2020Q3 Reports: Anthology Director

Updates

I will start with updates on issues from The Q1 report.

• New ID format. We have successfully converted to the new ID format, and are using it for all data ingested into the Anthology since January 1, 2020 (including volumes from prior years).
• Hiring an Assistant. I have done an informal search through word of mouth without success. I will soon post an advertisement in the usual places to begin this search. Anthology issues continue to be very time-consuming (I could easily spend 10–20 hours per week on issues related to maintenance, ingestion, and planning), and I am hopeful that this will help.
• Videos. These continue to be a problem; many are not ingested, and the process for doing so remains an externality. This is one of the first things I hope to have the assistant tackle. We hope to have ACL videos ingested by September; the issue is a bit complicated by the new vendor we used (Slideslive).
• Backfilling the catalog. We now have all of IWPT. The LiLT journal should be completed within the next week. The MT Archive has been digitized but not yet ingested, in part because it requires many time-consuming editorial decisions. We have some money left from IAMT to help with this process.

Legal issues and Copyright

I had a conversation recently with the ACL lawyer. I will send a written summary to the Exec mailing list. The bottom line is that the Anthology needs to straighten out its copyright situation. A few points:

• It's is helpful that we obtain a copyright transfer, because it simplifies matters, but there are situations where (a) the authors refuse to sign this form and (b) the authors sign it but may not be authorized to do so. The lawyer is going to review our transfer form and provide advice here. This is going to add work that I am hoping can be addressed with paid (rather than volunteer) labor.
• We should take care to ensure that we have documented license when we host third-party materials. I see this as important because we are increasingly receiving requests to host such material.

On another point, the Anthology currently provides data under two licenses: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 for material prior to 2016, and CC BY 4.0 for data afterwards. Inquiries I've made suggest this was decided in a somewhat ad-hoc manner. This is an issue the Exec should consider. I propose to simplify things by making all data in the Anthology available under a single CC BY 4.0 license.