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Summary

Who will keep my city, my friends, who will bring Vukovar out of the dark? There are no backs stronger than mine and yours, and therefore, if it's not too much bother for you, if any youthful whispering remains in you, join. Somebody has touched my parks, benches on which your names are still carved, a shadow in which you gave and received your first kiss – somebody has simply stolen everything because, how to explain that there is even no Shadow any more? There is no more window shopping in which you took small pleasures, there is no cinema in which you watched the saddest film, your history is simply obliterated and now you have nothing. You have to build it all over again. First your past, search for your roots, then your present, and then if you have any strength left, invest it into the future. And as for the city, don't worry about it, it has been all this time inside you. It has just been hidden. So the executioner doesn't find it. The city – it is you.

(Siniša Glavašević, Croatian reporter on Radio Vukovar, 1991)

Introduction

The Republic of Croatia declared independence from the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) in June 1991 and was quickly plunged into war as Croatian Serb populations revolted and the Yugoslav National Army and Serb paramilitary groups attacked along the states’ ethnically mixed borders. Eastern Croatia saw some of the most brutal early fighting. Each lunchtime during its 87-day siege, Croatians across the country tuned their radios to listen to Siniša Glavašević's report from inside the border city of Vukovar, the first European city to be completely destroyed since World War 2. His poignant, reassuring yet defiant invocations continued until the radio went silent. Several hundred soldiers and civilians, Glavašević among them, were summarily executed by Serb forces when the city fell. His body was exhumed from a mass grave on a farm at Ovčara outside Vukovar in 1997.

Glavašević's words paint a picture of the daily life and spaces of this previously vibrant, multi-ethnic Danube city that preserves its citizens’ most intimate moments and personal pleasures in ways that no official archive can replicate.

Summary

Introduction

This chapter documents a collaborative archives project at Maison d’Haiti, a Haitian community-based and cultural organisation located in the north east of Montreal, Quebec/Canada. Since 1972, the organisation has dedicated itself to the education and integration of immigrant individuals and families through its mission of promoting, integrating and improving the living conditions and defending the rights of Quebecers of Haitian origin and immigrants (Maison d’Haiti, 2018). In their 1981 activity report, members of Maison d’Haiti noted the importance of documenting and preserving their work. They stated that the newsletter was a precious tool because, in addition to providing information about the organisation's activities, it allowed them to make connections between the different programs and with other groups, served as a tool of reflection and animation, and acted as archives of their activities (Maison d’Haiti, 1981).

Beginning with explorations in the late 15th century, Canada became a settler colony primarily for British and French immigrants and their descendants through the dispossession of Indigenous Peoples and the invasion and occupation of their territories. A broader historical and contemporary feature of Canada's capitalist economy has been its systemic reliance upon exploitation through race, immigration status and shifting forms of ‘unfree labour’ (Thobani, 2007; Choudry and Smith, 2016). Racialised communities continue to fight and mobilise for their rights throughout Quebec and Canada. In doing so, they produce records that speak to the ways in which community is negotiated, built and rebuilt through time. The records and archives of community-based organisations encompass different types of records and entail various archival processes (Flinn, 2007; Flinn, Stevens and Shepherd, 2009).

Although there had never been a formal archives project before 2013, people who have been involved at Maison d’Haiti have, at different points, worked to preserve or organise older material. The current archival project and process began in January 2013 in parallel with the organisation's effort to build a new space to accommodate the community's growing and changing needs. Initiated by the director and a volunteer, the project has relied on the participation of volunteers and community members.

Summary

Introduction

As this book looks at how social tags can serve to link content across a variety of environments, a key environment to address is the enterprise or workplace. As people of all generations are utilising social platforms and social tagging on a regular basis to share, search and retrieve information, the impacts of tagging behaviour in the workplace open new doors as well as create a bridge to how enterprises leverage behaviours displayed by their employees outside the workplace. Enterprise social media platforms have seen increasing use during the last few years. The popularity of Facebook and other social media platforms has caused businesses to ask the question: ‘Can a Facebook-like application be used to help our staff members work together?’ A 2011 survey conducted by British job site Reed.co.uk found that one-third of employees used social media while at work; and of those people who logged into social networks on a daily basis, 35% claimed that they did so solely for business purposes (Holtzblatt et al., 2013). Enterprises have implemented social business or collaboration platforms that provide employees with many of the same social features and capabilities, including wikis, blogs, tagging and the ability to create user profiles.

This chapter will examine tagging in the enterprise: specifically, the approaches, advantages, challenges and effects it has on employees. We will also look at how enterprise tagging plays a role in content management and in locating expertise within an enterprise and communities of practice. The main focus of this chapter will be on content tagging, people and collaborative tagging and communities of practice.

In this chapter the term enterprise is used to refer to an organization, company or business that provides services or products to the general public locally, nationally or internationally. As defined by Allam et al. (2010), enterprise tagging, or enterprise social tagging, is a tool that offers strong potential for organizations in knowledge sharing and collaboration. Tagging in the enterprise allows for many different opportunities, including document management, collaboration and identifying subject matter experts. The enterprise must provide its employees with the means to tag content (i.e. documents, records, videos and audio) and tag people (i.e. expertise within the enterprise) through collaboration or content management platforms.

Summary

Welcome again! Arriving at this point means that you navigated a range of topics and points of view on digital archives. We hope that this collection helped you to understand better this complex domain. As we stated earlier, this is not a manual which would guide you in what to do. The digital world is very diverse and each institution is looking for the right combination of content, services and engagement with its communities. We wanted to provide an opportunity to explore the different aspects of the domain and to give a taste of some of the tools of the trade. If you were a complete novice in this area, we hope this book gave you a sound overview of the various aspects of digital archives. If you are at an intermediary level, we hope it helped you to build your knowledge further. And if you are an expert in a particular domain, we hope that the breadth of the examples and points of view helped to expand the depth of your knowledge.

We are very conscious that a book which brings multiple points of view is a good way to expand readers’ understanding. You had a chance to walk in the shoes of archivists, digital humanists, lawyers, information scientists, economists and policy researchers. This wealth of perspectives may feel only a starting point in a longer journey and here we would like to point out some additional publications which could help you explore further.

If you developed a particular interest in engagement with digital archives, you might find useful the edited collection Engaging with Records and Archives: histories and theories, edited by Fiorella Foscarini, Heather MacNeil, Bonnie Mak and Gillian Oliver (Facet Publishing, 2016). We were fortunate to have Gillian as one of the contributors to this book (Chapter 8).

You may also check a book which will shortly be available at around the time our book is published: Community Archives, Volume 2, Sustaining Memory, edited by Jeannette A. Bastian and Andrew Flinn (Facet Publishing, forthcoming 2018).

If you feel that you would like to further explore the territory of digital humanities and the role of memory institutions, a valuable source for you would be Developing Digital Scholarship: emerging practices in academic libraries, edited by Alison Mackenzie and Lindsey Martin (Facet Publishing, 2016).

Summary

Every organization needs to keep track of the content it has created. Yet most organizations’ information assets are stored in multiple locations with little corporate control over what is kept where, and for how long. Even where one or two appropriately structured central systems cover key functions (for example, customer relationship management in sales, stock control in retail, or case management in law), it is likely that staff have access to and use many other data repositories in the course of their work. And the number of places where staff might store the information they create is only increasing. This chapter is about the issues KIM professionals need to consider when managing expressed knowledge: where it can be found, what risks it carries, and what you can do about them. In an increasingly chaotic world of written information, what can an information manager do to provide structure?

The key issue for workers who create or require information comes under the headings ‘findability’ and ‘putability’. This is covered by the questions ‘Can I find the information I need to do my job?’ and ‘Where do I put the information I have created?’ The answer to both questions should be the same, so that staff can access information created by each other. In our post-manufacturing world, most organizations’ largest output is collections of words and numbers held in Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations. Where they end up depends on how the issues of findability and putability are addressed. This is the essential task of the information manager and one that has only increased with the quantity of explicit information. One of the authors of this book once overheard a senior policy-maker complain that their e-mail inbox was full of essential policy, strategy and position papers that she needed to read, but she was too busy writing other such papers to do so. Over time, not just the quantity but the number of locations of recorded corporate information has increased. And as more items are saved in shared repositories, the more difficult it is to find useful content and ensure it is kept for the right amount of time.

Summary

Introduction

Traditionally, archives have been characterised by restrictions on access for two main reasons: because of the nature of the type of information represented by archival records, and the need to protect unique artefacts. However, all the settings have changed in today's digital environment, which necessitates questioning and re-evaluating our approaches to access. Networked technologies have substantially lowered barriers and put archives in the global information landscape. This process is not always straightforward – the complexity of digitisation arrangements, and in particular agreements for joint digitisation initiatives of archives with external partners, contribute to make artefacts available in digital form, but might be bound with access restrictions as highlighted by Trudy Huskamp Peterson in Chapter 2. While these are interesting phenomena, the aim of our chapter is to highlight the perspectives on access restrictions that reflect the nature of the archival materials and their use.

This chapter begins by exploring traditional views of access provision, and then reflects on the disjuncture between highly publicised freedom of information initiatives such as WikiLeaks and current professional practice. By way of contrast, the need to recognise cultural imperatives to restrict access is discussed, using the example of New Zealand Māori perspectives. This example also illustrates the dimension of access which contributes to ‘giving a voice’ to minorities and in some cases puts access in the centre of human rights movements. The chapter concludes by calling for a much more nuanced and culturally appropriate view of access rights and restrictions.

Access – of lesser importance to archivists?

It can be argued that access considerations may be accorded the lowest priority by archivists, as is illustrated by this summary of the skills needed by an archivist taken from the Australian Society of Archivists’ website. Archivists need to know:

Summary

Introduction

Managing is getting things done through people. In the 1980s, the mantra was ‘management by walking around’, the idea that a manager who wandered through the workplace, observing people and equipment and working conditions, would encourage better performance and productivity. When a mechanical system – say, a digital one – is introduced between the manager and the people within the organisation, things change.

Managing in an archival organisation where some of the materials are digital is one aspect of the greater management realm. Using digital tools while managing people who work in the archives is another. How does the advent of the digital ecosystem in archives change the composition of the workforce that makes up the archival service? How does it change the management of staff? And how does it change the characteristics of managers?

First we will take a close look at hiring as an example of how thoroughly digital systems have captured a fundamental managerial responsibility. Then we will pull back to a wider view to see where staff members work and the electronic tools that are available to managers for supervision. Next we turn to the nature of the workforce itself and the changes that are possible by choosing digital management options. Finally, we will look at the characteristics of archival leaders in an organisation that depends on digital systems.

Hiring as an example of digital process

When a manager decides to hire, the first step is recruitment. Today that nearly always includes electronic distribution of the job vacancy announce ment. Although there is no single site for posting archives vacancies worldwide, governments have electronic sites where jobs are posted, some archival associations have electronic job sites, and archival listservs also post jobs (such as the listservs of the International Council on Archives and ARMA [Association of Records Managers and Administrators] International). The Society of American Archivists (SAA) boasts to employers that posting with the SAA online ensures that they will ‘find the best’, ‘meet their recruitment goals and attract top talent.’

Once the employers have the applications in hand (virtually), they can review not only the application but also the candidate's social media profile.

Summary

Introduction

Tags are a form of linked data familiar to those of us who use the internet for social media. These pieces of metadata are usually assigned to posts on social media to help users make sense of the content (Golder and Huberman, 2006), in a way that is generally easy to understand and emulate. It is difficult to use a social media platform like Facebook, Twitter or Tumblr and not come across tagging in one form or another. Hashtags can sprout up amongst many important events or moments, like #blacklivesmatter or #yesallwomen. Generic tags that have very little indication of meaning or importance can also be added to statuses for fun, like #ThursdayThoughts. These are some of the most common uses of social tagging, but they are far from the only examples of social tagging being used in online spaces.

Although the developments leading to modern, western fandom vary according to country (Cuntz-Leng and Meintzinger, 2015), it is generally accepted that fandom as we now would recognise it largely came about in the late 1960s to early 1970s, when the original series of Star Trek (1966) was airing. Star Trek has had a varied following over the years and still attracts many kinds of viewers (Frazetti, 2011), but Star Trek was and is a byword for geek culture. The incredible devotion and love many Star Trek fans have for the series has led to conventions, collectables, and works of art. Fanfiction was a popular way for Star Trek fans to share their own interpretations of the show's characters by creating transformative works of fiction. Some of the oldest examples of modern fanfiction were created by the Star Trek fandom (Verba, 2003), and were copied and shared in person. With ease of access to the internet becoming more widespread, much of fandom now takes place in online spaces, made up of internet based communities. In spite of this massive technological shift, fanfiction and fandoms have changed very little. Put simply, fandoms today are online spaces dedicated to fans, many of whom produce content for their particular interests and share it online.

Summary

Half of archival collections have no online presence. (OCLC, 2015, 6)

Welcome to this edited collection of articles exploring digital archives! We live in times when all organisations which collect, preserve and provide access to the collective memory of the humankind – frequently called memory institutions – libraries, archives, museums – are expected to provide digital services. There is a range of driving forces in the process of digitisation, digital curation and providing access to the growing digital collections. One is that diverse collections with descriptions based on different principles originating from the library, museum and archival sectors can be treated as if they are the same in the digital space, especially for hybrid digital resources like Europeana (www.europeana.eu/portal/en). In the long term the process of digitisation may have unexpected consequences for the nature of sector-specific collections description. But is the description of material the only way in which memory sectors are different from other sectors? Or does the transition into digital space require other aspects of the professional trade to be redefined?

Living and working within this period of continuing rapid expansion of accessibility to digital content when the reflection could be very problematic due to the lack of sufficient time distance, calls for understanding what the substantial shifts in the professional philosophy, knowledge and practice of digital archives are. This edited collection attempts to explore these uncharted territories. It presents a variety of viewpoints on the archival profession and the drivers of change, and was designed to interest several categories of readers. Archivists will find in the book a breadth of opinions on topics that are changing the archival landscape. Librarians and museum specialists can explore how the digital environment reflects the specific needs of the archival domain, which hopefully will help to strengthen the collaboration and mutual understanding between specialists from these different sectors. Humanities scholars may find useful the discussion of how archival materials enter the territory of digital scholarship. Students can get a generic idea of the range of issues within digital archives. Last but not least, policy makers could explore the relationship between research policies and memory institution policies.

Summary

Introduction

Over the past several years, I have explored the role of user-generated metadata in library discovery systems, specifically social tagging and user reviews. In a previous monograph from Facet Publishing (Spiteri, 2016), I examined the specific contributions of user-generated metadata in the following areas:

Summary

Introduction

Some 25 years after the world wide web was born at the CERN (http://home.web.cern.ch/topics/birth-web) in Geneva in 1993, it should come as no wonder that most of the information we process today is produced and used in digital form. Capable of reproducing most of the pre-existing information carriers such as texts, pictures, sounds and films, the digital format is progressively replacing many of the former media. This process implies there will be profound changes in the daily practices of both scholars in the field of humanities and information professionals.

Understanding changes induced by the influence of digital media within professional practices remains a critical task. As Michel de Certeau reminds us, there is more to learn about the evolution of scientific disciplines through the analysis of the conditions of their production than through their scientific outputs (1975, 65). This chapter proposes to shed light on the current changes of practices within the humanities and to outline several recommendations for a closer collaboration between humanities scholars and information professionals in order to achieve a thoughtful use of digital media.

The first part of the chapter introduces the digital humanities, a field of practices situated at the crossroads between information sciences and the humanities, which has experienced a rapid growth in the past few years. It discusses the origins and scope of digital humanities, as well as the question of its definition. The close association between digital humanities and information sciences is also highlighted.

The second part shifts the focus from digital practices to professional collaborations and analyses the evolving relationship between researchers and information professionals under the influence of digital information systems. Recent changes in the use of libraries and archives are discussed, drawing from recent surveys about information practices among humanities scholars.

Finally, in the third part are recommendations on how to improve this relationship in a digital environment. It draws on previous points in order to propose some ways to introduce a closer collaboration between information professionals and humanities scholars within the context of the digital information landscape. In particular, it advocates the benefits of enhancing the visibility of documentary mediations in online environments.

Summary

While the previous chapter concentrated on tangible artefacts of KIM, this chapter looks at practices centred around people. These are perhaps the most difficult to define, implement and gauge success. As the first chapter described, KM originated as a people-centred area of study and it is only over time that it has become associated with tangible systems. Indeed, some consider the knowledge held inside people's heads to be essentially unmanageable. This area of KM, therefore, largely concerns methods of encouraging the exchange of knowledge between people. This might be in a more or less formal manner and as far as the practice of KM is concerned may have different levels of inter - vention. Most of our examples will be around online collaboration spaces, but we also address face-to-face knowledge-sharing.

In this chapter we discuss a range of different approaches to sharing know - ledge, broadly defined as communities of practice. These are groups formed in the course of negotiating their way through a shared part of working life, nonwork endeavour or common interest. They are considered to share a language, common practices and behavioural shortcuts, but may be unaware that they constitute a community of practice. As a knowledge manager, you may have a more or less formal role building, facilitating and recording such communities and their outputs. While the community of practice may already exist, you can add value by organizing events, providing and curating online tools, and helping to bring knowledge and learning from the community back into the organization.

Why would an organization support a community of practice? It is a cheap way (staff time allowing) of enabling staff to learn from each other and share infor - mation, not requiring classroom sessions, professional trainers or lots of one-to-one information transactions. The benefits are more than this: we potentially learn more in an ongoing process of engagement with our peers than from a one-off session within which knowledge is organized into discrete packages. This is not to say that classroom sessions are not valuable, but communities of practice provide a constant means of reinforcing and developing formally acquired knowledge and skills, and putting them into practice. Moreover, formal training represents an official version of practices, systems and skills.

Summary

Introduction

There have been many participatory approaches to digital cultural heritage in recent years, with a groundbreaking work on archives by Sexton and Flinn (2013). There is particularly prominent interest in the applications of crowd sourcing (Ridge, 2014) and citizen science in this domain (Dobreva, 2016). One area where participatory approaches could be particularly beneficial is oral history research; the advantage of appealing to the wisdom of the crowd is to attract greater numbers of contributors to the collection of histories on a particular topic. Involving a wider network of informants should ideally allow more content collecting and refining of information through the memories of participants.

Oral history projects can follow different designs and one recent trend is to involve interviewers as voluntary contributors after providing sufficient context on the research and interview process. Volunteers can also help in transcribing and curating interviews. In some cases, people from the same community or even family may be involved since they have the advantage of knowing the interviewee, which can be beneficial for topics where there are no areas of sensitivity. In other cases, spreading the word in the community can help to identify potential contributors to the project.

This chapter explores two case studies on oral history projects implemented in two countries (Ireland and Malta) and on different topics (rural place names and tattoo art history). In Ireland, six teenagers aged 15 or 16, from two schools, applied to take part in the project within three weeks in November 2014. In Malta, university students were involved in the various stages of the project, from holding and transcribing interviews to populating digital content on an institutional repository.

Looking at two case studies helps us to better understand the dynamic of early involvement of volunteers and to explore the potential benefits for projects that require a high level of dedication.

Participatory approaches in archives

Staff in memory institutions are interested in involving members of the general public in contributing to the creation and/or refinement of digital content. One of the popular ways of engaging citizens is crowd sourcing; in 2011 Johan Oomen and Lora Aroyo proposed a typology, which looks at several ways of engaging citizens: through correction and transcription, contextualisation, complementing collections, classification, co-curation and crowdfunding (Oomen and Aroyo, 2011).

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10 - Post-x: Community-Based Archiving in Croatia

Summary

7 - Maison d‘Haïti's collaborative archives project: archiving a community of records

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PART 2 - CASE STUDIES

Index

9 - Social tagging and the enterprise: an analysis of social tagging in the workplace

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Afterword

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3 - Information management and governance

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8 - Access restrictions

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2 - Managing turbulence

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7 - #FandomCommunication: how online fandom utilises tagging and folksonomy

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Index

Case studies and sidebars

Contents

Preface: Digital archives: management, use and access participatory approaches in archives

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5 - Hashtags and library discovery systems

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1 - Digital humanities and documentary mediations in the digital age

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List of Figures and Tables

4 - Communities and knowledge-sharing

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9 - Citizen science: two case studies in oral history research

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PART I - DRIVERS FOR MODERN DIGITAL ARCHIVES

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