Preservation, Description and Preservation, Description and Access Concerns for Archives Access Concerns for Archives and Manuscripts Materials in a and Manuscripts Materials in a

Digital WorldDigital World

Anne GillilandSummer School in the Study of Old Books

Zadar, Croatia, October 1, 2009

Goals• Review key archival ideas and principles

in traditional practice

• Discuss how those ideas and principles faring in the digital context

• Identify areas where research is needed to support archives and archival practices in the future

The OpportunitiesThe Opportunities

• New forms of digital documentation of bureaucratic, scholarly and personal activities

• Ability to collocate, disseminate and analyze traditional as well as these new documentary sources in unprecedented ways

The ChallengesThe Challenges• To continue to acquire and process large backlogs of traditional

materials

• To select, digitize, curate and make available archival holdings online

• To create, identify, acquire, describe and disseminate born-digital materials of archival value

• To stay abreast of increasingly complex and multinational policy questions relating to ownership, provenance, privacy and cultural sensitivities

• To implement preservation regimes and infrastructures that meet archival and evidentiary requirements for reliability and authenticity of analog, digitized and born-digital materials

Questions emergingQuestions emerging• What will the archives of the future look like?

• How might archival notions of the record, evidence, permanence, uniqueness, authenticity, ownership, and custody be shifting?

• Which archival approaches continue to work in the digital age, which might be relevant for other information practices, which need to be enhanced, and which might even be abandoned?

• What might spreading responsibility for archiving activities mean for the trust we place in the archived record?

“Authors in the Nineteenth century who sought to give a more precise meaning to the word archives gave contradictory definitions of it because they followed preconceived ideas, like Ménage and Le Duchat before them. We have seen that in the predominant thought of the first of these etymologists his conception of archives was that of ancient documents; for the second, it was the idea of precious documents. Several modern authors attach to the word archives other conceptions just as little satisfactory in themselves, e.g., that of official documents, of historical documents, of authentic documents, of documents in substantiation of rights.

In actual practice, if archives are in fact composed above all of documents in great part in one or another of these categories and sometimes in all of these, it does not mean that there may not be found in the archives documents which are neither ancient nor precious nor official nor authentic nor such as substantiate rights …”

-- Charles Samarand, 1938, Professor of Bibliography and Archivistics, École nationale des Chartes, Paris and future Director General of the National Archives of France

Whether as a notion, impression, concept or anti-concept, the image of the archive is a useful focal point for bringing together issues of representation, interpretation and reason with questions of identity, evidence and authenticity; in other words, just those issues that tend to concern those who work on those kinds of problems that typically characterize the history and historiography of the human and cultural sciences.

-- Thomas Osborne, sociology scholar, “The Ordinariness of the Archive,” 1999.

… The possibilities of Archives as evidence, as correctives of the more or less ex parte statements of contemporaries or later

commentators on events … -- Sir Hilary Jenkinson, Archivist, U.K. Public Records Office, 1944.

Scope of the archiveScope of the archive

“A collective shift has taken place during the past century from a juridical-administrative justification for archives grounded in the concepts of the state to a sociocultural justification for archives grounded in wider public policy and public use” -- Terry Cook

• Institutional archives• Collecting archives/special collections• The “total archive”

Impact of the digital on the Impact of the digital on the traditional repositorytraditional repository

• Not well understood yet. A moving target.

• Use of both digital and physical archives seems to be increasing

• What role should archival mediation play in the digital archive in cases where users never interact with a physical repository or archivist?

• How best should digital or digitized collections be promoted to users? Is there a role for digital curation?

• Non-custodial and post-custodial roles?

New models for archives

• Archives and institutional or other digital repositories

• Community archives• Open Archival Information Systems• Digital curatorship

The nature of the recordThe nature of the record• The unconscious, usually unique, by-product of bureaucratic

activity. It is transferred to the archives when it is no longer active but has permanent legal, fiscal, administrative or research value (bureaucratic evidence)

• To be considered authentic, it must be fixed, set aside, and entered into the archival bond according to its provenance.

vs.

• Any object in any form or media, however created, that serves to record or document human processes and experiences (the human record)

• Evidence that has ongoing value• Might be mutable, dynamic, of unclear or multiple provenance,

and unclear whether it is original, a copy, or a derivative• Might never be physically acquired

Role of activity/function in records creation

• Records serve as organizational, individual, or cultural memory

• Organizations need accurate records in order to function

• Records are organically related to the activity or function by which they were created

Importance of collectivity

• Since records are the products of ongoing, organic activity, and naturally accumulate over time, they are best understood when maintained and viewed collectively

• Individual documents taken out of their documentary context may become less valuable as evidence and information

Respect des Fonds

• Archives as organic entities

• Impact of records management and appraisal

• Total archives, digital repositories and virtual collections

Principle of Provenance

• Retaining and describing archival holdings according to their creator or collector

• Hard for users in an unmediated environment

• Notion of provenance is increasingly complicated with digital authorship

• Principle of Pertinence and subject access

Sanctity of Original Order• Maintaining the physical order in which archival materials

were generated and received

vs.

• Documenting the original order and then providing multiple views or end-user tools that can re-order the materials virtually

• Facilitating item-level as well as collection-level description and access

The myth of neutrality in records• Records are purposeful documents created for

specific reasons

• Records serve the vision and purpose of their creator

• Records are socially constructed entities and this can be reflected in their documentary form

• Records are created and kept by elites and reflect dominant narratives

Archival neutrality

• Archives serve as a disinterested third party in the long-term management of bureaucratic records, thus ensuring their authenticity and the ongoing accumulation of evidence

BUT

• Most modern archives participate in records management, appraisal and description

• Some archives engage in the design of active record-keeping systems and/or documentary projects

“Appraisal occurs primarily today on the records of

yesterday to create a past for tomorrow. What kind of past should the future have?” -- Terry

Cook, archival scholar and educator

Archivists as cultural agents

• Documenting the process of governance, not just of governments - makes archivists active mediators in shaping collective memory through archives (Cook)

• Primary sites of agency are appraisal and description activities

Archivists as activists

• Correcting• Redressing• Documenting• Advocating• Assisting• Pluralising• Building meta-institutional ontologies and

collections

Appraisal in a digital worldAppraisal in a digital world• Possibly cheaper and easier to store everything and not

do appraisal– Abundance of digital documentation now being created

captures more aspects of contemporary society and institutional and disciplinary practices than in traditional archival holdings

– Lack of drafts as well as multiplicity of versions– Automated accessioning and processing and much better end-

user retrieval algorithms are becoming a necessity

• Legal, social and emotional imperatives remain to eliminate certain kinds of information or documentation from the record– Difficult to make something digital go away completely

Description in a digital world• Reflexive implementation that is mindful of the

intellectual lineage of ideas about description and the motivations and perspectives underlying them, as well as the background and perspective of the describer

• Implications for contemporary concerns of global information exchange, sovereignty/nationhood, democratization, pluralization, and accessibility

• Digital materials require at least some item-level description

• Supporting increasingly complex documentary and contextual relationships

The life cycle of records

Traditional view:– Creation, capture, storage, active (primary)

use, and disposal -- either archival retention (secondary use) or destruction

The Records Continuum (Upward)

http://www.dcc.ac.uk/docs/publications/DCCLifecycle.pdf)

Proactive life cycle managementProactive life cycle management• If archives are eventually to take control of any born-

digital material, then they will need to be involved in the design of the systems that will generate that material.

• Working with software developers, systems designers and the actual creators of the material to ensure that: – any documentation created will be in an environment as little

dependent upon proprietary software as possible– systems have sufficient security controls and metadata to

document their reliability and authenticity in and over time– systems capture and describe accurately their provenance,

content and any rights considerations– materials that need to be preserved can indeed be “fixed” in

an unalterable way and removed when appropriate from an active system to an archival system.

Preserving digital collectionsPreserving digital collections• How to preserve salient evidentiary characteristics of

born-digital and digitized materials?

• How to protect investment in digitization?

• Need to design preservation regimes and repositories that can provide meet appropriate levels of evidential requirements for different kinds of materials– Born-digital archival materials set the bar highest

• Need to develop economic frameworks and metrics

• Challenges to notion of permanent value

Life cycle metadata regime Life cycle metadata regime rather than archival descriptionrather than archival description

• Supports description and resource discovery at the collection and item-level

• Documents archival administration and the various business and research contexts, legal and rights requirements, and technical specifications and functionality of the records themselves

• Can enhance archival user services, e.g., learning systems, multi-linguality and alternate search terms

• Supports content and metadata enhancement via Web 2.0 activities, e.g., social tagging, refereeing

• Supports restructuring of finding aids and collation of related resources

The need for ongoing metadata management

• Diversity and dynamism of metadata schemas and standards

• Applying multiple metadata schemas and standards at the collection and item-levels

• Cross-walking• Social tagging• Volume of metadata created• Maintaining trustworthy metadata

Questions about metadata• What kinds of end-user research can be done using

metadata alone?• What balance, if any, can/should be struck between

the empowerment and sustaining of traditional or locally-devised descriptive practices and professionally-developed metadata standards and structures designed to support inter-community/institutional/national interoperability and data exchange?

• What are the relative benefits and challenges of naturally-occurring and manually-created, as well as lay versus expert (professional or other) metadata?

• How do we address the scalability of metadata practices for digital materials?

Shifting user communities

• Global• Interactive• Culturally diverse• Different levels of literacy and comfort

with technology as well as textual materials

• Differing expertise and contextual knowledge

• Multi-lingual

Key areas where more research is needed

• Development of analytical techniques to identify important changes in the records and records creation over time in form, format and function

• Development and evaluation of tools for automatically processing and preserving large volumes of digital materials

• Designing digital archives for heterogenous user communities and their epistemes—by examining how they create, remember, seek, and use knowledge, and what they believe and how they come to trust