The New Information Order and the Future of the Archive
Old College, The University of Edinburgh
20-23 March 2002
ABSTRACTS OF PAPERS
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Back to basics: Reassessing archival priorities for the new information order
Steve Bailey
Joint Information Systems Committee
This paper is based around the simple premise that we cannot provide access to records which we do not have and that issues of record capture and storage continue to be inextricably linked to those of access during the 'electronic revolution'. Today's archivists risk being put on trial by future generations for failing to preserve the political, social and cultural memory of the nation during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Online access to finding aids and digital collections of scanned documents attract headlines - and deserved praise - but do little to address the fundamental problem that most archives are simply not capturing and preserving the electronic records of today needed for the creation of the archives of tomorrow. This paper does not seek to offer solutions to the issues raised by electronic records management, but to demonstrate the problems for future researchers which will arise through record selection and appraisal based on storage media rather than content and the prospect of collections being split along similar lines and managed by commercial IT companies as opposed to professional archivists. It will also explore the dangers of allowing a preoccupation with new technology to distort our professional priorities to the extent where money for new IT projects can be found and yet irreplaceable original documents are being destroyed due to lack of funds and an over-reliance on once cutting-edge but now obsolete technology.
The Opposite of Property
James Boyle
Professor of Law, Duke University
We are in the middle of a second enclosure movement; it sounds grandiloquent to call it "the enclosure of the intangible commons of the mind" but in a very real sense, that is just what it is. True, the new state-created property rights are "intellectual" rather than "real," but once again things that were formerly thought as either common property or as un-commodifiable, as outside of the market, are covered with new, or newly extended property rights. We are faced of a world-view which imagines that property is always the answer, and that more property rights will automatically bring us more progress, more innovation and more speech. To restore the balance in the system we need to reimagine, and reinvent, the opposite of property - the cluster of concepts that delineates the outside of the intellectual property system; the realm of the commons and the public domain.
Web Access to the Original Archival Records - Challenging the Old Information Order?
Eleanor Brown
Photographic and Manuscript Archivist; Digital Access Project Coordinator in the Online Services Division
National Archives of Canada
The challenges of web access to original archival records presents one of the most demanding issues facing cultural institutions worldwide, whether in the realm of government or private records. All cultural institutions find themselves in different stages of developing digital access programs. Through its mandate the National Archives of Canada is unique as a National Archives, with the distinction of recording memory through the acquisition of government and private records in all media.
This paper will address the issues raised by theoretical discussions revolving around digital initiatives in relation to traditional archival methods of acquisition, selection, description and control:
The audience - how do we balance and juxtapose the requirements of the traditional scholarly researcher vis a vis the changing, rapidly growing demands for publically funded institutions to provide digital access to non traditional researchers?
Will the demands of servicing both traditional and non-traditional users of archives, in addition to the pressures of public funding, further challenge or conflict with the development of collections and the acquisition policies of cultural institutions?
Will the artificial accumulation of records in selected digital groupings, based on web access challenge the integrity of the context and provenance of original archival records and possibly marginalise traditional archival descriptive practices?
In addition, publishing archival records on the web complicates existing complex copyright laws and raises potentially contentious issues over ownership of Intellectual property rights.
ABC Online as an Environment of Public Memory
Maureen Burns
Australian Key Centre for Cultural and Media Policy
Edward Said has argued that there has recently been an increasing interest in the overlap between geography and memory. At the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), television and radio have operated in that overlap: trying to cover territory with national memories via particular technologies. At the ABC now, the relations between memory and geography are in most rapid change around ABC Online. ABC Online remembers broadcasting - re-presenting broadcast material in the archive of ABC Online: covering a territory, 'unifying' a population, connecting outposts (in its replication of regional radio stations, for instance). Yet it also demonstrates a dynamism reminiscent of Nora's 'lived' memory, in its public forums and the community publishing site, for instance. Once we danced memory, and now we surf it. The implementation of ABC Online altered governmental techniques of public memory production, offering a non-linear system of storage and recollection, where users can select 'programs' or 'memories' for themselves at any time, and can add their own voices to interactive forums which are also archived. The implementation of ABC Online fundamentally changed the previous relations between geography and memory on which ABC broadcasting had relied. ABC Online is nostalgic for the future - projecting into convergence our memories of and desires for public service broadcasting.
The Multimedia Catalogue: making the RAI audiovisual heritage accessible to the general public
Giorgio Dimino
RAI - Research and Technological Innovation Centre
Turin
The RAI audiovisual archive includes several million documents spanning from the first radio transmissions in 1924 to the latest television productions. Most of the materials have significant cultural and social relevance representing a daily chronicle of the past 50 years. RAI launched in 1997 a corporate wide project aimed at the design and development of a centralized infrastructure for the preservation and management of its audiovisual patrimony leveraging on the possibilities offered by the digital technology. A special attention has been given to the access and fruition aspects, as the archive in the broadcast environment is the most valuable resource for documentation, inspiration and footage retrieval. This led to the development of the so called Multimedia Catalogue, a documentation repository that includes retrieval and browsing functionalities of both textual and audiovisual information (still pictures, soundtrack and motion video) related to radio and television programmes contained in the RAI archives. Since 1998, when the Multimedia Catalogue started its operation, more than 100,000 hours of television and 90,000 hours of radio have been documented and made available to journalists and producers operating in the corporate environment.
In agreement with the public role of RAI, an analysis has been performed on the feasibility of enlarging the access to the Multimedia Catalogue outside the company, with special interest to educational and institutional communities.
This speech, after giving an overview of the main features of the Multimedia Catalogue, will discuss the main points connected to the public exploitation of the catalogue content, touching also the critical issues, that include security and rights management.
Scholarly Publishing Online: Technologies and Markets, Partnerships and Communities
Josie Dixon
Publishing Director, Academic Division
Palgrave
How will online technologies and markets affect the relationship between publishers and the academic community they serve? Does online distribution offer a more direct route from author to market or do we need publishers and other intermediaries in the supply chain all the more? Who is supplying the investment in this sector, and how are they faring? What are the opportunities, the costs and the risks asssociated with academic publishing online, and how are publishers addressing them? Does the online environment reduce or increase the commercial constraints on scholarly publishing? These are some of the questions I shall be addressing from the vantage point of a publisher actively grappling with these challenges to produce an innovative online programme for the academic market.
Picturing the Digital Info-Pixel: Photographic Archives and the Visual Content Industry
Paul Frosh
Department of Communications and Journalism
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Over the last decade a potent cocktail of economic, technological and cultural forces has placed photographic archives at the centre of a new global business: the visual content industry. Dominated by transnational corporations such as Getty Images and Corbis Corp., the industry supplies a majority of images used in advertising and marketing, and controls vast swathes of image-production and distribution through its ownership of historical and photojournalistic collections - as well as the digital rights to much of the world's fine art. Based on extensive fieldwork, this paper aims to map the core dynamics of the visual content industry: digitisation of photographic production, storage, duplication and distribution procedures; commercial and organisational consolidation through the voracious acquisition of photographic archives and image-producers; enhancement of the malleability of images and the simultaneous undermining and retrenchment of image-integrity and artistic authority; formation of new markets for mass-produced photographic images and alternate modes of usage and consumption; diversification of image-content and style coupled with the systematic reproduction of hegemonic constraints. Arguing for complex relations of continuity and discontinuity with pre-digital practices, the paper addresses key ideological and ethical questions concerning the fate of the visual archive in the "new information order".
The Politics and Ethics of Electronic Archiving
Dr. Gary Hall
School of Humanities and Cultural Studies
Middlesex University
To date a lot of the discussion regarding the establishment of electronic and, especially, e-print archives has been taken up with issues of gatekeeping: whether or not people should pay for access to archived material, and how the standard and legitimacy of academic research can be maintained after the transfer to the electronic medium, via new forms of peer review, etc. (See, for example, Stevan Harnad, Hal Varian & Bob Parks, 'Academic Publishing in the Online Era: What Will Be For-Fee and What Will Be For-Free?', Cultural Machine 2, 2000 http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk) However, I want to argue that the consequences of electronic archiving for the mode of legitimation of the academic community are even more radical than, say, Stevan Harnad's 'subversive proposal' suggests (http://www.arl.org/scomm/subversive/toc.html ). I'm particularly interested in the challenge electronic archiving offers to the accepted, conventional forms of culture and interpretation through its placing of the normal and the usual in a 'strange and disorientating new context', as J. Hillis Miller describes it in Black Holes. This challenge is a political one, it seems to me.
It is perhaps worth making clear at this point that I don't see the challenge represented by electronic archiving as being political in the sense that it conforms to some already established and easily recognised criteria of what it means to be political and to do politics. But I do see it as being political in the sense that - as Bill Readings explains in The University in Ruins - one way in which cultural studies can think the university without resorting to either nostalgia for a national culture or the discourse of consumerism and excellence which is increasingly taking over the contemporary university, is by keeping the 'question of thought' open. An electronic archive of cultural studies texts and materials provides a means of doing precisely this. Rather than deciding the question of cultural studies in advance, the 'strange and disorientating new context' of electronic archiving forces us to see cultural studies again 'in a new way', as if for the first time, and so account for it and judge it anew, thus keeping the question of cultural studies (what it is and what it is not, what it is legitimate to ascribe to cultural studies and what it is not) open.
Given that cultural studies' political commitment is for many one of its defining features, I realise of course that, as a result, what is contained in any such cultural studies electronic archive risks not looking too much like cultural studies, at least as it is commonly conceived and most easily recognised. But as far as I'm concerned this questioning of cultural studies is 'perhaps' the most 'responsible' thing for cultural studies to do, at least in Derrida's sense of the term responsibility, since there can be no responsibility, and hence no politics or ethics, without the experience of the undecidable; without, in this case, the constant retaking of the decision of what cultural studies is:
'I will even venture to say that ethics, politics and responsibility, if there are any, will only ever have begun with the experience and experiment of the aporia. When the path is clear and given, when a certain knowledge opens up the way in advance, the decision is already made, it might as well be said there is none to make: irresponsibly, and in good conscience, one simply applies or implements a program. Perhaps, and this would be the objection, one never escapes the program. In that case, one must acknowledge this and stop talking with authority about moral or political responsibility. The condition of possibility of this thing called responsibility is a certain experience and experiment of the possibility of the impossible: the testing of the aporia from which one may invent the only possible invention, the impossible invention,' (Jacques Derrida, 'The Other Heading: Memories, Responses and Responsibilities')
Archives and Race: Technologies of Difference
Orit Halpern
Doctoral Candidate, Department of the History of Science
Harvard University
Dominant discussions of the relationship between information and biological technologies largely ignore the construction and practices of the archive. There is a heritage of biological classification and organization that both informs, and is being reconstituted, in current bioinformatic practices. This paper examines the similarities and differences between different technologies of archiving - photography and digital DNA data-basing practices - in identifying and surveying biological difference. The central question is, how do different media and archival systems produce and identify difference?
The relationship between criminality, race, and gender has a long history in the State archive, starting in the mid-19th century. The Paris Police Commissioner archive and the work of Francis Galton both developed systems that married optics with statistics in medicine, criminology, and anthropology, thereby coupling the visual identification of difference with classification and knowledge production. This is an archival logic that played an important part in the classification of criminality, race, "deviant" sexuality, and colonial people. Today, the latest criminal archival system is digital, and based on DNA. Since the late 1980's when DNA fingerprinting first entered the American court system, the proliferation and utilization of this technology has increased exponentially. In the 1990's DNA databanking and surveillance systems have been instituted in all fifty states and throughout global policing organizations such as INTERPOL. This technology is also prevalent in the corporate realm through pharmacogenomic programs and private research projects on mental illness, breast cancer, and other "pathologies".
As the digital databank replaces previous archival regimes as the locus of human identification, we are forced to contend with both what changing modes of production and media imply for subjectivity. The emerging integration of information and biological technologies creates specific structures of debate, evidence and observation that need to be investigated. These new assemblages structure the way evidence is produced, the narrative and temporal structure of debate narratives, and finally, the possible outcomes. These are outcomes that are not restricted to individual cases, but rather create specific subjects and identify difference - creating relationships between race, gender, nature, and behavior. A study of DNA fingerprinting and data-banking in comparison to previous photographic archives in the criminal justice system is a place to examine these relations between discursive structures and political organization. This study provides a location for inquiry into how both practices of observation and classification are being reformulated or conserved through different archival and media practices.
Fantasies of Containment: Digitally Archiving a Nineteenth-Century British Literary Annual (the Forget-Me-Not) as a Textual Moment
Katherine Harris
English, PhD Program
Graduate Center, CUNY
At this moment, when we realize that an archive of all cultural moments is perhaps impossible, the codex, the manuscript and the printed form are becoming obsolete in the material world. In an attempt to preserve, make public and digitize our cultural markers, we have moved to a seemingly open space that provides both a public and a private forum for publishing, displaying and viewing these cultural markers. That space is the cyberworld of hyperlinked documents, scanned images and digitized/searchable documents.
I am currently working on a project which compiles the Tables of Contents for the first five years of the first literary annual, the Forget-Me-Not. Accompanying graphic scans of the Contents pages, List of Plates pages and Title pages are transcripts of each. In addition, I have added a hyperlink for each author's name to his/her other literary contributions to the annuals (from Andrew Boyle and Faxon's indices). The listings are linked to bibliographic descriptions for each annual as well as a sampling of the number of annuals published each proceeding year after 1823.
My project attempts to revise a portion of literary history during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century through this work - or at least attempts to discretely recognize women's roles in the authorial production, printing production, economic dissemination and lucrative continuation of the literary annuals. A hypertextual publication of a few literary annuals would facilitate other scholars' investigation of this genre. (As the Table of Contents from each volume indicates, women were not the only authors included. Surprisingly, quite a few "canonical" authors first published as young literati in these annuals. The disparate community of contributors often astounds and mystifies researchers. An overview of five years' worth of only the Table of Contents from the more popular annuals would certainly send scholars on the hunt to investigate the genre more closely.) My eventual aim is to find and reproduce these annuals online for a wider reception and to invite more scholarly work.
For "The New Information Order" conference, I would like to demonstrate this project and discuss the implications of moving from complicated research of obscure materials to online representations of the texts themselves and their bibliographic disintegration as physical objects.
Sociotechnological Change and the Transformation of Research Libraries and the Academic Information Environment
H. Thomas Hickerson
Associate Librarian, Cornell University
I intend to discuss the manner in which technological change and its social impact are interacting to permanently alter the academic information landscape. I will suggest that the digital environment is, increasingly, not just a surrogate for the "traditional" environment, but is developing as a domain with an ecology of its own. While in part theoretical, I will focus on specific changes, present and near future, particularly in libraries and other information/cultural repositories but also more broadly. That many things have not changed, does not negate the significance of this transformation, and we are challenged to develop new thinking, new roles, new models.
Can there be such a thing as a postmodern archive?
Michal Kobialka
Department of Theatre Arts & Dance
University of Minnesota, USA
Why this question? Maybe because, despite the fact that a lot has recently been written about the shifts and transformations in the field of theatre studies in terms of the questions posed regarding the archives, the investigation itself still takes place within the epistemological and ontological domain of a modernist archive - a storage room for the documents of the past.
However, if indeed it could be suggested that, as Gilles Deleuze would have it, "thinking is always experiencing, experimenting, not interpreting but experimenting, and what we experience, experiment with, is always actuality, what is coming into being, what is new, what is taking shape", this statement should make us rethink the function and the organization of a historical archive. Already in 1969 (English version-1972), Michel Foucault argued in his Archaeology of Knowledge that history "undertook to 'memorize' the monuments of the past, transform them into documents, and lend speech to those traces, which, in themselves, are often not verbal, or which say in silence something other than what they actually say." This process of transforming events into documents and, finally, into monuments has been problematized by historiography - a practice which can be defined as a mode of thinking taking place in the open, specifiable, dynamic field of potentialities as well as enunciative possibilities-and its strategies for perturbing the order of traditional history. Suffice to mention the work of such thinkers as Jacques Ranciere, Michel de Certeau, Jacques Derrida, or Giorgio Agamben in order to realize the degree to which the archive, events, and facts have been split open by an intellectual inquiry.
Taking a cue from Foucault, de Certeau, Derrida, and Agamben, in my presentation, I would like to shift the discussion regarding the historical archive from evaluating its position or function vis-a-vis academic research towards perceiving an archive as the general system of the formation and transformation of statements. That is to say, the archive should not be defined as a place housing a text of what is uttered (de Certeau), or in terms of its economy which reveals how the law becomes institutionalized as law (Derrida), but should be seen as a moment of enunciating the taking place of an event (Foucault). Insofar as this enunciation refers not to a text but to an event, it cannot be determined by 'the reality effect' (Barthes, Ranciere) or the habitus (Bourdieu), but by its function of existence - "a procedure in 'ana-': a procedure of [. ..] anamnesis [. ..] that elaborates an 'initial forgetting"' (Lyotard). This procedure in 'ana-' of anamnesis, which elaborates an initial forgetting and exposes the historicity of a present intelligibility, expresses the tension between different enunciations in the process of becoming and draws attention to the very aporia of knowledge: a non-coincidence between facts and truth, between verification and comprehension, between representation of knowledge (modes of scientific viewing, analysis, and education), culture (modes of belonging and social/political inter-action), and memory (software as message, commercial representation), or between the Self and the Other .
Wondous Textual Machines: new forms of textuality in a changing world
Zachar Laskewicz
University of Ghent
Gutenberg's wondrous machine brought about rapid sociocultural change in its age; it had an enormous impact on the way we approached knowledge transferral and the way we communicated with others. In short, the possibility to print books helped to bring about - while avoiding the perils of technological determinism - a radical epistemic shift (a la Foucault) as had never been imagined. This paper concerns a similarly radical epistemic shift that we are currently going through thanks to a similar technological development - the wonders of computer textuality (via the CD-ROM) and the internet which have provided us with new forms of text. The ultimate purpose, however, is not to predict the future of either our epistemologically changed culture or any affects this all may have on the publishing industry. Rather, I would like to present new ways of experiencing textuality in this new epistemological context, and more importantly other types of non-linear textuality that have been a part of our culture (and other cultures) which has made us ready for this epistemological shift. I also make parallels and comparisons to other cultures which have experienced and/or have been experiencing textuality in a similar way for hundreds of years. In other words multimedia textuality is something that has been present in our culture before the actual technological developments had taken place. Here I am referring to texts as diverse as Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books, role-playing games and Balinese lontar manuscripts.
Legal, Cultural and Technical Obstacles to the use of Court-Based Information
Dr. Philip Leith
School of Law
Queen's University of Belfast
The new forms of legal scholarship require more than access to judgments - the new legal scholar is attempting to put law into a social, political and economic context and can only do this by means of documentation which enters the courtroom. Unfortunately, most of this documentation evaporates on judgement, leaving less than the bare bones of the arguments in the judge's written opinion. The lack of this pre-judgment information has been, it can be argued, one of the main reasons why British legal scholarship in the past has been so tied to redundant philosophies (e.g. the Hartian model) since scholars have had insufficient evidence upon which to seriously consider the operation of the legal system.
In this paper I outline the problem of access to court-based information, why it has arisen and also the obstacles which must be overcome in order to develop a legal archive which is worthy of the richness of the court system in action.
Free Access to Research Publications? The Potential of the Open Archives Initiative
John MacColl
Sub-Librarian, Online Services; SELLIC Director
University of Edinburgh
Within certain disciplines in the world of scientific research, publication practice has been dramatically altered over the last decade through the development of 'archives' of research papers which serve as a means of ensuring rapid publication of research for academic authors, and of free access to this same research by peer researchers around the world. The most prominent such archive, and the model for many others, has been arXiv.org, originally based at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which moved to Cornell University in 2001. This archive serves researchers in the physical sciences. It emerged from the practice of preprint exchange within many physical sciences disciplines in the print era, and suits the working habits of researchers in a very fast-moving field of scholarship. In time, however, the archive began to include not merely preprints of papers submitted to the scholarly journals in the physical sciences, but also the online versions of the papers accepted for publication in those journals (which the community concerned knows as 'postprints'). These latter papers are therefore identical to the versions of articles which appear in the publishers' electronic versions of journals in the field, which of course are also taken on subscription by many academic libraries. They are permitted for publication in the free archive by means of a copyright waiver agreement existing between publisher and academic author. This agreement represents the mechanism by which research publication generally could be transformed through use of the Internet. The example of arXiv has already been copied in a number of other disciplines. More recently, the Open Archive Initiative has developed an Internet protocol which allows federated searching across a distributed cluster of such archives, hosted on servers in individual institutions, thereby making possible virtual archives in all disciplines. In this environment, the academic library emerges as the most obvious candidate to assume the role of research publisher on behalf of the institution, because of its existing expertise with metadata creation and management, its role in digital document preservation, and its existing arrangements with publishers. At the University of Edinburgh, we are in the process of creating such an open archive. This paper will discuss the possibilities of the Open Archives Initiative transforming the practice of research publication in all disciplines, making the entire corpus of research literature freely available to researchers irrespective of the purchasing power of their institutional libraries. It will examine the role which libraries should play in this developing scenario, and consider the way in which the roles of journal publishers - still very important in providing quality control of research publication - are likely to have to adapt.
The IntraText project: lexical hypertextualization as a new model of access to digital textual resources. Feedbacks and perspectives in readers' behaviour, editorial policies and technology.
Dr. Nicola Mastidoro
Director, IntraText Digital Library
The IntraText project is a computational linguistics based model for high-quality text reading and searching in a digital library/archive context. Based on lexical hypertextualization, IntraText offers a simple interface for non-linear reading and has minimal technological constraints for the user. Full and rigorous representation is given to footnotes, philological notations and other elements of the original edition. Since 1999 IntraText is also an online digital library offering a qualified, multilingual access to textual resources.
Readers' behaviour has been monitored for three years and interesting data have been collected. Although the library offers full-text reading as starting approach, non-linear reading is the main activity for most readers. Some typical behaviours have been defined and will be discussed as guidelines for a new model of access to the textual resources.
The IntraText approach requires quality in the e-texts (completeness and reliability) and in the transcription procedures. After copyright, the quality of the e-texts seems to be the first issue in the editorial policy of the digital library. Examples will be given of how the digital library tends to set the validation criteria and eventually becomes a centre of expertise for editors and publishers.
From a technological point of view, IntraText is based on XML. A sub-project defined a simple markup language (ETML) allowing non technical operators to quickly add the relevant information needed to obtain a well-formed XML. A dedicated parser then produces the XML. Methods and tools to quickly translate e-texts in well-formed XML files are, in the IntraText perspective, one of the main technological issues for a high-quality digital library.
A Discourse upon Methods. Historical knowledge and practice and the implications of electronic data.
Professor R J Morris
Department of Economic and Social History
University of Edinburgh
a) Electronic data has been created by historians. This has had a subversive effect on the historical narrative of many nations. It has repositioned the railway and social mobility in US development and the 'industrial revolution' in the British story. It has changed the ethics of enquiries into US Slavery and into the Irish Famine. Such work depends heavily upon the techniques of list processing, record linkage, coding of social data and sampling strategies. These all exploit the computers capacity for handling large amounts of data in a pattern seeking manner. The critique of these methods is as yet ill developed.
b) Electronic data is being created for historians. An increasing number of documents are and will be available in electronic form. Examples to be discussed, Statistical accounts of Scotland, Valentine photographs on internet. This provides opportunities of analysis and access but also problems of quality control. Some sciences already require data to be made available on a web site. Archaeology has an electronic journal. Should historians be made to place their evidence/data/research notes in footnotes a megabyte long? If so, how should others respond to this?
c) The historian of the recent past is entering a world in which data was created in and preserved by way of electronic means - often to be accessed only by a dated technology. This provides major problems of source criticism and exploitation. When I read Gladstone's letters I touched the same bit of paper as Gladstone, got to know his handwriting and used the same technology as Gladstone. When Tony Wedgwood Benn deposited his diaries in the British Library, he handed them a set of disks, readable only by a now dated technology. For other historians, the relationship between document and data has been broken. Plan a 19th century railway journey and you look for the solid bulk of a Bradshaw; plan 21st century air travel and your document exists for fleeting moment on the travel agents screen, created from a data base of continually changing information.
d) The quantity of information created and preservable in vast electronic warehouses is vast. It is impossible to read all those dispatches, e-mails, drafts. New strategies will be required to survive in such a world. One of these perhaps is that of 'noise' - something derived from intelligence analysis - it is impossible to organize anything violent and important like a war or a coup without an increase in telephone calls, e-mails etc (a rule Bin Laden et al got around by using old fashioned foot soldiers).
Some of these strategies are usable by historians, often by exploiting the new e-data in innovative ways. When did the Catholic question create most interest in 19th century Britain? Knowing that the RsLib project has just catalogued a wide range of pamphlets I logged onto the combined on-line catalogue (COPAC), asked for all titles which included the word 'catholic', sorted them by date.
Historians' responses to e-data varies from caution, to ghettoised enthusiasm to downright hostility. This needs to change because no aspect of the historian's craft can remain untouched by the infernal machine.
Bibliography of recent writing on the topics to be covered by the above proposal:
'Project Design and the Creation of Digital Records in Scotland', in Professor Terry Coppock (ed.), Making Information Available in Digital Format: Perspectives from Practitioners, Stationery Office, 1999, pp.15-165.
'Information Technology and Social History: case studies of a subtle paradigm shift', in Terry Coppock (ed.), Information Technology and Scholarship. Applications in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 1999, 79-91.
'Electronic Documents and the History of the Late Twentieth Century: Black Holes or Warehouses', in Edward Higgs (ed.), History and Electronic Artefacts, Oxford University Press, 1998
A la recherche de la bourgeoisie anglaise au XIXe siècle. Example d'exploitation quantitative d'un ensemble de source qualitatives, Siècles. Cahiers du Centre d'histoire des entreprises et des communautés (Université Blaise Pascal, Clermont Ferrand, no.6, 1997, pp.31-50)
'Death, Property and the Computer - Strategies for the Analysis of English Wills in the first half of the 19th century', in The Art of Communication, (edited by Gerhard Jaritz, Ingo H Kropac and Peter Teibenbacker), Graz, Austria 1995, pp.164-178.
The Value of the Past, the Relevance to the Present
Richard Paterson
Head of Knowledge, British Film Institute
The bfi has housed the national archives for film since the early 1930s and for television from the early 1960s. In addition the bfi has various other collections of related materials including stills, scripts, personal and company papers, journals and books. These vast storehouses of material are matched by an unrivalled filmographic database and a staff with a wide knowledge of the history of film and tv and a diverse skills base. The bfi is a knowledge organisation which has for the past six years built a range of expertise and identified a framework for usability for film in the digital domain.
This paper will provide an account of the bfi's various pilot projects in the digital domain and the lessons they are contributing in the planning and realisation of the NOF-funded screenonline digitisation project currently underway. Our focuses in screenonline are three histories: of British film, of British television, and the social history of Britain in the twentieth century as captured by film and television. The approach to these issues will be described and illustrated and their usefulness for a range of audiences and the challenges of a digital pedagogy explored.
The value of the past, and in particular of archives, has recently become an issue of greater concern to content producers in the film and television industries. This paper will conclude with a review of intellectual property issues in relation to developments in copyright legislation, and a case study of the relevance of the present in work the bfi is carrying out using archival material of news coverage across the world in the months following 11 September.
Virtual Enlightenment, or Digital Dark Age? A view from the Scottish Cultural Resources Access Network
Bruce Royan
Chief Executive Officer, Scottish Cultural Resources Access Network
Scotland's cultural institutions have jointly set up an organization to digitise highlights of their collections, organize and deliver them on the National Grid for Learning and the People's Network, and manage the resulting digital Intellectual Property Rights. Contributors to the Scottish Cultural Resources Access Network (SCRAN) include Libraries, Archives, Museums and the Built Heritage. Digitised assets contributed to SCRAN are governed by a licence agreement protecting the contributors' commercialisation rights while ensuring unrestricted access, free at the point of use, for members of participating educational institutions. Experience in building and sustaining this resource base have lead the author to make the following observations on the future of the electronic archive.
As we move forward into the millennial Information Age, with the Internet its founding technology, many commentators seem to fear that, like other mass media before it, the web will lead to a homogenisation and dumbing down of culture. The experience of the author has been that it is possible by exploiting technology to support cultural diversity in the Wired World, by for example: - Passing on traditional skills and narratives - Letting the People have their say - Celebrating diversity within a modern nation - Virtual reversal of the Diaspora - Virtual repatriation of Cultural Icons - Local access to National Treasures - National Identity from Local Resources
The paper then considers "born digital" phenomena such as NetArt, and wonders whether it is possible, or even desirable, to preserve for future presentation something that is by its nature subversive, distributed, evolving and ephemeral.
In a section entitled "On the Persistence of Digital Memory" the paper discusses problems of - Discovery and capture - Overload - Intellectual Property - Lifecycle Issues - Technological Obsolescence - Media Degradation - Accident - Deliberate Mischief and poses the question "are we already in a Digital Dark Age?"
The paper concludes with some practical thoughts about what might be needed to secure the future of the digital archive, touching on: - Active Harvesting - Retention and Disposal - Legal Deposit - Preservation Licensing - Open or Stable Standards - Migration Strategies - Physical and Logical Security - Disaster Recovery Plans - Emulation - Internet Archaeology.
Curating the WorldWideWeb
Craig Sinclair
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
The web is the archive or the future now, and it is already as much of an oligopoly as the printing press. As such the WorldWideWeb has effectively ended the postmodern era by creating a global metanarrative. We have moved on, in deed if not in actuality. We are now post-modem and always connected, but as the tower of babble replaces the Tower of Babel how will we find empirical truths in this web? As multinational corporations, and the governments they control, re-brand and re-spin ever more of the WWW, how can we distinguish between information, knowledge and the ever-pervasive content? We can and must by looking to education as salvation, by empowering ourselves and finding the human agency in the web, by becoming search engineers.
The archive is not under attack from any New Information Order; rather it is aggressed by the sprawl of tabloidia across the web, which we must counter with academia. I will connect McLuhan's message to the medium, look at how we use the web as a source of information, and how it has already used us. Then we can explore the links between Intellectual Properties and Internet Protocols in addressing the future of the academic archive in the new hierarchies of the now.
The World Literature Hypermedia Project at The University of Nevada
J. Michael Stitt
Associate Professor of English
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
The World Literature Hypermedia Project (WLHP) is a digital archive intended as a resource for both students and instructors of two World Literature courses that are required of all students at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Brought online in the summer of 2001, the WLHP has several purposes. For students, it provides all of the features of web-based instruction - primary and secondary texts and materials (both on-site and via links), asynchronous discussions, an archive of student essays, etc.
Instructors, most of whom are part-time staff or graduate students with little experience teaching world literature, have further access to an archive of syllabi, asynchronous discussions with other instructors, and essays on pedagogical strategies by senior faculty. The database does not constitute a single course; rather, instructors are free to create their own syllabi of assigned readings. In constructing the archive we have had to address many of the challenges facing any digital archive. Accessibility issues include data transfer rates (since many students are limited to a 56K modem, we provide some materials on CD for increased speed); duplication of primary texts on our server vs. the use off-site links; and, the loss of valuable secondary sites from the World Wide Web. In addition to the usual copyright issues, we have had to deal with intellectual property rights with regard to student essays and instructors' syllabi. As time goes by, we will be faced with questions of what to do with rarely used resources and with the problems of format migration.
The Audivisual Heritage
Gaetano Stucchi
Senior Consultant
European Broadcasting Union
Cinema, television and other visual media heritage generate a very special case in the modern and future role of the Archive. Some paradoxical contradictions appear with strong evidence in the relation of these media's products with the social need of preserving a common public heritage. Despite their mechanical reproducibility (and maybe because of it) these documents are confronted to an intrinsic physical fragility, due to the ephemeral nature of their supports (technologies accelerate progress and never-ending turn-over). Digital processing results in extremely easy reproduction, transport and access to the audiovisual documents, but at the same time their manipulation: security and certification of the originals becomes a real problem. The market value of the original products is also related to the quality of their master's preservation, so there is a strictly economic or industrial dimension to the Archive. On the other hand, the scarce practice and high cost of restoration of originals is worrying today not only for film museums and cultural institutions, but for big and small rights owners, for publishers and distributors. The same notion of heritage, public heritage, if applied to goods too recent for reaching the public domain zone, raises a crucial question: are these audiovisual documents belonging to the community, since they constitute a non-negligible sum of knowledge, cultural identity and educational content? Or are they mainly a private, individual intellectual property? Is their common interest's value sufficient to annihilate their capacity to be a source of profit? Considering all these (and other) contradictions and problematic issues, it seems worthwhile to try to bring together the many different "players" involved in the future of audiovisual heritage, in a kind of "common house" (for instance, some no-profit European Foundation), where it will be possible to exchange opinions, compare and evaluate interests, build a consensus of agreed solutions . . . . . Engineers and rights owners, archivists and entrepreneurs, individual and collective users, everybody should recognize that there is no private, single way to the future of the Archive: it's a global challenge, that we must accept and win by means of a large, open social dialogue .
A new sense of motion: framing the idea of the archive in the new information order
Joseph T. Tennis
Information School
University of Washington
With the advent of accessible networked technologies, in the context of e-commerce and higher education, a shift in the paradigm of the scholarship and information sharing has come. What then, is the archive? What is the document collection to which scholarship can turn for its various purposes? Who keeps and has the keys to this collection?
This shift, from fixed to fluid, is perhaps just a turning of the prism. The anxiety of impermanence, the battle cries of ownership are not unwarranted, but rather are symptomatic of the new frame of reference. The underlying current in discussions of the new information order focuses precisely on this mutation of the material state of information. And the new properties of the fluid state of information are in constant motion. The rhetoric surrounding information futurology should not be a debate between a paper-bound or paperless culture. Rather, the new object of interrogation should be on the motion - now faster than before, of information in a networked environment. Information professionals, scholars, and students are no longer dealing with the slow tectonics of pulp or stuff, rather we are attempting to wrap our arms around a liquid series of tributaries and waterfalls, if not the sea itself.
In conceptualizing the archive in the new information order, the contributors to this discussion must consider the change in the motion of time in permanence (preservation of media paper, film, and digital objects). We must consider the change in the motion of publisher, to distributor, to repository. We must consider, on an intellectual level, the self-conscious motions we take in attempting to preserve our present for the future. And by extension we must question the way we move or do not move information - through its use, storage, organization, dissemination, and retrieval. This paper seeks to explore these issues, and in doing so ties information in all its guises to a theme that makes knowledge live - motion.
Archiving the Corpse: Embalming Technologies of the Past and Present
John Troyer
Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
In mid nineteenth-century United Stated of America, a chemist by the name of Thomas Holmes developed a process that significantly changed how death interfaced with daily life. Dr. Holmes produced the first reliable, modern embalming tools and fluids for the preservation of the dead. It was during these years both before and after the American Civil War that embalming the dead became a normalized social practice. Through the cessation of time by stopping decomposition in the deceased and the ability to ship the dead on rapidly expanding railroads, the emerging American funeral industry provided a mass consumer product. The embalmed body and subsequent funeral service produced a new archive for the dead human that re-defined the American death experience. In short, the circulation and fluidity of embalming technologies during the late 19th and early 20th centuries invented the modern corpse. In the 21st century, new media forms (obituary videos, funeral web pages, LCD touch screen grave markers etc.) are interfacing to produce previously unseen methods of remembering the dead. The corpse as archive of the self, already mediated by mechanical embalming, is in a constant state of digital mediation. In the weeks since September 11, 2001, the presence, and absence, of the corpse in New York City has forced the use of these archival methods for funeral services without bodies. My essay examines the technologies of the archive as witnessed in 19th century American embalming methods and 21st century new media interfaces with the preserved corpse.
Critical editing in the digital age: Informatics and Humanities Research
Dr. Eduardo Urbina
Department of Modern & Classical Languages
Texas A&M University
Our project - The Electronic variorum edition of 'Don Quixote' (1605-2005) - was initiated in 1999 by a team of researchers in Humanities and Computer Science at Texas A&M University, and it is now funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation program in Information Technology Research.
In the context of the work undertaken by the Cervantes Project group applying advanced computer science research to traditional scholarly practices in the humanities to develop tools and publish online scholarly editions, we propose to analyze the future of critical editing, editors, and editions as it relates to three principal aspects:
1) the transformation of traditional scholarly paradigms: Recensio, Collatio and Emendatio
2) the question of universal access vs. copyrighted materials in online digital libraries
3) the new role of editors and readers in the creation of virtual editions
Security in a digital repository
Mr Ellis Weinberger
CEDARS Project Officer
Cambridge University Library
A digital repository is an institution, like a library or a public records office, which preserves digital objects. The purpose of the security policy is to describe how to protect digital objects in the repository. In order to preserve the intellectual content of digital objects, the objects themselves, information about the objects, and information about the usage and access restrictions to the objects will need to be protected. Technical means to provide the ability to use the intellectual content of the objects, and to satisfy usage and access restrictions, will also need to be protected. In order to maintain all these conditions, the archiving institutions will need continuing technical, economic, and political support.