Interesting piece today in the Chronicle (article available only to subscribers, unfortunately) about multimedia dissertations and the challenges they present. Usual suspects, few surprises: format, storage and retrieval, citation (that one’s pretty well under control), and copyright. Still, a very interesting set of examples and a useful overview of the state of the question. These dissertations will only become more numerous as time goes by. Sooner or later we must have some definitive rulings on fair use. Larry Lessig’s and his colleagues’ work at the Electronic Frontier Foundation is more important than ever in this respect.

The one wrinkle that I didn’t see coming was the authoring platform for this particular multimedia diss. The author had used TK3, but agreed to port the work to a truly open-source/open-standards platform currently under development called “Sophie.” As it turns out, the same folks who developed TK3 are also developing Sophie.

Perhaps librarians will save the day again, as they have so often in the past. If the archival standards mandated by official academic repositories specify open-source/open-standards platforms and public accessibility, uniform authoring platforms and fair-use claims will follow. Perhaps one day the materials with which we aggregate, shape, and present our digital creations will be as ubiquitous and interoperable as paper and ink–or close to it, anyway.