Inconvenient Exposure: Managing Controversal Content in Digital Collections
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From wrongful arrests to genocide denial, our community collections are reaching more people in more places, and not everyone is happy about it. So, how do you handle online pushback about your digital collections? Is it censorship or good policy to remove a newspaper article from the collection because someone’s checkered past is affecting their present? What happens when a collection sheds new light on a controversy? This session will discuss a wide array of examples of individual and community response to controversial content online.
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Inconvenient Exposure: Managing Controversal Content in Digital Collections
- 1. Inconvenient Exposure: Managing controversial content in digital collections Jess Posgate Projects Coordinator OurDigitalWorld APLA Conference June 10, 2022
- 2. Four Waterloo College students reading a newspaper https://images.ourontario.ca/Laurier/29488/data
- 22. Rousseau Lake College Digital History. Yearbooks. https://images.ourontario.ca/RosseauLakeCollege/2817554/data?grd=1445
- 23. McHenry Public Library District Local History Digital Archive https://vitacollections.ca/mchenrypubliclibrary/3733139/page/15
- 26. Documents with the personal addresses, phone numbers and other contact information of living people Birth dates or birth announcements of living people Membership lists less than 50 years old (unless intended for the public record – (see above) Biographical information about a living person unless otherwise published or permitted for dissemination Recent photographs of individuals, including children, unless permission has been received. Items that might need to remain private can include:
- 28. The Bokan family share a meager meal marking three hundred days without the consumption of bread. https://vitacollections.ca/HREC-holodomorphotodirectory/3631568/data
- 29. Komlichenko, Tetiana. Original. https://vitacollections.ca/HREC- holodomordigitalcollections/3681241/data
- 37. Beach, Smiths Falls postcard, ca. 1970 https://vitacollections.ca/smithsfallsdigitalarchive/3754655/data
- 38. Thank you! Jess Posgate Projects Coordinator OurDigitalWorld jposgate@ourdigitalworld.org
- 39. References ❏ Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act https://laws- lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/p-8.6/ ❏ Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act https://www.ontario.ca/laws/statute/90f31 ❏ Google: Remove Your Personal Information from Google https://support.google.com/websearch/troubleshooter/3111061?hl=en ❏ VITA Toolkit: Removing Personal Information https://help.vitatoolkit.ca/3541867/data ❏ Wikipedia: The Right To Be Forgotten https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten ❏ Holodomor Research & Education Consortium https://holodomor.ca/ Digital Collections ❏ Rosseau Lake College Digital History https://images.ourontario.ca/RosseauLakeCollege/search ❏ McHenry Digital Collections http://vitacollections.ca/mchenrypubliclibrary/search ❏ HREC Digital Collections https://vitacollections.ca/HREC-holodomordigitalcollections/search ❏ FWIO Digital Collections https://collections.fwio.on.ca/ ❏ Laurier Library Images https://images.ourontario.ca/Laurier/search ❏ Smiths Falls Digital Archive https://vitacollections.ca/smithsfallsdigitalarchive/search
Editor's Notes
- Hello, thank you for joining me today and I hope you’re enjoying the conference. I am Jess Posgate, I’m the Projects Coordinator for OurDigitalWorld, a not for profit organization based in Ontario. I would like to acknowledge that I am speaking from the traditional lands of the St. Lawrence Iroquois, Wendat, Anishnabe, and Haudnishonee nations and that as a descendent of Scottish farmers in Ontario, I am keenly aware of my settler history and now strive to live on and work this land in the spirit of regeneration.
- Today, I want to talk about Inconvenient Exposures online. At OurDigitalWorld, we work with organizations to bring their community history and research collections online for public discovery. Our philosophy is to make public information publicly accessible, but there are some instances where we realize that these collections sometimes have personal - and political - impact and not necessarily in a good way.
- First, I want to take you through a scenario of personal information and local history - I’m sure many of you will be familiar with this kind of narrative.
- A young couple have a child, a daughter, in 1964. The father proudly walks down to the local newspaper office to put an announcement in next week’s paper. He wants his friends and family to know and also it’s a point of pride to announce a healthy new member of the family. Over the newspaper counter, he faithfully provides his name and his wife’s, their daughter’s name - let’s call her Cathy Wells - and weight, maybe her older siblings’ names, and the date of her birth. From today’s standpoint, you can already see some troublesome details being shared.
- But, in 1964, there were not such worries: The weekly newspaper was printed and delivered around the community, stuffed into mailboxes along rural routes, and shared over drinks at the local cafes and bars. Oh look, so and so had a baby girl. That’s nice. A copy goes to the local library for public use and is stored for preservation.
- Thirty years later, the library is moving to a new building or needs room for a new youth space and raises the funds to have all the old newspapers microfilmed. The footprint for storage is reduced, the bulky microfilm reader is a technological masterpiece, and the storage room is emptied.
- People from the community come into the library to browse through the microfilmed newspapers, looking for history on their relatives, their heritage homes or for school projects. Local newspaper staff use the microfilms to look back on crimes, disasters or honours that can be dragged out or celebrated as part of current events or in their research into larger stories. The Library keeps adding annual runs of the local newspaper to the microfilm cabinet. The collection grows.
- The 21st century comes, and the Internet. The Library realizes the value of making their community history collection available online and has the local newspaper on microfilm digitized along with a BMD index that volunteers have been compiling over the years. The resulting files and index go up into a public site and are searched by international search engines like Google.
- Now, here we are in 2014, let’s say, and one day - through no fault of her own - Cathy Wells finds herself “downsized” out of her job in an Insurance firm but isn’t able to retire quite yet, so she sets out to find another position in the field. She has a good career behind her and her resume reflects this. She is invited to multiple interviews but the positions keep slipping away.
- According to her colleagues in the field, the positions are being offered to younger candidates. She dyes her hair, has fresh looking skin and is in good shape. While she has quite a few years of work experience, her resume doesn’t include her age. A colleague suggests she do a “vanity” search, searching her own name - using her maiden name, the one she’s reclaimed after her divorce.
- Cathy Wells has since moved away from her home town and lost her parents but, following the tradition of announcing all the family milestones in the paper - her sister’s marriage and the births of her children, her brother’s graduation, Cathy’s first marriage - she also posts her parent’s death notices. She even includes suggested donations to services that match her parents’ values.
- Other news items record her brother’s one-time brush with some bad apples, her sister’s involvement with the Women’s Institute – anything newsworthy. When Cathy does her vanity search, every one of those records comes up. Her history is totally exposed. She writes to the library...
- In the immediate, Cathy is experiencing ageism in her field and realizes that having her birth date available online means anyone can know her age. This is the record she asks to have taken down from the online news collection. But other news, other records, can lead to more serious problems: It might be that her first marriage resulted in violence and her fleeing and hiding until she obtained her divorce and returned to her maiden name, but the newspaper item still binds her to that man and makes her feel vulnerable. Some people make personal requests for marriage announcements to be removed from the public collection, sometimes with their lawyers present.
- Perhaps Cathy’s brother, during the stupidity of his youth, was named in the local police blotter one week as charged with break and enter, theft and property damage. Sure he had a smart mouth then and ran with the crowd who were also named in the crime, but the week after those charges were laid against him they were summarily dropped when witnesses put him on a street corner far from the crime. The newspaper has moved on, the police blotter fills with other misdemeanours, and no one looks back. But now, when Cathy’s brother - or his potential employer, or a woman he wants to date, or babysitters for his kids - Google his name, the charges and description of the crime comes up, not the pardon. So, you can see where some of the problems lie with these kinds of records. In all cases, the Library is contacted to manage these items, items that are officially in the public record, but that have been publicized and are so far reaching that they are considered to be jeopardizing peoples’ privacy, their safety, or their reputation.
- It’s a quandary, because we want local history and community heritage collections to be accessible and shared widely. We love that newspapers, especially, are such a treasure trove of genealogical and historical information about our towns and townspeople. Having this online means we can make connections, drawing from collections and records from all over to see a bigger picture or draw a line on a family tree, to better understand people as individuals as well as the collective history of our communities.
- This is all fine and good when the objects of our research are part of the deeper past, of people already dead when their legacy is relatively static. However, as more current material comes online and we are able to find and share information about people who are still living - wherever they are - we need to consider the legal and personal implications of the public record and therefore come up with some tactics to handle requests from the public for changes to that public record.
- Most of the organizations we work with have been very swift to come up with policies for handling personal information requests. Obviously, this pertains to individuals like our Cathy Wells, not so much to people with larger political or commercial careers and personalities. For newspaper collections, most organizations will accept and act upon written requests for information or record removals. When thinking about writing such a policy, though, if the item names someone convicted of a crime, would you want to have that expunged from the public record, would you require a legal request rather than a personal? These are things to consider. Working with Newspaper Content Practically speaking, if the item is an index record (like this one), it’s very easy to simply “turn it off” and the search engines will not be able to crawl it and deliver that record back from their index.
- For full text newspaper content, there are a few steps that need to be taken. You can turn “off” the display of the page entirely which will affect the presentation of the issue as well as removing any other news items on that page from the collection) or just retract the full text that matches the personal information request - making sure that you have access to every version of the text files running in your system.
- In VITA, you can “Turn off indexing” for the page text though search engines will thwart this or remove all the full text for the page and simply present the image of it for human browsing.
- It used to be that just the full text was crawled and indexed for discovery and by search engines but more recently Google especially has developed an automatic OCR process wherein it can find a PDF page image and will automatically process that page with OCR so that the text is searchable in Google. So, now we work with organizations to do all of the above and replace the accompanying PDF file with a dummy PDF. This way, the local search site won’t return the name or full text from that page but users can still “see” and read the page if they go to it directly, and when Google crawls the site and snatches up the PDF it pulls the dummy file and can only OCR those words.
- Further to this work in the actual collection, ODW - as the website owner - also puts in a removal request with Google. There are two tiers to this: removal of outdated content for removed or altered content on the web; or a legal request can be made directly to Google to remove content with personal or legal issues. We usually employ the “outdated content” removal workflow after making the changes in the VITA site content. This is done by entering the URL where the content is found - e.g. the PDF that Google made searchable or an image URL. The trick with any of these examples is that any written requests for information take-down *must* be accompanied by the URL of the page or pages where the information was located.
- Moving away from our Cathy Wells scenario, I want to address other types of documents where personal information is exposed.
- Yearbooks Where these requests get a little fuzzier is in material that was *not* intended for broad public dissemination. School records like yearbooks, for example, are created and printed for distribution to a finite group of staff and students, and as part of the school’s organizational memory. Yearbooks, however, are also a point of pride in community history, and some organizations are digitizing these and making them available online as well. But, we have seen personal information removal requests for information in yearbooks - someone adamantly did not want to be associated with a particular school for whatever reason. We’ve also seen personal information included in yearbooks from small schools in remote towns where every student’s name and phone number or street address was included. In that case, those pages were kept non-public because in many cases, either the students or their parents still use that contact information.
- The same techniques would be used as for newspapers to remove identifying details and private information from items like yearbooks. Reviewing the items beforehand, though, means the organization can proactively suppress any blatant private information before the items go online and are indexed locally and then by search engines. Organizations like Wilfrid laurier University will remove student names and/or photographs by request, but are digitizing and uploading collections of all kinds including convocation programs, photographs, the school newspaper, news releases - after checking for names and contact information - and have university and registrar support in digitizing and making the collection public.
- Other community documents The Federated Women’s Institutes of Ontario have a fastidious approach to privacy and personal information. Their digitization project covers a massive number of documents and volumes produced by Women’s Institute branches from across Ontario. One key activity of the Women’s Institutes is to officially record community histories in the Tweedsmuir History Books, something they have been doing since 1947 and which are intended for public use and circulation.
- But the WI branches also have other documentation stretching back to 1897 since the FWIO’s inception. Because the majority of the material they have produced is from the last 75 years, much of it includes information about members who are potentially still living or only recently deceased. The FWIO, respecting its members and the fact that the documentation is - like the yearbooks - really meant for local dissemination, review every document and apply certain rules to ensure a consistent protocol for the release of private information. Items in their collection meant for public dissemination like books, newspaper clippings, plaques, etc, are exempt from privacy restrictions. However, non-exempt items that might need to remain private can include: Documents with the personal addresses, phone numbers and other contact information of living people Birth dates or birth announcements of living people Membership lists less than 50 years old (unless intended for the public record - see above) Biographical information about a living person unless otherwise published or permitted for dissemination Recent photographs of individuals, including children, unless permission has been received. Generally the group follows the mandate that minutes or other record books less than 50 years old should remain private and not be put on a website, as most contain privacy issues, such as membership list and keeps those full document non-public. Doing this before online publication means they will not be discovered and searchable until released. The 50 year range is something the FWIO has chosen to follow as a rule of thumb, even though other sources suggest 30 and even 20 lapsed years is sufficient. These kinds of decisions should be made internally and documented to ensure consistent treatment across the collection. This also begs the question of how to include this in the workflow for the future. How will you flag when an item *can* be made public? Who is delegated to do so. Similarly, this might affect any policies regarding privacy/personal information requests and whether they would have an expiry date.
- The Right to be Forgotten There is some legislation around these kinds of requests, called the Right to be Forgotten, but it is not something that is in place in North America so it’s very much a grassroots effort to effect the appropriate change by having local policies that make sense for the communities they serve. Suppression On the other hand, what if your work is to share information you don’t *want* to be forgotten or suppressed? This is the case with many advocacy and solidarity groups who are exposing current and historical conflicts online through controversial collections. We also see politically motivated suppression of information - even here in Canada, when only recently, the government decided to release documentation from Residential Schools, saying now they “don’t need” approval from the Church. Once those documents are open, there’s no question the anguish they will cause, but their exposure also reveals a long part of Canadian history and the shaping of its people.
- Holodomor Controversial history is not new, and handling personal attacks is something we’re all familiar with. We know that anonymity on the internet is a perfect curtain for “haters” who shield themselves while targeting groups or individuals whose collections reveal events or beliefs that don’t match their own version of the universe. On an individual or social level we see this in open forums like comments and so on, which - with our tools - need to be approved before they’re made public. But a systematic attack is something our team had never seen until we started working with the Holodomor Research and Education Consortium. The timing of this seems an amazing coincidence with the current crisis in Ukraine, because the Holodomor Digital Collections documents and exposes survivor and witness accounts and photographs of the Ukrainian Famine of 1933-34. In their words, the Holodomor was “The death through starvation of about four million people in Soviet Ukraine, mainly Ukrainian peasants, in a famine caused by the policies of Communist Party and Soviet government authorities headed by Josef Stalin. Recognized already in 1933 as a great national tragedy by Ukrainians living outside of the Soviet Union, discussion of the Famine was proscribed and its occurrence officially denied in the USSR until late 1987.” This group - and others - gather, discuss and disseminate resources for genocide researchers and other scholars. HREC had access to an astonishing collection of photos and correspondence that they wanted to make available online. The collections include a photo directory that presents and describes dozens of photographs, storyboards and photographer biographies. The photos were mostly taken surreptitiously by a few foreign visitors and then smuggled out of Ukraine and used to publicize the events there. The one domestic photographer, Nikolai Bokan, suffered severe punishment for photographing and publicizing the atrocities he documented.
- The other main collection of first-hand testimony is captured in the Maniak Letters. This will ultimately amount to about 500 handwritten letters penned in Ukrainian and Russian. The letters are accompanied by transcriptions and translations, and describe a host of atrocities and hardship. HREC and ODW have worked together to bring the material to a public, online platform with full text search in Ukrainian, Russian and English to ensure that their discovery reaches the widest audience possible.
- Photo Directory 2020 The impact and response of the release of these collections was immediate: our analytics show that the collection is being searched and accessed by communities across the globe. These screenshots show the public site access, but according to our team, a number of internal server attacks also started in 2020.
- Photo Directory 2021
- Digital Collections 2020 These attacks have largely taken the form of attempts to login remotely as administrator. Given that we have always done remote administration, a variety of defences were already in place, but server security has had to be tightened over the course of the last two years and so far, this has proved sufficient: there have been no signs of successful penetration of the security. To illustrate, the attacks are significant: the weekend before last we saw 16 or so attempts per second, almost 14 thousand on that weekend. There were over 134 million attempts last year.
- Digital Collections 2021
- We can’t absolutely pinpoint the attacks to the HREC collections, BUT we had never been attacked like this before and the logs show the originating location of the attacks so it’s hard not to draw conclusions.
- Conclusion Deciding which collections we want to share used to be based on very practical considerations: preservation of the original and most popular items or, in the case of the newspaper microfilm, about space, access and human resources. As the internet becomes more ubiquitous and tools more powerful, now we have to consider the larger effects and impacts because of the international reach we can accomplish online. Local or community history has considerable and growing value and you are the stewards of those unique collections and their contents. By taking some thoughtful steps ahead of any digitization project or collection release, you can manage any and all responses. Engage the online community - yes! And also prepare to keep some things private and to handle requests like the ones I’ve mentioned. In the case of the Holodomor collections, there is no obvious way to change the minds behind a politically motivated, systematic attempt to suppress inconvenient history, but it is worth realizing that this is a possibility and recognize the steps that might need to be taken to maintain that information online for the rest of society.