Tag: 11. Januar 2008

Wikimedia Commons.

(c) Giovanni Dall’Orto

http://erc.europa.eu/pdf/ScC_Guidelines_Open_Access_revised_Dec07_FINAL.pdf

The importance of open access to primary data, old manuscripts, collections and archives is even more acute for SSH. In the social sciences many primary or secondary data, such as social survey data and statistical data, exist in the public domain, but usually at national level. In the case of the humanities, open access to primary sources (such as archives, manuscripts and collections) is often hindered by private (or even public or nation-state) ownership which permits access either on a highly selective basis or not at all.

From the Open Access mandate.

(an English version of http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/4606498 )

Publishing digitized versions of programmatic or propagandistic nazi material is always a difficult issue. I think that, generally, such texts must be part of any truly universal retro digitization project, and that they are part of the historical material that digital libraries must provide. That said, publications should contain scholarly introductions or at least a classification with some historical background. In some legislations (e. g. in Germany) these may even be necessary in order to distinguish educational historical material from propaganda published for political reasons.

As Klaus Graf already pointed out on Archivalia in August 2007 (Link), the internet archive “https://archive.org” in its all-in approach to preserving everything does not distinguish anything at all, and hence has become a veritable platform for neo nazis. There are more or less educational historic nazi pamphlets (Link), but also dozens of newer and newest texts from Holocaust deniers (Link). I doubt that they have been uploaded for historical research, since they are propagandistic in nature as well as commonly used by neo-nazis until today.

All this is still documentation, albeit documentation taken too far for my taste, and also much too far for German and Austrian laws.

Now what is really outrageous is that introductions and commentaries on the historical sources are propagandistic in nature (Link):

Daß diese alte Schrift „ausschließlich zu Zwecken des wissenschaftlichen Studierens“ gedacht ist, versteht sich von selbst. Die in ihr dargelegten Worte sind klarer Natur und sprechen für sich. Möge ihr Geist auch über 70 Jahre nach ihrer Niederschrift, unter völlig veränderten Zuständen, wirken!

(My translation: „It’s obvious that this old work is “only for scholarly studies” [ironically citing the exemption in German laws that allows publication of otherwise banned nazi works] The words herein are of a clear nature and speak for themselves. May their spirit take effect even 70 years after writing, in completely different states of things.“)

This is the introduction to https://archive.org’s scan of the nazi pamphlet „Die Frauenfrage und ihre Loesung durch den Nationalsozialismus“ (The question of women’s rights and its solution by National Socialism), written in 1933 by Paula Siber von Groote, head of division at the Ministery of the Interior of Nazi Germany.

This is not retro digitization or documentation anymore, it is propaganda of the worst kind, in the front matter (= meta data) of an https://archive.org scan. https://Archive.org should part with contributors like this uploader quickly and thoroughly.

Update: https://www.archive.org/iathreads/post-view.php?id=175053