interactivity

Read/viewed:

Bearman D, Trant J. Interactivity comes of age: museums and the World Wide Web. Museum International. October 1999;51(4):20-24.

"The Wiki and the digital library," Jeremy Frumkin, OCLC Systems & Services. 2005, Volume 21 Issue 1.

Online Finding Aids: Are They Practical? CJ Hostetter - Journal of Archival Organization, 2004 Vol. 2, p 107.

Abdication or empowerment? User involvement in library, archives and records services.Preview By: Robinson, Leith. Australian Library Journal, Feb2007, Vol. 56 Issue 1, p30-35, 6p.

Encoded Archival Description on the Internet (Wendy Duff and Daniel Pitti)

I have been looking at EAD and interactivity for the last couple of weeks (EAD discussion pending)...Many of the articles take EAD as matter of course, as the best available finding aid format, although everyone seems dubious about MARC. The Bearman/Trant piece is more specifically about museums, following along from my last post, and at this point is 10 years old. But in addition to discussion of cool new (at the time) interactive features in museums--although many of them that I looked at have not progressed much beyond the initial (and probably NSF-grant funded, at this time?) efforts, which is disheartening--they also mention the opportunity for restructuring that Web representation provides. This does not ring true at the LBJ library, where the webmasters are a separate entity from the archives department, rather than integrated into it--I think they underestimate the intimidation factor for professionals who do not have the requisite skill sets. I think the reason for the dearth of good online finding aids is very often the result of this kind of disjuncture.

Frumkin's piece on digital libraries and wikis is also pretty dated, mostly about Ask a Librarian (and other virtual reference) and additions to content management systems. For mys purposes the discussion of user-annotated finding aids are more interesting, although he glides over what I think is the fundamental issue with wikis in this context, that we are NOT talking about a Wikipedia-level worldwide community of users, but rather a few people, some of whom may be highly expert but the rest not. Would individual commentary, reviewed by archivists, not be more appropriate in the context? But how will researchers feel to be, god forbid, corrected, if necessary, by archivists? And will they jealously guard their research? At LBJ we have a surprising number of researchers who check No, they do not want to be contacted by other researchers interested in their topic. I think there is some question as to whether people will want to contribute, as useful as the product of these contributions would be.

In her report Robinson is dubious about user involvement in libraries and archives, on the grounds that it will worsen the digital divide, threaten staff, isolate patrons, and create security problems for digital documents (this is an eminently solvable problem!). Like much of the digital library readings I did for the Management of Digital Libraries class, she comes down on services as the way for libraries to make their presence felt and appreciated in the digital environment.

The Hostetter 2002 article, "Online Finding Aids: Are They Practical?" is one of the most on-point that I have come across in readings for this project, and it raises a number of interesting issues. She administered a survey to archivists in 20 institutions about finding aids and discusses the results. It is very helpful in illuminating how archives use online finding aids in the real world, and what they see as the opportunities and challenges therein. She found that EAD is the markup of choice (no surprise) and that the biggest challenges to improvement of finding aids are time, money and staff (also no surprise). She references the Tibbo/Maho article I read earlier on the difficulty of finding EAD finding aids with search engines, information she hints that archivists are unaware of. She does discuss lots of potential benefits to online finding aids--like increased donations--which are interesting, but still the archivists she interviewed still to me seem to be inordinately attached to the notion that finding aids are more useful that digital collections, when I have seen lots of evidence to the contrary. Perhaps because archivists are thinking in terms of PhDs and other serious researchers?

I think the most surprising and controversial idea Robinson encounters is that access may not be an unmitigated good. Archivists said things like increased use increases demands on archivists' time (isn't that what they're there for?) and the Web leads neophyte researchers to believe that they will find good stuff in the archives relatively easily. This is the first time I have seen this issue laid bare. Archivists, knock it off! None of the archivists interviewed mention user studies, everything is discussed from an institutional effectiveness perspective, which seems to me to give us a good idea of what's wrong with archives.

For next week:
EAD
including Smith I. Preparing Locally Encoded Electronic Finding Aid Inventories for Union Environments: A Publishing Model for Encoded Archival Description. Information Technology & Libraries [serial online]. June 2008;27(2):26-30.

curation: museums and archives

read/viewed:

Westbrooks, Elaine L.. "African-American documentary resources on the World Wide Web: a survey and analysis." Archival Issues 24.2 (1999): 145-73.

Karp C. Digital Heritage in Digital Museums. Museum International [serial online]. May 2004;56(1/2):45-51.

Anani N. Sustainable engagement in digital heritage– The challenges of learning environments for heritage institutions. Museum International [serial online]. May 2005;57(1/2):142-143

Wechsler H, Ledbetter E. The Nazi-Era Provenance Internet Portal. Museum International [serial online]. December 2004;56(4):53-62.

Bowen J. The virtual museum. Museum International [serial online]. January 2000;52(1):4-7.

The Westbrooks piece (1999) is interesting in part because she lambastes DLs for not sufficiently utilizing archival principles, and archivists for their insufficient understanding of the Web environment. Because of the lack of concern for archival principles like authenticity and reliability(e.g., DLs that do not include information about the original object, or the scanning environment, or the provenance) Westbrooks argues that most of the African-American heritage DLs she analyzed are inappropriate for use at an academic or scholarly level. She says that they are useful for access--for people who could not otherwise visit the collections--for K-12 and the like.But she rates them in many cases as not worthy of the money spent in their development! While I have certainly noted the K-12 bent of many of the collections, I had not related it to a lack of metadata. I tend to think of metadata in terms of IR, but of course there is much more to it that that. I did keep thinking of Cliff Lynch's effort to separate digital librarians from curators--Westbrook seems to think that both librarians and archivists are not concerned enough with curation.

On that note I turned to the issues of Museum International that Ian Anderson had mentioned, to see what kinds of issues they were grappling with in digital collections. Karp examines the definition of "virtual museum" and how it differs from a physical museum--I am reminded of Michael Lesk talking about how the term "digital library" is doomed to go the way of "horseless carriage." Karp comes up with IP and ownership, and curation--long-term preservation and care of the digital objects. Migration, bitstream preservation etc, what I think of as archival concerns.

Anani talks about Web 2.0 features for museums, like pre- and post-visit forums, and how such features might foster the development of new groups of users. Bowen mentions the 24 Hour Museum, (now Culture24) a collection of UK museum virtual collections and other related stuff in 1 place. I wonder how it works--I bet its not autopopulating from the different Web sites (via a OAI-PMH-like interface) but that would be cool to find out. I will look around a bit. Finally, the piece about the Web portal for Nazi-era art turned out to not be particularly relevant, but it was interesting anyway. A DL with an entirely different purpose, where provenance was the most important facet of the objects.

Add to list (maybe) more Yakel:
Yakel, E., & Kim, J. (2003). Midwest State Archives on the Web: A Content and Impact Analysis. Archival Issues, 28(1), 47-62.

For sure, 1 last museum piece:

Bearman D, Trant J. Interactivity comes of age: museums and the World Wide Web. Museum International [serial online]. October 1999;51(4):20-24.