is impossible to separate
content from presentation of viewing. This inability to isolate intellectual content calls
into question the long term and broad based accessibility of works.
Presentation and Content Standards
Standards are needed that permit intellectual content to be encoded into a work in a
way that is independent of any specific access software; this is needed to ensure that
material can be viewed from any appropriately configured platform, and ensures that
the work can outlive specific hardware or software technologies. This is both a
preservation issue-ensuring that the work will be available for the foreseeable
future-and a portability issue, ensuring that the work will be available from multiple
hardware platforms today or in the near future. Today, few useful standards exist, and,
for various reasons, those that do are not widely adopted as vehicles for distributing
electronic information. Worse: it is becoming increasingly clear that there is a serious
lack of consensus as to where intellectual content stops and presentation begins,66
and the extent to which information providers such as publishers are prepared to
distribute content as opposed to specific presentations of content. This controversy has
had a considerable impact on the development and acceptance of relevant standards,
and most standards currently seeing broad use tend to encode presentation along with
content rather than separating the two.
66 This ambiguity between form and content has very significant implications fOr copyright. A number of
information providers seem to be taking the position that by simply reformatting or marking up out of
copyright works they can return the specific representation of the work to copyright control. This is not
necessarily a bad thing, as the availability of out of copyright works in marked up forms such as the
encoding specified by the Text Encoding Initiative program adds substantial value, and the copyright
protection protects the investment of the companies doing the markup, but it is a source of considerable
uncertainty and confusion.61
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United States. Congress. Office of Technology Assessment. Accessibility and Integrity of Networked Information Collections, report, August 1993; [Washington D.C.]. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc39703/m1/67/: accessed April 2, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; crediting UNT Libraries Government Documents Department.