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3 - Value in fragments: an Australian perspective on re-contextualisation
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- By Helen Morgan, University of Melbourne's eScholarship Research Centre, Cate O'Neill, University of Melbourne, Nikki Henningham, Australia's Oral History and Folklore Branch, Gavan McCarthy, University of Melbourne, Annelie De Villiers, University of Melbourne's eScholarship Research Centre (ESRC)
- Michael Moss, David Thomas
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- Book:
- Do Archives Have Value?
- Published by:
- Facet
- Published online:
- 02 October 2019
- Print publication:
- 28 September 2018, pp 37-62
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- Chapter
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Summary
Introduction
Archival records need context in order to maintain their value. Indeed, value is rarely inherent. It needs to be excavated, lifted out, exposed and made explicit; and it needs to be shared widely to take its place in broader contexts in order to grow and create value in the collective. Conceptualisations of value in the archive are constantly changing and dynamic, and context and re-contextualisation – core to the work of archivists – underpins this.
Context is perhaps best understood as a series of questions, such as: What happened before? What happened after? What was happening at the same time? Who was involved? Where did things happen? When did things happen? Which, when all combined, might help to answer the question: Why did things happen? (McCarthy et al., forthcoming). Record systems and archival systems don't always make this collation of context possible, but continuum model thinking, incorporated by design into systems, with its emphasis on multiple purposes and values, potentially does. But not all records which have – or have the potential to bear – value as archives are waiting patiently in archival repositories for their value to be appreciated. With changing conceptions of value – and growing audiences for archival knowledge – unmanaged archival material, fragmentary in nature and sitting at and outside the boundary of the archive, is proving highly valuable.
Archival interventions
This chapter is written by archivists and historians from the University of Melbourne's eScholarship Research Centre (ESRC, the Centre) to reflect on the value that we add or diminish by our archival interventions and the means by which (and reasons why) we work at the boundary of the archive. Critically, these reasons include the desire to situate the materials of the archive ‘in a contextual information framework that helps make them understandable to those without the deep lived experience of the field’ (McCarthy et al., forthcoming). The work of the ESRC, a post-custodial archival service based in a research environment and operating in the digital space, offers unique insights into the value of archives for the general public, as well as for specific communities. Situated originally within the University of Melbourne faculty structure, the group of archivists who had worked together as the Australian Science Archives Project moved into the library and academic services area on the transformation of the group into a research centre.
8 - Rights and the commons: navigating the boundary between public and private knowledge spaces
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- By Gavan McCarthy, is Director of the University of Melbourne eScholarship Research Centre in the University Library, founded in 2007., Helen Morgan, is a Melbourne writer and archivist. She is a research fellow in the area of cultural informatics at the University of Melbourne eScholarship Research Centre, having significant experience of working in collaborative research teams using digital technologies, with particular emphasis on building resilient contextual information frameworks, exploring the challenges and requirements of mapping cultural heritage in digital/networked environments and the transfer of knowledge between researchers, memory institutions and the community.
- Edited by Michael Moss, Barbara Endicott-Popovsky
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- Book:
- Is Digital Different?
- Published by:
- Facet
- Published online:
- 08 June 2018
- Print publication:
- 30 September 2015, pp 171-188
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- Chapter
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Summary
Introduction
For the 21st-century archivist, access to all archival materials is going to be one of the most complicated and difficult tasks. In the pre-digital world the number of variables that the archivist had to deal with was significantly fewer than that which they are confronted with in the networked digital age. As a rule, records in the pre-digital world were only in material form and in the custody of an archival service or repository. Access was provided physically through a research or reading room – the researcher had to go in person to the records. This physical containment of the records, the archivist and the researcher (or information seeker) in the one space enabled the negotiation of rules, restrictions and obligations associated with access to archival material. This containment facilitated responsible access to material not intended for publication that could, for example, contain information relating to third parties – in particular, other people – or information pertaining to national security or information of commercial interest. The research room was a frontier where the public were able to interact with private knowledge, whether those materials were generated by governments (in Western democracies these are often known as ‘public records’), by businesses and organizations or by private individuals. In all cases these records have been kept by archives because they have been deemed to form a useful contribution to societal memory.
Differential access to records as determined, for example, by security or information privacy issues was managed through processes of restriction. This meant additional work for the archivist in preparing materials for release that might include redaction of third-party names or other information that might infringe the rights of others or compromise the role of government. In extreme cases highly secure research rooms were established purely to enable security-cleared individuals to access the most highly restricted materials. Similar conditions were set up for academic researchers wishing to consult medical or criminal records. With the passage of time the sensitivity of records diminishes. As a rule, for records over 100 years old, when the individuals concerned have died, commercial concerns are long passed and national security issues have become of historical interest only, access is less problematic. But, as we shall see, in a highly connected digital world even this rule of thumb is being challenged.
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